See also Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage:
http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf
The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#42I believe cstross's book Neptune's Brood is based on ideas from this paper. 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-fic...
I'm struggling to remember the novel, but there was another book where some aliens created an antimatter-generating system around a star, using the dip in the star's brightness to tell if another civilization was tapping it.
One of their N-removed feudal client races would then come and conquer your primitive society, unless you managed to decode the rest of their message and further demonstrate you were advanced enough to operate your own government across relativistic distances and timespans.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#43Did 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/
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#44Its 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.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, 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.
Interstellar 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'.
Well remember physics constrains everything, so it's interesting to look at that too. The reason we'll look into expanding in the first place is because of energy/material constraints in our own system. Some systems will require large "seeds" to boot up depending on how advanced we are at a particular point and how long can we wait for booting. Then as soon as it boots it will start receiving updates on how to improve itself, otherwise it would be terribly outdated by the time it starts exporting computing. What we choose to colonize will probably depend on the specifics of the system, like solar power output, material availability at planets, etc. There's a question on what kind of information the seeds will produce too: improving themselves should be largely redundant with the improvements made by the colonizers, which would be streamed to the new planets. So they'll be some very long term tasks so it can be efficiently divided across the decade-or-more latency separated systems.
I need to write a book about this some day. It's just so fun to imagine :)
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#46It 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.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#47Interesting. 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.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#48Interesting. 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.
You 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.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#49Interesting. 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.
You 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.
You 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.
Re: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, 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.
Interstellar 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'.
It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it goes.