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The Theory of Interstellar Trade
- brudgers 8y agoregular PDF, https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- azeotropic 8y agoSo riddle me this -- how did Adam Smith's work (published in 1776) influence the initial settlement of Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620)? I'm guessing Krugman hadn't actually read Wealth of Nations, since anyone who had couldn't possibly have made this mistake. That's pretty shocking.
- dnautics 8y agoAnsibles allow violating causality
- azeotropic 8y agoI was waiting for him to go there -- if he had, I'd have been sure it was a joke.
- dnautics 8y agoHe's not that knowledgeable. I mean he claims to be a liberal yet advocates for impoverishing the laboring classes by giving them backdoor paycuts: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher-inflation/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
- Fomite 8y agoGiven the whole thing is tongue and cheek, one could read "Could this be as influential as Adam Smith's work on the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia" be a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that this work is effectively pointless. ...you know, like the whole rest of the paper.
- sulam 8y agoYou’re suggesting that the winner of a Nobel Prize for Economics hasn’t read Adam Smith? I’m guessing you’re wrong.
- azeotropic 8y agoI doubt it. What fraction of Nobel Prize winning biologists do you believe have read Darwin?
- sulam 8y agoIs that an apples to apples comparison? I also don't expect Nobel physicists to have read Principia Mathematica.
- georgecmu 8y agoI'm guessing you parsed it wrong. "Could this be as influential as Adam Smith's work on the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia" refers to Adam Smith's work on the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia, not to purported Adam Smith's work influence on the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia.
- mirimir 8y agoRight, "on" here means "about". English can be annoying.
- credit_guy 8y agoSo what is that influential work written by Adam Smith and concerning the settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts?
- mirimir 8y agoThe Wealth of Nations. He looked at what Spain, England, etc got out discovery and colonizing America.
- credit_guy 8y agoThat’s a very oblique way of referring to the Wealth of Nations. There are only 4 references to Massachusetts in a 750-page book.
- mirimir 8y agoOK, "peripherally about".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lisper 8y agoAny civilization that has mastered interstellar travel will almost certainly also have mastered atomic transmutation as well. So as long as all the interesting stuff is made of atoms, and the atoms over there are the same as the ones over here (which AFAWCT they are), there are only two possible "goods" that could be worth transporting between star systems: information, and free (in the physical, not the economic sense) energy. You don't need a space ship to transfer either of those, you just convert them into photons and let Maxwell do the work. The idea that it might be worthwhile to actually ship something (including ourselves) to another star system is based on very quaint notions of identity binding and what it takes to produce things.
- squirrelicus 8y agoWhere I think you're wrong is that you seem to assume there's a path to arbitrary transmutation. It may not be possible, and I would argue, almost certainly isn't.
- gibybo 8y agoDo you see some fundamental limit other than energy?
- squirrelicus 8y agoContainment, which is somewhat of a practical limit, and somewhat fundamental. Now I'm no fusion expert, and frankly neither is any human since we can barely get tiny amounts of hydrogen to fuse at all. But point being, I'm not a physicist, I'm in software. So take my understanding with a grain of salt. However, while we theoretically can fuse arbitrary elements (and add neutrons for heavier elements so they don't instantly decay), I'm pretty sure there's no known, theoretical, or speculated material or process that can contain and capture the results of fusing some elements to, say, uranium. The extraordinary energy levels required pretty much means you need a supernova. And I'm not one to suggest that in the future we'll magically be able to engineer something to contain supernovae. Quite the opposite, I'm comfortable saying no civilization will ever do this no matter how many quintillion years they try. All this being said, there is definitely an inflection point where it costs orders of magnitude less energy to mine an element and rocket it to a destination than to fuse it on demand. Sometimes people complain that this takes time and we need the thing now, but that's fine. Once you set up the supply line, all that really matters is throughout and interruptions, since arbitrary latency can be overcome by a continuous stream of material floating to you. I mean, sure, it'll cost latency to ramp up or down the stream, but if engineering is One Thing, it's trade offs. Reality's a bitch like that.
