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The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
- BerislavLopac 12y agoThis is essentially The Martian of the pre-Internet era.
- crimsonalucard 12y agoI'm actually more interested in the theory behind how he got a grant to write this. Interesting nonetheless!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- GabrielF00 12y agoI think that line was a joke.
- GregBuchholz 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award
- HCIdivision17 12y agoMan, the wiki page really makes him look like a short-sighted jerk. A lot of those items are the stereotypical headlines that lack the needed context. Like the $3k for if military should use umbrellas in the rain: well, should they? Perhaps only officers, so soldiers have their hands free? Maybe we should just contract a clip of some kind that will hold the umbrella to their gear? Or maybe it's only worth it on base? I mean, how far will $3k even go - a week or so of consultant time? Or the $57k for measuring stewardesses. These are the people who may still be moving about the cabin while everyone else is seated. How do we decide how much a seat on a $100,000,000 plane needs? Can the seat be wider just above the waist of the lady, such that the seats can slightly encroach on the isle? (Big money to be had there possibly - though it's worth noting the 1975 flights likely still had an implicit assumption about stewardess ... styling.) Is it reasonable the typical rider can squeeze past a stewardess? How often and with what kind of difficulty? Will they be required to get out of the way in the event of an emergency or should they stay to direct, potentially blocking the path? In this case, we spent about $130 bucks a few hundred times. An engineer needed those numbers somewhere down the line, and hopefully some insight was gained. Never mind that someone had the (likely) enviable job of measuring the fitting of a few hundred 1970s-style stewardesses. I'm not saying a lot of the stuff's doesn't make me gloriously incredulous, but it's super easy to just take something at face value and just mock it. (Not that your linking it implies anything - people who mock like Proxmire just get my goat.)
- dirtyaura 12y agoI especially enjoyed the following paragraph from the paper: "It should be noted, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics"
- arjunnarayan 12y agoThis was the first paper he wrote after earning tenure at MIT. It was his blowing off steam fun project.
- AceJohnny2 12y agoI believe cstross's book Neptune's Brood is based on ideas from this paper. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-she... Which is funny, considering older Krugman's a fan of Stross's other book series The Merchant Princes, which also tries to have a solid economic backbone. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/more-science-fiction-for-economists-seriously-time-wasting/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/more-science-fic...
- javert 12y agoKrugman and Stross seem to be fellow travelers.
- cstross 12y ago1. Neptune's Brood is more heavily based on David Graeber's work on Debt (notably Debt: The First 5000 years). 1a. If you feel inclined to read Neptune's Brood, I've got one big regret: I wrote it circa 2010-11, before BitCoin really took off in the public eye, and used the term "bitcoin" for a not-like-our-BtC-honest cryptocurrency. (If I'd known BtC was going to take off that way the year the book came out, I'd have come up with a different name.) 2. Paul Krugman is a cool person to go drinking with in a pub :)
- mithras 12y agoHi Charlie, I enjoyed the book a lot, and I was only a bit irked by the slightly-off Bitcoin references and the countersigning etc. I have a few pages written on the same idea of many disparate colonies but with the twist that quantum entanglement allows for limited FTL communications, which makes an interstellar blockchain feasible. I'm looking forward to your next book.
- cstross 12y agoThe next book ("The Rhesus Chart") came out last July; there are five books in various stages of production after that ... and none of them deal with cryptocurrency or space colonization or the singularity: this decade I'm doing urban fantasy (plus my big fat post-Edward Snowden security state near-future technothriller).
- happyscrappy 12y ago"This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved." He goes on to say this work may have some galactic relevance and that the force is with him.
- GregBuchholz 12y agoMore interesting is what resources or products would be potential candidates for interstellar trade.
- Shivetya 12y agohard science, art, and entertainment?
- api 12y agoProbably information -- art, music, culture, scientific discoveries, technological blueprints (that could be "printed" anywhere), software, genetic material, anything informational. Information has the benefit of weighing nothing and being easily transmissible at the speed of light. This is also probably true for interplanetary trade, such as with a Mars colony... though return of very precious materials via something inexpensive like gun launch can't be totally ruled out. Going full sci-fi mode: if something like consciousness uploading were possible, it would also be possible for people to travel interplanetary and interstellar distances at the speed of light as information as long as something at the other end existed to reconstitute them. So one mechanism of interstellar colonization would be to send unmanned drone ships first, then encode ourselves and go.
