I've got two sci fi questions for Veeky Forums, it's been fascinating me for a while.
1) Would interplanetary trade ever be profitable? At least enough for some futuristic swashbucklers with their personal space-yacht to trade from planet to planet, and still make a living.
Are there ways around fuel and time costs that you can imagine, like faster-than-light travel, or suspended animation?
2) What things could these space merchants sell?
Obviously exotic materials, or nuclear/mineral rich ores, but what about biological specimens? Alien life forms, bacterium, or DNA might hold valuable biochemical properties for industries, and scientific research. What about physical artifacts, or advanced technologies?
Could they sell tickets aboard their craft? Could the people who buy the tickets get a discount if they stay in suspended animation?
>1) Would interplanetary trade ever be profitable?
Within the solar system? Probably, give three or more inhabited places so you can set up a triangle trade.
>At least enough for some futuristic swashbucklers with their personal space-yacht to trade from planet to planet, and still make a living.
I like Heinlein, too.
>Are there ways around fuel and time costs that you can imagine, like faster-than-light travel, or suspended animation?
Now you're outside the solar system. Gets trickier there, without Muh FTL Drive. Many such have been imagined. or sheer weirdness, my favorite was Niven's "End Teleport Drive." Given really cheap short range teleportation, of the sort that requires a "transmitter" AND a "receiver. Build the transmitter into the base of your ship, attach the receiver on the nose. Press button. Hilarity ensues. He wrote an essay on teleportation that included musings on the ETD, but never used it in a story because it is too insane.
2) What things could these space merchants sell?
Everybody always tries to answer this in terms of wild exotic wares -- but at it's really the same as trade on Earth: move something from where it is cheap to where it is expensive. Say axes are cheap on planet Amazon, but are expensive on Burgerplanet. On Burgerplanet, baking soda is plentiful but it is expensive on Caledonia. Caledonians desperately need baking soda, but they make a fine array of croissants, which nobody on Amazon knows how to make. Assuming the value differential is high enough, you work that triangle the right way around, you get rich. Go backwards, of course, and you go broke. Note that in the example above, you need the baking soda to make the croissants, but the axes and baking soda are not really related. Whether something is a raw material or not is not as important as a high price differential between locations (and mass, since your drive probably costs more the more mass you move.)
Chase Turner
There have been a lot of white papers on this subject.
The prevailing view is that the knowledge gaps between civilizations would tend to be so large, the less advanced civilization would be sort of like forager societies in our world today: capable of exchanging context-specific information (such as info about fashions) but little else.
Luke Bell
>the axes and baking soda are not really related Unless the baking soda is extracted from the wood of baking soda trees. Maybe the axes themselves are grown with a metal binding farming technique on planet Amazon and the croissants are processed from croissant ore found only on Caledonia that needs large amounts of baking soda to purify.
Because scifi.
Nathan Lee
Don't joke about that shit. My father died working the croissant mines. 12 hours hard baking every day. The pastry-lung was fatal. Insensitive prick.
Levi Gray
The year is 3045. rare pepes are the only remaining intergalactic currency....
Camden Miller
I love that you got my Heinlein reference. Straight out of Time Enough For Love.
Owen James
There was a sci find read about this very question. Corporations funded a bunch of colonization efforts, but space travel was too expensive to make trade profitable, they just created a bunch of self contained economies. So the corporations started pirating the colonies of all valuable items in "asset realization campaigns" which sounds just short sighted and greedy enough to be believable.
>complaining about working 12 hours a day >on a planet with a 115 hour long day He was a lazy asshole.
Alexander Martin
lol
Isaiah Hall
>1) Would interplanetary trade ever be profitable? At least enough for some futuristic swashbucklers with their personal space-yacht to trade from planet to planet, and still make a living. Probably yes, at least for a while until we reach a Kardashev level where all planets are self sufficient.
>Are there ways around fuel and time costs that you can imagine, like faster-than-light travel, or suspended animation?
You can save a lot if you can afford to wait, read up on the Interplanetary Highway. That however could take years. Then again that is not much of an issue if you send new cargo vessels out regularly, then the lead time is only once.
Practical FTL is not known. Theoretical FTL would require unfeasible amounts of energy. No known physics point to practical solutions in the foreseeable future.
Suspended animation is more probable, since one mammal (bears) can go into hibernation there is a chance also humans can. Research is ongoing but I am not aware of much progress there. Technically likely to be achieved but you need people of a special kind that will be frozen for decades before waking up unless one of a billion possible things go wrong.
