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Even 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.
Maybe trade secrets don't make sense, given entropy. Light-speed limitations just expose the fact that not sharing information makes no sense. Unless capitalism.
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Raw 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.
Why 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.
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.
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Without having read anything but your comment: The economic impact to the attendant ('observer travelling with the goods') is not diminished by his own experience of the passage of time, but is affected by the reduction in his own ability to take on other tasks during the same [external] time frame. In other words, it doesn't matter that he experienced the travel as five minutes. What matters is that his options were…
We can turn this on its head and ask a similarly tricky question: Should a human that can live for 1000 years be allowed to access interest rates that 100 year humans get? A 1,000 year human has many more opportunities, and compounding interest will only grow his wealth further. Here's only an initial $1000 investment over 1000 years: https://www.calculator.net/interest-calculator.html?cstartin... At the end of it, t…
> Near light travel time dilation is essentially life extension relative to planetary populations. So any interest paid to the traveler should be calculated at the fraction of time experienced, so 5 minutes to 5 days would be 1 / 1440.
Why should either the lender's clock or the borrower's clock be considered more valid for the purpose of calculating interest? Why is one privileged over the other?
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Maybe trade secrets don't make sense, given entropy. Light-speed limitations just expose the fact that not sharing information makes no sense. Unless capitalism.
What kind of information would be worth sending that would also be worth receiving years after the fact?
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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 thing that would ever be exchanged between solar systems, would be information.
If 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 min…
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...
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We can turn this on its head and ask a similarly tricky question: Should a human that can live for 1000 years be allowed to access interest rates that 100 year humans get? A 1,000 year human has many more opportunities, and compounding interest will only grow his wealth further. Here's only an initial $1000 investment over 1000 years: https://www.calculator.net/interest-calculator.html?cstartin... At the end of it, t…
> In other words, it doesn't matter that he experienced the travel as five minutes. What matters is that his options were limited for five days. > Near light travel time dilation is essentially life extension relative to planetary populations. So any interest paid to the traveler should be calculated at the fraction of time experienced, so 5 minutes to 5 days would be 1 / 1440. Why should either the lender's clock or…
Abstract: > This paper extends interplanetary trade to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: How should interest on goods in tranist be computed when the 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 travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theo…
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.
This seems to be a joke, it says it was funded with a grant from William Proxmire, an american politician that started the "Golden Fleece awards".
As an example, I remember Marvin Minsky walking into 6.034 one morning in 1978 completely apoplectic over an article in that morning's "Ergo" (A MIT/Harvard libertarian free student newspaper distributed on campus) criticizing some research on homosexual behavior in ducks. I can't find any current reference to Proxmire, but I recall he was involved and it would have been up his alley. Anyway, as I remember, Minsky spent most of the morning explaining the research and it's importance with a real passion. It's one of those things you don't forget.
EDIT: I found a reference that says how Proxmire had his staff compile constituent responses to his endless press releases to find subjects sparked the most interest. He was pretty much seen as an idiot in academia but he could easily ruin careers.
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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 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. 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…
> 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.