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I'm trying to imagine a physical product that is worth transporting on an interstellar level, rather than locally manufactured. It seems to me that the only t
by koheripbal 6y ago
I'm trying to imagine a physical product that is worth transporting on an interstellar level, rather than locally manufactured. It seems to me that the only thing that would ever be exchanged between solar systems, would be information.
- baxtr 6y agoDepends on the shipping costs I guess...
- simonh 6y agoPossibly people, or biological goods depending on the state of development of synthetic biology and in vitro tech.
- amelius 6y agoLive performances?
- SeanLuke 6y agoWell, there's the spice.
- AlgorithmicTime 6y agoThe Spice must flow.
- m463 6y agospherical cows come to mind (although they might be oval due to relativistic effects).
- phreeza 6y agoI've probably read too much sci-fi, but high-density computronium left behind by a fallen civilization might make it worthwhile?
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI hope it's ARM or RISC-V, and not x86-based computronium.
- bemmu 6y agoWhat sci-fi would you recommend if I want to read more about this computronium?
- btouellette 6y agoSome of the later books in the Culture series (most directly The Hydrogen Sonata) deal with civilizations trying to get a leg up on the galactic tech ladder by scavenging the leavings of older civilizations that have "sublimed" and left the physical realm.
- adrianN 6y agoA Deepness in the Sky and the related books.
- phreeza 6y agoBeside the already mentioned Culture series and Deepness in the Sky, I can recommend the Revelation Space saga.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoArt. A good chunk of value of a work of art is in its provenance. That said, I can't imagine a terrestrial economy - much less interstellar one - built on trade of paintings and sculptures.
- b34r 6y agoAn exotic natural resource not present in the recipient’s local space.
- krapp 6y agoEven exchanging information doesn't doesn't make much sense, given the time lag involved with light-speed limitations. Another answer for the Fermi Paradox, maybe.
- thanatos519 6y agoMaybe trade secrets don't make sense, given entropy. Light-speed limitations just expose the fact that not sharing information makes no sense. Unless capitalism.
- krapp 6y agoWhat kind of information would be worth sending that would also be worth receiving years after the fact?
- Swenrekcah 6y agoEverything worthwile you have read in books or on the Web that was written >X years ago is worth transmitting X lightyears
- cgriswald 6y agoI get your point, but I don't think this answers the question. The first part of the question is defining what it means to be 'worthwhile.' Information itself does not have inherent value. If you send a colony information on how to create an advance polymer, but the colony lacks a use for it, the requisite knowledge, the requisite tools, the requisite knowledge to craft the tools, or the requisite materials, your transmission isn't 'worth it'. You'd be better off not sending the information (possibly in favor of sending the requisite information). The second part of the question is 'How do we know what will be worthwhile in advance?' It's easy to look back X years and say "Yes, this information was worth carrying forward into the future." (On Earth, it's even easier, because carrying that information forward is dirt cheap.) It's a much harder problem to figure out what information is worth carrying forward at the time you have to make the decision and when the costs are much higher.
- kempbellt 6y agoOnly if there's some magical elemental material that exists in one place and not in another and just has to be shipped... As someone's who has gotten into 3D printing lately (it's super cheap now...), I'm still wrapping my mind around all the things I can just make at home, vs having them fabricated elsewhere and going to pick them up or having them shipped to me. > It seems to me that the only thing that would ever be exchanged between solar systems, would be information. Maybe Thingiverse is onto something here?
- forgingahead 6y agoWait until we have Galactic Economics and other voodoo fields of study* , and beings start being convinced of "specialisation" on a cosmic scale. *Not unlike it's current-day counterpart, Macroeconomics.
- treeman79 6y agoMaybe proprietary nano-machines that make one immortal. Not much that’s going to worth the high cost. Assume the cost could ever even be paid.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThe paper is a thought experiment, written in a somewhat whimsical tone. In certain respects, macroeconomics is wildly successful, so successful that people take it for granted. It's bad at forecasting recessions, but good at telling us how to react to them. It was bad at predicting 2008 would happen, but was good at preventing 2008 in turning into 1929. There's no way macroeconomics could predict COVID would happen in 2020, but aggressive fiscal and monetary policy kept the economy from being completely wrecked by the pandemic.