>2) What things could these space merchants sell? In Sol system transport of hydrocarbons from Titan is plausible. There are truly vast amounts out there and for all the alternative energy sources we still need hydrocarbons for plastic and synthetic fertilizers.
>Obviously exotic materials, or nuclear/mineral rich ores, but what about biological specimens? Alien life forms, bacterium, or DNA might hold valuable biochemical properties for industries, and scientific research. That would bring a real danger to existing life on Earth. Such things should be researched under strict safety rules. In any case we do not know of any alien life.
Noah Brown
OP here again. Just finished reading Niven's "End Teleport Drive"... damn, man thank you for sharing that. It's such a genius idea that it's retarded.
Adrian Wood
>until we reach a Kardashev level where all planets are self sufficient. Even then it'll still be profitable. All that matters is that demand is high enough. That demand doesn't have to be for something necessary; it could be for luxuries.
Kayden Thomas
For cultural trinkets and any special materials that no one else has. There are sci-fi books that touch on these very things.
Literally correct since it would be a cultural trinket. Meme trade would be curious. Kind of like when someone has a 2chan meme thread on /b/ from time to time (haven't seen one in years though).
Nathaniel Ortiz
>it could be for luxuries. Well, what kind of goods would that plausibly be?
As services, rather than goods, there might be sight seeing.
Brody Young
>what kind of goods would that plausibly be? Regional foods, cultural trinkets, entertainment (transporting athletes and entertainers to live venues).
Landon Morales
What does Veeky Forums think about O'Neill cylinders?
My intent was to say that there does not need to be a relationship between the commodity brought in and the one you take out. You MIGHT use A to make B, or you might not.
Only mention it because some people get hung up on "you have to be moving raw materials and then going on with manufactured product."
Carter Miller
Though I admit I was thinking more about the Rolling Stones, for some reason. Maybe the Bicycle to Mars, flatcats to the belt...
Aiden Powell
You should now go read his "Theory and Practice of Time Travel."
Levi Lopez
Art. Entertainment. The product of different minds and cultures. Definitionally stuff you can;t get at home.
>websites can't make up timestamps Why do you think the posts there are still catching up with the posts here?
Cooper Thompson
>Why do you think the posts there are still catching up with the posts here?
They aren't, as far as I can tell.
Assuming that this veeky shit is indeed a mirror, I have to admit that is a pretty clever idea. They substitute "sci" for "Veeky Forums". They are copying another forum and passing it off as their own.
Jose Collins
>They substitute "sci" for "Veeky Forums". They do that with every board they mirror, there's a reason these are all Veeky Forums boards. Notice you can't even signup to post on their website.
Benjamin Harris
Is there any way to get a pdf or scan of the revised copy of the high frontier by O'Neill without having to actually buy the book? I'm talking about the third edition.
Jonathan Perez
how do I know you are not a sneeky veeky shill?
Jose Anderson
Because you can't even post on veeky.
Thomas Gonzalez
You're veeky himself.
Cameron Collins
underrated,made me laugh like an autistic child in a lego store
Samuel Clark
>Art. Entertainment. Much of that can be televised. And food can be reconstituted.
You need something more else that people would want transported across space.
Isaiah Watson
>Much of that can be televised
It can't. People pay a shit load of money in the art industry for originals. Even art from artists who are still alive. As for entertainment. Not everyone watches tv or video entertainment in general.
Owen Barnes
Better question. How do you make interplanetary internet viable?
Nolan Richardson
There is a story about that, by Asimov or Clarke, cannot remember who. The idea was that bandwidth is good but latency is bad. So you just start talking and talking ... and talking and then the other side responds for each item plus interject own questions.
Back in the day Usenet News was in parts transferred on QIC. Same idea.
Connor Cruz
>>but what about biological specimens? Alien life forms, bacterium, or DNA might hold valuable biochemical properties for industries, and scientific research that you can transmit back at the speed of light, same goes for reality television.
Futuristic space traders might not ever exist because of this
>>planet to planet well the problem is the high delta V cost for moving stuff from planet to planet. Unless you build a bunch of space elevators, earth ain't gonna be shipping wheat to mars anytime soon.
>>exotic materials the most exotic materials that we know of are only found on earth. Fossils and coal have not been found anywhere else. There really aren't that many exotic materials that are worth shipping to another planet. Antimatter might be harvestable from planetary magnetic fields: centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/Bickford_Phase_II.pdf
And that's pretty speculative. Even more speculative are magnetic monopoles, superdense matter, strangelets, microblackholes, IE basically whooey. Niven famously used magnetic monopoles as macguffinite in his stories.