- imh 8y ago>A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved. >This paper represents one small step for an economist in the direction of the theory of interstellar trade. >These complications make the theory of interstellar trade appear at first quite alien to our usual trade models; presumably it seems equally human to alien trade theorists. This is wonderful and hilarious and full of cheeky fun (so so much more than I've quoted). It's perfect for the sigbovik crowd. Thanks for posting! >This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject...
- skookumchuck 8y agoInterstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical. The real problem is bootstrapping it. Because weight is so incredibly expensive to send interstellar, the only thing that could work is sending a nanorobot with an ability to self-replicate and build a receiver and a factory once it arrives. Then information is sent to the factory, which proceeds to bootstrap a civilization.
- stephengillie 8y agoHow would the economics change if we could only communicate at light speed, but had a functional Alcubierre drive (or other lightspeed technology) and could travel at FTL speeds?
- tCfD 8y agoPresumably you would just load up the your Alcubierre station wagon with a bunch of backup tapes and send it down the interstellar highway. You could restore your backups before the original data is written!
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> you would just load up the your Alcubierre station wagon with a bunch of backup tapes Tapes have mass. Unless we learn to suppress inertia, it would be easier to encase the message photons in an Alcubièrre field.
- tCfD 8y agoNot suppressing inertia is indeed a problem, unless the message the kind you intend to be understood primarily by virtue of its infinitely inverse ratio of complexity to fidelity.
- mapt 8y agoThe secret to time travel is to drive backwards.
- pseingatl 8y agoFrom the point of political economics, charging interest is not necessarily a given. Economies exist where interest is prohibited.
- gibybo 8y agoIn name perhaps, but the concept of an economic good having potentially different values at different times is universal. An economic system that tries to pretend it doesn't exist may work in the sense that a mathematical system without a 0 works. We can still analyze the system using the concept and develop insights using it as a tool, even if they don't recognize it themselves.
- SECProto 8y agoVaguely on topic - the novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge touches on this subject a fair bit. potential spoilers follow Essentially, no spacefaring civilization is stable over long time scales, a culture (the Qeng Ho) get by through predicting which planetary system will have the economy to support refueling an interstellar craft (in the centuries-later future when they arrive). Trade advanced/secret technology development info for said refueling. The story has way more to it, but I loved it as a known-physics-following scifi story. I expect the audience of this site would also love it (and probably, many have already read it)
- hartror 8y agoLoose prequel to my favourite book of all time A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge is a brilliant author with a background in maths and computing and it shows in his writing.
- _audakel 8y agoThanks for the recommendation, I just got it on Audible and I'm looking forward to listening to it.
- girvo 8y agoSoftware archeology! I adored that book. Highly recommended to anyone on HN that hasn’t read it, it’s well worth it. Quite enjoyable too, outside the neat hard sci-fi and cute extrapolations of modern day software engineering.
- matt-snider 8y agoLove this book. The prologue is one of my favourite beginnings to a book and hints at how epic/vast the book's universe is: > The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries. It had always been a secret search, unacknowledged even among some of the participants. In the early years, it had simply been encrypted queries hidden in radio broadcasts. Decades and centuries passed. There were clues, interviews with The Man's fellow-travelers, pointers in a half-dozen contradictory directions: The Man was alone now and heading still farther away; The Man had died before the search ever began; The Man had a war fleet and was coming back upon them. With time, there was some consistency to the most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues. Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to a few of the largest trading Families, and went unacknowledged. They were rich enough, and this search was important enough that it scarcely mattered. For the search had narrowed: the man was traveling alone, a vague blur of multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but always moving back and back into this end of Human Space. The hunt narrowed from a hundred light-years, to fifty, to twenty - and a half-dozen star systems. And finally, the manhunt came down to a single world at the coreward end of Human Space.
- gsanghera 8y ago> The ship's velocity can then be represented by a rotation of the axes; the rotation of the time axis is shown in Figure II. (Readers who find Figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary).
- gangstead 8y agoI've read this before but this is the first time I noticed that Krugman wrote the paper in 1978 and the references include a paper about faster-than-light travel written by him, published 1987.
- godelmachine 8y agoI read the Wikipedia article on this paper today and turns out Krugman wrote this when he was feeling quite low being embroiled in the rat race.