What would planets trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by...

What would planets trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by themselves? Since their planets are always going to be big enough to grow food and such.

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Souvenirs, things that represent completely different cultures and styles of arts and entertainment.

Are we talking inside of a solar system like in the Expanse? Or are we talking interstellar travel? Because it's a very good point that its hard to imagine what interstellar merchants would even sell. Alien techs, rare cultural artifacts, singularity engines, maybe some solar systems would be low tech or behind the curve in tech development and would buy bootstrap singularity tech on millenial spanning credit loans.

What would trade look like between posthuman AI based societies? Like the Culture or something, everything would depend on the whims of AIs. Or just in universe building, you create super special metal and super special alien critter and all that. Lightsaber crystals and Dune Spice and what have you.

Food and resources? It’s the same thing you see in the real world, just on a much larger scale. China uses merchants to fuel their industry, Ancient Rome was always one day away from starvation if the Egyptian grain didn’t get through, and Earth’s Zero-Point Energy reactors would halt their hum if neutronium wasn’t shipped in on a daily basis.

Culture.

>tfw the IMS Israel is late with the weekly Nubian shipments

If we follow the theory, every planet should specialize in one kind of product, the one which is cheaper for him to produce. We should study however the cost of intergalactic freighting, since It may be more expensive than producing at home.

>What would countries trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by themselves? Since their countries are always going to be big enough to grow food and such.

If both the galactic society and its economy of scale were large enough, you could have planets that specialize in a certain area, like agriculture or manufacturing

or storing so much paperwork on a planet it literally secedes from your empire

It'd be pretty unlikely unless intergalactic shipping was cheap somehow.

>What would planets trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by themselves?
Numerous luxuries like in our world

The spice must flow, OP.

Even interplanetary trade is going to take years. Bot because it is impossible, but because trade must be economical to do. You arent very efficient when you consume energy on the order of magnitude to reach a planet within a week. It is fine for humans, but not goods.

3D printing will be a significant factor . You dont rade thinks that can be done on-site unless you are truly mass-producing them.

youtu.be/gRd8fR9D3-8

>intergalactic
There's billions of stars in a galaxy, going to other galaxies wouldn't really be worth the effort even with FTL.

Manufactured goods, especially difficult or involved ones to produce are probably going to be traded more than resources. Every system is going to have plenty of metals and silicates and the like available locally. But if a nearby system already has the infrastructure and tool set up to mas produce quantum computer chips or something its likely cheaper to just go there and trade some of your exotic foods or your own manufactured thing, for the quantum chips instead.

Tourism would probably be the biggest driving factor of trade, unless building trade ships is cheaper than building the infrastructure needed.

Yeah I meant intragalactic.

What would continents trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by themselves? Since their continents are always going to be big enough to grow food and such.

>unless building trade ships is cheaper than building the infrastructure needed.
It probably would be, in principle building ships already in space with material mined in space makes them relatively cheap.

It could easily end up like the real world where its wound up economically favourable to mine iron in australia, ship it to China to make into steel cars, that get shipped back to Australia and sold here. Even though we already had a local car manufacturing industry thats now basically dead because of this.

The biggest variable is how expensive and quick intersetellar travel is. The cheaper and/or quicker it is, the more viable trading is. But even expensive and slow interstellar travel will likely still see some trade in rare or unique exotic materials, foods and artefacts. Shit like ivory, silk or cinnamon.

It really relies on some form of FTL, so it makes it difficult to judge.

Whats going on in this pic?

unobtanium, vespan gas, druish air

There could be a set up where most of the population is concentrated on heavily urbanized worlds where defense infrastructure and government services are easier to supply and the smaller chunk of the population live out in much less densely populated worlds (basically rural worlds) supplying the city worlds with the resources they need like food, metals, gas, and unrefined resources for luxury goods.

Stock/trade market crash.

outside of a grimderp universe where whole planets specialise? they'd trade the same things that self-seufficient countries do. Minerals of local rarity, finished products that can be made circumstantially cheaper, technology and information, entertainment, and finally any goods that there is aa cultural affinty for, or restriction of.

Microeconomics answers this question and many others using the logic of comparative advantage, transaction cost economics, and the law of one price.

"If we follow the theory" doesn't lead where you claim it leads, which suggests that you read up on what the theories actually say.

Not being rude here, just pointing out that economics has long since answered these questions and doesn't predict what you claim.

Even manufactured goods might be worth trading if they're super-high tech and a planet has developed specialized expertise. Other planets would import rather than trying to use their best people to duplicate the efforts of others (instead using them to double down that a planet's own advantages).

If nothing else, trade in knowledge/technology/culture would be viable. You might not see much traffic, especially if the best interstellar travel is slower-than-light, but any time there is inequality in some dimension (especially information), you have an incentive to develop a business model to exploit and ameliorate that inequality.

Luxuries, culture, immigrants, tourists, stuff one system is short on.

Finished good and culture.

>What would countries trade using merchant ships if they could just make whatever necessities for their populations by themselves? Since their countries are always going to be big enough to grow food and such.

I mean I know OP just wants to have a generic sci-fi thread but come on now.

>druish air

SPACEBALLS

THE REFERENCE

Unobtanium.

In the early stages of a planet's colonization, or if there can't be a sufficient amount of living organisms on a given planet (due to having no atmosphere for example) Phosphorus will be the one thing that HAS to be imported. No Phosphorus, no new life possible.

Drugs.

There might be world that specialize in small scale agriculture for cultural or religious reasons. An Amish planet is an almost certainly in the future.

Slaves or more likely Gynoids.

I was going to say continents, but you beat me to it.

>Setting where travel is easier at extreme ranges only