>>nuclear/mineral rich ores So here's something interesting, a number of uranium segregation processes rely on the presence of oxygen and water. Oxygen very rarely occurs naturally and really requires life to be formed. centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/Bickford_Phase_II.pdf >>ores It probably does not make sense to ship ores. It takes a lot of energy to get stuff moving up to kilometers per second. You are not shipping bits of asteroid to some refinery at a lagrange point just to get the platinum which is at ppm concentrations.
Xavier Taylor
now the only case that sort of makes sense for shipping unrefined materials is luna--->lagrange point so you can build space colonies. Because A. lunar regolith is a fine construction material especially for things like a colony's radiation shield and B. luna's gravity and day-night length makes it difficult to use solar
Even then, you need a mass driver on luna and a giant catchers mitt ship to intercept big regolith pellets. But planet to planet YOU DO NOT SHIP ORE!
Now one thing you might ship are volatile elements. Places like the moon or mercury are pretty low on volatile elements like CHNOPS
Nolan Scott
>Much of that can be televised.
And thus charged for, if you set up your system that way. It can;t be televised from Earth to Omicron Persei 8, because muh attenuation.
But I can bring it on my ship, and if you guys want it, you can pay me, Plus, look, I got here the original props and models and production mementos, which are just the sort of luxury items rich people pay too much for!
Xavier Myers
>But planet to planet YOU DO NOT SHIP ORE!
Unless you live in lawless times, and your shipment needs to be safe inside your big ship, bristling with guns.
OP's mention of :swashbucklers" brought that to mind.
Hudson Moore
Trouble is, you cannot transfer information faster than light.
Also: laser can be transmitted across interstellar distances, just chose an out of the way wavelength.
Carter Perez
>Also: laser can be transmitted across interstellar distances, just chose an out of the way wavelength.
Space dust fucks that up and it still has attenuation. Turn the sun into a big signal lighthouse and you might have enough power for interstellar transmissions.
Aiden Turner
>Also: laser can be transmitted across interstellar distances, just chose an out of the way wavelength.
Why though? Expensive as fuck, and you get othng back.
But if you carry it there in your ship, you cansell it for what the market will bear.
I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet spaceflight, Soyuz T-16Z to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. His other Soviet crew members returned to earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, but his place was taken up by return cargo. There have been occasional Progrez supply flights to keep him going since that time. He is in good humor, but wants to come home.
Jonathan Jackson
>and you get othng back. One laser is for simplex, you need a second set for duplex.
>But if you carry it there in your ship, you cansell it for what the market will bear. What? You get there late and the market is lost thanks to the laser message that arrived years before you did.
Jose Diaz
If the space merchants sold alien stuff from other planets could lead to a biological catastrophe. Especially if the species had some form of sickness that humans wouldn't be able to combat
Ethan Martinez
The Galactic Overlord could make it pay.
Nolan Jackson
hy would anybody pay to send a laser message for which they get no guaranteed return?
Jeremiah Reyes
Why is there a skeleton in that space suit? I thought bodies don't decompose where there isn't other life?
Bentley Watson
you're covered in bacteria waiting for you to die so they can consume your corpse
Hunter Allen
Until someone dies on the moon we can't know for sure. But yeah as long as there's heat (if there's sunlight, space is surprisingly warm) the body's own bacteria will devour it. Hell that's what gut microbes are MADE for. They won't stop until the water all sublimates or boils off, which is very likely long enough for the face if not the majority of the fleshy parts to rot off.
Jaxon Sanders
1) The most profitable forms of interplanetary trade are things like people, precious art, critical things that are rare and difficult to produce locally, patents and other information. Nobody is going to make money shipping iron from Mars to the Earth. Most of the economy will be tied to the local gravity well (people on Pluto will likely only ever do most of their business with people on Pluto).
Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) is currently the go to. Planets will probably have their own local Internets connected through the DTN system. Like the Earth-Moon system may share a local Internet because the lag can be tolerable for many things (~3 light seconds each way), but Earth and Mars won't share an Internet.
It might be pre-paid by those at the receiving end.
It might be sop cheap that why not?
it could be a by product of, say. accelerating light sails to the receivers.
It could be done by artists forever craving more audience.
Luis Sanchez
Let me interject that Linux kernel is set up to ensuring communications with University of Mars. > * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once > * implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix > * the 120 second clamps though!
What GNU does in this respect beyond interjecting I don't know.