- dnautics 6y ago> but was good at preventing 2008 in turning into 1929 That is such an unfair comparison. You don't know that 2008 wasn't as bad as 1929 because we have a better food supply chain and food productivity (norman borlaug and all that), and healthcare technology, and not because of macroeconomic guidance. Macroeconomic guidance, after all, is what has got us to a state where we bail out the rich by stealing from the productive value of the poor.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoWe do know that it was because of macroeconomic guidance. The money supply contracted sharply because of the collapse of the banking system in 1930-31, and the gold standard was too inflexible to allow rapidly expanding the money supply. The economic contraction for each country right around when the country went off the gold standard. In 2008, governments prevented the banking system from collapsing, and were able to rapidly expand the money supply because there's no gold standard. The US was the epicenter of the crisis, but recovered faster than Europe because it was more aggressive. In 2020, the response was even more aggressive, and the recovery faster. The US hasn't pursued the ideal policy, but the policy it has pursued has made recessions shorter than they would be, otherwise. If anything, the lesson of 2020 is that governments should follow the advice of macroeconomists more than they already do.
- generalizations 6y agoIf we cannot assume the distribution of elements across solar systems is homogenous, I imagine there might be some other system largely composed of heavy or noble elements we have a hard time obtaining locally. Edit: come to think of it, interstellar trade might become necessary once we start building at larger scales - moon sized space stations, asteroid-sized interstellar ships, etc. That's a lot of material to mine, and it might be easier to import it.
- ghaff 6y agoThe elements point is an interesting one. I'm trying to imagine what element or group of elements would be hard to do without. The elements related to carbon-based life of course (although hydrogen at least is not realistically scarce)--though I guess life doesn't need to be carbon-based. There are the conductive metals--gold, silver, copper--although aluminum at least could fill in in a pinch. Silicon? Although you'd probably have be lacking semiconductors more broadly. If you restrict the discussion to worlds that are basically human habitable, also any trace elements that humans need. (According to this [1], humans are known to need 25 elements to live so that would be a good place to start.) [1] https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1728-the-essential-elements https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1728-the-essential...
- generalizations 6y agoStuff on the far right of the periodic table seems like prime candidates also, just because they're easy to lose and probably some of the hardest to obtain. Helium is basically a limited resource unless we figure out how to get it back out of the upper atmosphere; same goes for the argon we use for fire suppression - that stuff is already super expensive.
- admax88q 6y agoArgon and Helium are pretty stable though. It's probably cheaper to recover them from our atmosphere than to ship them from another planet altogether.
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- Ekaros 6y agoAlso leads to questions of development. How long until anything you ship is considered obsolete. On systems close by things aren't so bad if we are talking of a few years. But with tens of years, whole thing comes rather questionable. It is old tech when it arrives, and I can't even imagine the lead times. On other hand new "new old stock", is quite interesting proposition. As items would be old stock, but still in brand new non-aged condition. So spare parts with limited life-span and lowish demand or complex manufacturing process might be the answer...
- trailingComma 6y agoInteresting. There would effectively be a ripple pattern on what counts as new, originating from the source. This ripple pattern would not only apply to physical goods, but also the information about how they were manufactured.
- mybandisbetter 6y agoIt is at least possible that a manufacturing ecosystem would be so difficult to develop that it would require fewer decades to transport products than to develop that ecosystem. Such comparative advantage would likely disappear overtime, unless a given solar system actively keeps its technological know-how secret in some way, or controls the travel of skilled people (as in nuclear tech today). Or, perhaps, some solar systems may fail to create the institutional context necessary for building such a system — if, for example, they keep nuking themselves. In any case, it's not too hard to imagine scenarios in which such trade would be necessary.
- ardy42 6y ago>> I'm trying to imagine a physical product that is worth transporting on an interstellar level, rather than locally manufactured. It seems to me that the only thing that would ever be exchanged between solar systems, would be information. > It is at least possible that a manufacturing ecosystem would be so difficult to develop that it would require fewer decades to transport products than to develop that ecosystem. Or there are multiple desired products whose manufacturing ecosystems place such a burden on a system that a single system can't support them all.
