If every habitable planet can just produce enough food and basic supplies for everyone to live on, and interstellar travel is expensive enough to be a mild problem, what kind of goods would interstellar commerce be structured around?
If every habitable planet can just produce enough food and basic supplies for everyone to live on...
Kayden Sanchez
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Christian Johnson
Designer/Exotic goods that are impossible to find anywhere else. If nano fabricators exist, then the design templates for those goods can be ferried instead.
Raw materials are unlikely unless there happens to be some place that's just made of antimatter, in which case it could be possible for an interstellar civilization to figure out how to safely harvest it for huge amounts of power. Whether that's economically viable depends on how hard space travel is.
Jackson Jackson
Ideas?
Adam Myers
Space porn.
Julian Moore
We can manifacture pretty much anything in a every medium-large sized country.
But commerce is thriving. So, why don't just copy reality? Maybe there are china-like planets outputting cheaper shit, but there are also agricoltural planets in which crops are simpler to grow, and tech-y planets that make finer things.
If as you say it's just BASIC food and supplies, well, and travel is costly but not really that costly commerce would be even more important, wouldn't it? Possibly on luxury items first, of course, but who knows.
Tyler Martin
Cultural stuff. Art, unique foods, unusual drugs, tourism. Stuff that is truly unique to that planet
Also, black market stuff. If something is legal in point A, and illegal in point B, someone will try to smuggle it.
Camden Myers
Information. Culture. Technology.
youtu.be
Ryan Scott
Tourism.
Aaron Thompson
Space tourism is something that even most civilized space settings don't really give a fuck on.
I mean, granted, I fully expect my noble to have the Grand Gala night at the imperial capital as THE adventure defining the time on that planet.
But still, it it really is some supposedly ancient, snazzy, culturally complex and in general pretty awesome wonder of the galaxy, shouldn't there be something to go sight-seeing? And yes, I mean just sight-seeing, no shooting in the cathedral.
Just some snippets of setting between real scenes.
Elijah Brown
And if it's the planet the civilisation originated from (ie Earth) aren't there going to be a lot of "pilgrimage"esque sites? Places like th Empire State Building, the Sistine chapel, and Mecca.
Even just actual religious pilgrims will account for a lot of traffic, especially amongst space!Catholics and space!Muslims
Justin Butler
What luxury goods would a space civilization trade in?
Chase Perez
Nothing. Interstellar trade only makes sense if it takes less energy and time to send it across the vast interstellar distances than to just make it on your own solar system. Your kind of FTL is extremly important here.
That said, if you are building Dyson Spheres, you may consider planet-cracking trade.
Justin Perez
Exotic particles produced near black holes.
Noah Lewis
>have FTL travel
>don't have FTL communication for some reason
Sounds like a really retarded setting
Brandon Ross
Brandon Lee
The difference is that distances in space are several orders of magnitude larger than on Earth. Even travel within the Solar system takes years and decades, and that's a pittance compared to between stars. We wouldn't import cheap shit from China if it took ten years to arrive over here, you know?
Hudson Hernandez
>have colonies in different star systems
>want to trade between them
>assume that we don't have FTL travel
Why would you assume that lol
Jaxon Taylor
Delicious New England lobster, the finest lobster in all the universe. Cant get it anywhere else.
Brody Scott
Also, people would be a hot commodity. Settlers from developed worlds would want to get to "frontier" planets. Underpopulated worlds might want to attract immigrants, while over populated (or repressive) planets might want to deport people.
Joseph Ramirez
>Even travel within the Solar system takes years and decades
It doesn't have to. Look up the Orion program.
Tyler Ortiz
FTL is impossible, user. If it were possible, we would be talking about time travel.
Bentley Roberts
Artistic goods. Experiences, documentaries, vids, literature.
Other intellectual goods. Scientific advancements. Political histories, political documentaries, political memoirs that will sway people into not repeating the same mistakes on other worlds.
Hudson Hernandez
Why not send them over the universalnet?
Ryan Gomez
Either we are among the first technologically advanced species in the entire universe, or aliens never bother with expanding too much beyond their own solar system.
Caleb Gonzalez
Perhaps economies would be based around the trading of goods that require the economic infrastructure of whole planets to build it.
Unlike our globalist economy that we're approaching today, we could have many sub-economies on each individual planet.
Imagine making trades for spaceships worth 500 years of total planet production time.
Economies would rise and fall based on their ability to produce one singular good, sure other parts of a planet's economy may ship off food, and stuff like that between planets, but planets would trade goods between generations.
A stable economy would be one that can trade these super-goods, and a "growing economy" would be one that is not yet at the stage of producing super-goods, but eventually will.
Declining planets would be ripe for "repurposing", as the stellar economy must grow by gaining more planets to produce more super goods. The few "declining planets" that are left alone, are practically uninhabitable rocks.
Nicholas Wood
Even with FTL it doesn't change the fact that distances off-planet are vastly longer than on-planet. Transporting goods from notChina is speedier than from the next solar system using that technology.
Angel Evans
To make interstellar trade work, you need the cost of interstellar transport to be incredibly low, or the value of the trade item to be incredibly high. Or both.
Raw minerals probably are not valuable enough, it will probably be cheaper to synthesize rare elements instead of shipping them in. As for manufactured goods, why not just send the blueprints by radio or by your Dirac Poweredtm FTL Ansible communicator? In a future where everybody has 3D printers and rapid prototyping machines, the economy would be based upon trading intellectual property.
Since there does not seem to be any real-world trade item worth interstellar trade (unless it is cheaper to ship from another star than it is from another city), you will probably be forced to invent some species of Unobtanium.
Kayden Sanders
"Survival" is not the same as "life." Perhaps planet A's climate allows the farming of some crop that you can't grow on planet B without expensive and complex greenhouse systems. The people of planet B don't strictly "need" this food item, but they want it. Nobody "needs" spices, yet wars have been fought over it before.
Also consider: I legally own some rock out in the asteroid belt and I'm mining, say, copper out of it. Earth getting it's own copper into orbit requires multi-billion dollar launch vessels. Getting a load of my copper to Earth's orbit requires putting it all in a really big burlap sack and shoving it out my front door at the right angle and velocity. Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
Luke Powell
just as important as planet to planet trade is planet to space trade.
Lumber, food, animals, organics in general, just things that are more difficult to get ahold of in space.
Tyler Watson
Just because a planet can theoretically produce enough food and basic supplies for everyone doesn't mean it does just yet. In order to have a modern society at this technology level it requires a lot of people all working together, especially in technical fields as well as manual labor.
Slaves, indentured servants and the like are generally useful in these places where a number of volunteers can't be had.