- darkmighty 12y agoYea, send a drone -> build supercomputer -> export computing :)
- _random_ 12y agoYes, long-term everything could be printed via nano-robots. Even if not directly but as a sequence of building different plants. So something like a seed nano-robot colony + manufacturing blue-prints.
- api 12y agoInterstellar migration could be not unlike booting an embedded device via a slow serial link. First send the slow robotic "boot loader," then use it to download the colonists to the new star system and boot up a civilization. Matter is everywhere. Information is what it's all about, and information travels at 'c'.
- java-man 12y agoWhere is Figure II?
- _ihaque 12y agoOn page 7! "Readers who find Figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary."
- GregBuchholz 12y agoSince it is imaginary, you have to imagine it.
- numlocked 12y agoThis is by Paul Krugman??! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman That this is written by a Nobel Prize winner and NYT columnist definitely makes it a bit more noteworthy.
- kmfrk 12y agoYou clearly never read his blog; dude is the biggest sci-fi dork and continuously plugs Charlie Stross. :)
- javert 12y agoI think it makes it less noteworthy. Among Krugman's other "accomplishments" is this quote: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
- mikeyouse 12y agoAre you honestly going to drop a quote from the 100th anniversary of Time magazine in which the authors were instructed to speculate about the world in 2098 as some sort of referendum on Krugman's economic knowledge? Cherry picking a random sentence from a variety magazine isn't quite as strong of an argument as people keep insisting.
- javert 12y agoYou're right. I am absolutely not making the argument that Krugman is bad because of the quote. I'm asserting that Krugman is bad, because I know that to be true, without offering proof, which would be outside the scope of an HN comment. Separately, I'm also adding the quote to make fun of him. I didn't expect people to take my comment as some sort of intellectual argument. As you point out, obviously, it is not.
- kbenson 12y agoSubmitted multiple times before, but here's the only one I saw with comments, in case some finds something interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818706
- unknown_apostle 12y agoHe's so funny and smart, and yet guys like him are one of the bigger obstacles on this planet to accumulating enough capital to finance space exploration. Makes you think...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- geoffreyhale 12y ago"It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."
- nabla9 12y agoKrugman loves science fiction. He said that he wanted to stydy psycohistory described in the Foundation series, but chose economics because it was the closest thing you can actually study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
- DavidSJ 12y agoSee also Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage: http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf
- stox 12y agoDid you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction? s/world/interstellar trade routes/
- widowlark 12y agoIts interesting to me that this is written by Krugman. I am glad to see that he has read The High Frontier, Its one of my personal favorites.
- andrewflnr 12y agoIt seems to me that the scariest part of doing interstellar finance is the concern that the institutions that, say, enforce bonds (or otherwise give them meaning, I'm not sure of the mechanics) will disappear sometime during your round trip. A lot can happen in 50 years, much more in a 500 year interstellar round trip. I would expect interstellar trade to stick with "real" goods only for this reason.
- aswanson 12y agoInteresting. Krugman has said that he got interested in economics because it was the closest thing in reality to psychohistory as described in Asimov's Foundation series. Of course, any society capable of interstellar trade would be beyond scarcity and hence economics as we know it. But fun, nonetheless.
- caretcaret 12y agoYou say that, but go back a few hundred years and you can make an analogous statement about worldwide trade. Yet, our consumption of resources have increased to meet the level of production, and scarcity still exists.
- aswanson 12y agoYou have to get a grasp on the scale of the cosmos to understand what I mean. To get to the nearest star system, alpha centauri, you would need a matter/antimatter reactor that would turn approximately 10 kilograms of mass into pure energy to approach .8c, where c is the speed of light ( and the assumption here is that we acheive near 100 percent efficiency in our propulsion mechanism, which is impossible). Any society capbable of doing so would be far beyond celestial scavenging for a few trinkets, in the same manner that our global economy is beyond scavenging for artifacts from brazilian tribal rituals, historical curiousity notwithstanding.