- bluGill 6y agoIt is hard to imangine that smart people in the other solar system won't figure things out. The physics of nuclear is mostly known, which is why Iran and North Korea can have nuclear programs despite efforts to stop it. Anything secret that is exported to a different solar system is reverse engineerable. The first colonists will of course need to bring stuff with them, but it doesn't make sense to assume they won't plan on building most of what they need once they get there. It is a lot easier to setup manufacturing when you don't have to invent the assembly line. I can maybe see trade of one of a kind things. It hard to believe the Mona Lisa would ever leave earth, but that type of thing where the original is the thing might be worth it. Not enough to sustain trade though, the time line is far too long.
- drran 6y ago> The first colonists will of course need to bring stuff with them IMHO, first thing sent will be a universal Assembler, which will produce stuff and clone colonists. If a woman can give birth to a baby in 9 months, we can create a "3D printer" which will self assemble other "3D printers", which then produce mechanisms, computers, and colonists.
- jmcqk6 6y agoWhy are Stradivarius violins held in such high regard? The presence of natural resources is not the same as having the craftmanship able to best utilize them. And when scarcity of resources are not a problem, craftsmanship becomes even more important to people.
- thanatos519 6y agoPrecise instructions of exquisite violin construction followed by acoustic parameters of concert halls and then hq multichannel recordings of said instruments played in set halls would indeed be an effective use of bandwidth
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoAn impulse response would be significantly more effective.
- ldite 6y agoone-time pads
- cgriswald 6y agoRaw materials. Not every system will have convenient lumps of rock and metals spinning in orbit around the star. Among those that do, the presence of an asteroid belt may make those systems relatively rich since there is more material on the surface, easily accessible.
- adrianN 6y agoWhy would you want to settle a system that doesn't have all the stuff available you need? Moving nontrivial amounts of mass around the universe is extremely expensive.
- cgriswald 6y ago> Why would you want to settle a system that doesn't have all the stuff available you need? To make use of the materials and other benefits the system does have; the same reason we settle such places on Earth. > Moving nontrivial amounts of mass around the universe is extremely expensive. This amount of energy is a smudge on a ledger in comparison to the energy even a solitary, planet-less red dwarf puts out in its lifetime. Unless we develop a method for fusing the materials we need from hydrogen and helium, the only chance of becoming a type III civilization is to learn to move mass around and make these trade offs.
- hindsightbias 6y agoAll the stuff to make the factory that makes factories. After that, maybe just information.
- benlivengood 6y agoRich people who don't want to be taken apart by the teleporter and reconstructed on the other side.
- jerry1979 6y agoedit: Besides information, bitcoin transactions also come to mind.
- max_ 6y agoAllotropes that take millions of light years to form? The next global pandemic?
- cbanek 6y agoWhat about power / energy? Some kind of tightly focused long distance laser? I guess this depends on how much interstellar dust (extinction) is between the two places, which would diminish the efficiency. But of course you could maybe modulate that to send information too!
- elteto 6y agoSpice is only produced in a single place in the entire universe.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoYou beat me to it, and therefore you deserve my upvote :)
- asciimov 6y agoPeople have the tendency to desire things that are rare, unique, or beautiful. Anything from an alien world would have value to somebody here. You could buy up a bunch of junk and sell it off as curios. I'm sure people would line up to have the only blanket made off world.
- giantrobot 6y agoThe only physical thing I can see worth sending would be Von Neumann probes [0], essentially nanobots that could build things including more nanobots. To get to the highest velocity you need a very low mass fraction. You need your ship to be mostly propellant. All the mission equipment would be constructed at the destination out of ship structures and raw materials at the destination. If you've got nanobots that can directly construct anything you want you live in a post-scarcity Soviet so economics aren't terribly meaningful anymore. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#...
- hn2fast 6y agoI imagine high density data storage devices could be worth it, especially in a scenario of a colonized galaxy with a lot of background noise.