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
- PAUL KRUGMAN: If it bleeds It leads, inflation edition
Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist and a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on ...
- The Curious Case of Economic Theory
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you ...
- Krugman warns of negative impact from Trump’s re-election
Esteemed economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman recently spoke on the potential negative effects on the US economy due to a possible Donald Trump election win. His concerns center on Trump’s ...
- Mastering Short-Term Trading
Chris Seabury has 20+ years of experience in the financial industry. He is the administrator of Colorado Valley Wealth Management and Insurance Group. Short-term trading can be very lucrative but ...
- Aliens On Meteors? Study Proposes Wild Interstellar Hitchhiking Theory
The new research explores a model of life spreading between planetary systems via panspermia and terraformation.
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade” num_posts=”5″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Interstellar finance
- Written In The Stars: The Prophetic Matrix Inspires ORU Course And Exhibit
Reach for the Stars Landmark Exhibit at ORU Commemorates Literary Space History of The Prophetic Matrix™ Interstellar Travels SILICON VALLEY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / May 6, 2024 / Michael-John Toste, ...
- Why scientists lost track of a satellite in overcrowded space— for 25 years: ‘It’s basically like air traffic control’
A satellite called S73-7 that had been missing since the 1990s mysteriously turned up again this week, raising the question of how the Department of Defense lost the interstellar probe in the ...
- NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months
NASA re-established communication with Voyager 1, an interstellar spacecraft that nearly five months ago began sending unreadable data back to the space agency.
- NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months
NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago. NASA’s ...
- Jessica Chastain says a lot of kids have been named after her ‘Interstellar’ character — but a baby-naming site disagrees
The Babynames.com rep also told TMZ that only one person added the name to their favorites list in the two years after the release of “Interstellar” — and another person added it last year.
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Interstellar finance
[google_news title=”” keyword=”interstellar finance” num_posts=”5″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
