3 ms·

>I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company The trading companies of that era were a

by tormeh 12y ago

>I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant. Even putting that aside, these are trading companies, not exploration companies. We're not at the point in space travel where exploration can be a nice side-effect yet.

grey-area 12y ago
The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant. They're relevant because they raised private capital in order to explore unknown lands, sometimes very inhospitable ones (HBC). In their initial form they didn't have any of the trappings of state you impute to them, those came later, and are not really very far from the operations of large corporations nowadays many of which are supranational. The parallels to private exploration of space are obvious, and costs of access to space have fallen dramatically in recent years.
- soperj 12y ago
  HBC & EIC didn't make money by gathering useful things for sale in Europe. They did it by taking advantage of the people living there, and paying them significantly less for things that were of high value in Europe. There are no local natives to take advantage of to gather items to be sold at a handsome profit in space.
  - cardine 12y ago
    There are still very valuable resources in space.
    - soperj 12y ago
      certainly, as there are in the "new world"/"india", they did it cheaply on the back of the know-how(geographic knowledge, on where to go and how to stay alive) and the labour of the indigenous.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    If your time scale is long enough, and your pockets deep enough, there is plenty of money in space in the form of asteroids which could easily be nudged to earth or lunar orbits and mined with robots.

by tormeh 12y ago

grey-area 12y ago

The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant. They're relevant because they raised private capital in order to explore unknown lands, sometimes very inhospitable ones (HBC). In their initial form they didn't have any of the trappings of state you impute to them, those came later, and are not really very far from the operations of large corporations nowadays many of which are supranational. The parallels to private exploration of space are obvious, and costs of access to space have fallen dramatically in recent years.

soperj 12y ago
HBC & EIC didn't make money by gathering useful things for sale in Europe. They did it by taking advantage of the people living there, and paying them significantly less for things that were of high value in Europe. There are no local natives to take advantage of to gather items to be sold at a handsome profit in space.
- cardine 12y ago
  There are still very valuable resources in space.
  - soperj 12y ago
    certainly, as there are in the "new world"/"india", they did it cheaply on the back of the know-how(geographic knowledge, on where to go and how to stay alive) and the labour of the indigenous.
- grey-area 12y ago
  If your time scale is long enough, and your pockets deep enough, there is plenty of money in space in the form of asteroids which could easily be nudged to earth or lunar orbits and mined with robots.