Everyone needs a little light relief sometimes, including the Nobel winning economist and writer/blogger extraordinaire Paul Krugman.
A few months back he reminded the world of a short paper he’d written some years ago on the rather unexpected topic of interstellar finance. You can teleport a copy to your automated reading device by clicking here.
It’s a lot of fun, with a satirical slant lurking between the lines. But it’s also quite serious, because the specifics of sub-light-speed interstellar travel do pose some rather unfamiliar and intriguing conundrums: Krugman points out that transit times for goods are of course extremely large, and the passage of time itself is a function of inertial frames and the acceleration of frames. Relativity says that you can keep your roses fresh for Alpha Centauri, but your first customers may dead by the time you get there. Electromagnetic communication is naturally far faster than the transmission of material goods (although that’s a situation we already encounter here on Earth), which allows for trade to be set up. And having one-way transport, rather than round trips, of cargo vessels or merchants is okay for stable economic function on an interstellar scale.
He also shows that, in terms of capital, interstellar arbitrage and competition will tend to equalize interest rates between two locations (planets, ring-worlds, Dyson spheres, whatever) as long as they’re in the same inertial frame. This, as far as I can see, is astrophysically tenable. Typical relative motions of stars in our bit of the Milky Way are of the order of 10-40 kilometers a second. Although large by terrestrial standards, these velocities introduce a time dilation factor between systems of no more than 1.0000000089, or barely a millionth of a percent.
Despite the lore of so much science fiction, I don’t think anyone (erm… anything) is going to be hauling metal ore, minerals, water, beryllium spheres, dilithium crystals, helium-3, or for that matter any kind of raw material. The fact being that almost any cargo along these lines (made of the elements produced across the universe by stellar nucleosynthesis and supernovae) is going to be a) most likely available in any system already, b) definitely available for the taking from billions of unoccupied regions of space.
The better options are ‘native’ products.
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
- Self-replicating probes are imminent – implications for SETI
Tipler's stance was an expansion of the similar but earlier Hart declaration. However, crucial to the Tipler argument was the role played by self-replicating interstellar robot probes. Any ...
- planetary science
Astronomers have taken the best picture yet of a planetary system being born. The image, taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the high-altitude desert in Chile ...
- Ender's Game
In the latest episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, author and futurist Karl Schroeder talks about how technology could start replacing lawyers. By Geek's Guide to the Galaxy The Battle Room in ...
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Interstellar finance
- Michael-John Toste’s New Book, The Prophetic Matrix: Point of Contact Makes Space History Traveling 660 Billion Miles Into The Universe
Lighting has struck twice, with Michael-John Toste being the first author to officially send 2 of his books into outer space for their interstellar premier before their official release on earth! Now ...
- Saudi Arabia’s Message to Biden
After a closely-watched visit and a fist-bump broadcast around the world, US President Joe Biden departed Saudi Arabia without a firm commitment on oil production.
- Wait, this cat can 'play' the Interstellar theme on a piano? Watch to find out
In a video that has recently been shared on Instagram and has been going viral, one gets to see a cat who ‘plays’ the theme of Interstellar on the piano. Cats and their day-to-day antics will ...
- For Bitcoin To Win, We Must Burn The Ships
This is an opinion editorial by Interstellar Bitcoin ... breaking news and global impact at the cutting-edge intersection of finance, technology and Bitcoin. Published by BTC Media, the online ...
- NASA's Voyager 1 from the '70s is glitching. Engineers are consulting 45-year-old manuals to troubleshoot.
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the very first human-made object to venture beyond the boundary of our sun's influence, known as the heliopause, and into interstellar space. It's now around 14.5 billion ...