Paul Krugman's 1978 Theory of Interstellar Trade 173
jerryasher recommends Paul Krugman's blog at the NYTimes, where he introduces a paper he wrote, The Theory of Interstellar Trade, with tongue very much in cheek. Some packrat academician was kind enough to send him a scan, because "back then academics did their work with typewriters, abacuses, and stone axes." Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit 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 traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved... This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."
A continuation of what I posted on MR (Score:5, Informative)
On a note, I recall reading that section of the book. It comes at the end of "island in the Sky", a remarkably sober book about colonizing space (sober in light of crazier scifi/colonization books). For some reason I read it first and the pessimism of the article stuck with me, setting the tone for the whole book. That's not bad--our views about space travel and the future need pessimism, but I felt that it was the overriding theme.
In the end, there is no free lunch. While you could predict that interstellar travel would change time preference for some, there are a few caveats to make here:
1. Perhaps travel is so expensive that the change in time preference for some doesn't impact the market as a whole. If you have a vanishingly small group of people pushing the discount rate down, does it affect the prevailing rate? You could argue that the income effect of the billionaires of the world might be analogous. While Bill Gates may have the latitude to spend more money on small purchases than they might be worth to him systematically, that does not do much to change the price I pay for those same products.
2. Travellers will face a STEEP opportunity cost. There isn't any other way to describe it. They may (as the article in "islands in the sky" suggests) spend their wealth ENTIRELY on acclimating themselves to a radically different world or insulating themselves from that new world. In other words, this would be like taking a trip from ancient greece to the Soviet Union. You don't speak the language, you don't understand the culture, the medium of exchange, almost everything. You would be lucky if you weren't put in a circus or a museum.
3. In the longer term, risk dominates. Inflation risk and default risk historically rise to 1.0 as time marches on. There are vanishingly view equity or debt instruments that are still valid from 200 years ago. they exist, most notably in the low countries and england, but they are few and far between. What happens in the event of hyperinflation, panics or fraud (although the last one could be accounted for given a persistent third party overseer)?
4. Adverse selection. This is a corrolary of the risk argument. What bank would be likely to write a contract to make an astronomical payment in the far future? A bank that is likely to be solvent that whole time (assuming the bank knows with certainty) might, but would be FAR less likely to do so than a bank who might default on the contract.
5. Explicit cost. While this might eventually become a non-issue, we have to be real about what is at stake. A long term space voyage is basically one way in the eyes of the company chartering the craft. Unlike a 767 from NY to London, when the space ship returns, it will be obsolete, or at least at the end of its viable life. Each trip presents a large fixed cost for the charter company. This may not translate directly as a large enough cost to a consumer if the flight manifest is big enough, but it isn't trivial.
Just some thoughts.
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This still doesn't solve the right problem (Score:5, Interesting)
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
But, anyway, the thrust of TFA isn't "how do you build a colony for your people", but rather "how the F-word _do_ you make a profit out of it? Is interstellar trade even viable?" Even with robots, and without having to pay the crew or the producers anything because they're robots, you still face some non-trivial problems there.
E.g., ok, you put an order for, say, uranium from that far far colony. How do you know that you'll even still need it by the time you get it? How do you know that the price will still be OK?
If your colony is at, say, 10.5 light years away on Epsilon Eridani, or 12 light years away on Tau Ceti, and if you travel at half the speed of light average (accelerate to nearly C half the distance, then decelerate the other half), that's 31.5 and 36 light years respectively from the moment you sent the order by radio to the moment it lands on Earth. (10.5 or 12 years respectively for your signal to get there, 21 and 24 respectively for the ship to travel here.) That is, if they already have the mine and the surplus of that resource and everything. Otherwise you might have to wait more.
For farther away colonies, even more.
Historically there have been massive changes in demand within less time. Cloth went from a massive money-maker good to being "meh" to being outsourced to third world countries to produce. Coal was once _the_ fuel for any navy, and sometimes even (explicit or implied) military threat was used to open up markets to buy it from and coaling stations. (See Perry's expedition to Japan.) It took less than 30 years for everyone to switch to oil in their ships, and coal became of much less importance. Or once whale oil was the main lighting fuel, then some guy goes and discovers the light bulb. Grain was _the_ thing to have for millenia, and the wealth and military power of, say, Poland throughout the middle ages was based on being able to produce and export lots of it. Buggrit. Then it took less than a century for the bottom to fall off _that_ market, and nowadays the only countries which still have an agriculture are those who subsidize it. Etc.
It becomes even funnier if you want to build a colony for the explicit purpose of getting some goods from there. Let's say unobtanium wishalloy is the latest rage, you spot some unobtanium in the spectral line of a far away star, and plan to make a living out of it. Now you have the round trip increased by building those robots and waiting for that ship to get there, build the colony, get mining, and some time after 50 years or so you get your first shipment of it even for the nearest stars.
Will it still be needed? Will your company even still exist after so much time? What bank will give you a loan for that kind of thing?
And will your investors want your head rolling for that? Today's capitalism is obsessed by short term results, and thinks in quarters and years. (Maybe even justifiedly so.) Proposing to blow a huge chunk of money, with compound interest (one way or another: even if you have the money and don't take the loan, it must be judged against the interest you'd get if you just put that money in a bank and started _getting_ interest on it) on something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood.
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Deprecation means that if something takes a long time, it must be VERY productive to pay off.
A Starcraft Named Desire (Score:5, Interesting)
I was just reading a piece on economics which termed 1000BC to 1800AD "The Flintstones" and 1800AD to the present "The Jetsons". It's only been a relatively short time period where the economy has grown (hence *changed* in material respects) so rapidly that 50-year investment cycles are hard to fathom.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity [wikipedia.org].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain [wikipedia.org]
At some scale, common abstractions break down, such as your broad-brush of "subsidy" to the whole of global food production above. Some human endeavors are larger than the greed-loop in a Wall Street tycoon, who is, after all, merely engaged in a culturally shaped manifestation of his underlying biological drives.
The solution, obviously, is genetic engineering. One must first genetically alter the human population with biological drives compatible with 50-plus year investment cycles. In 50 to 100 years, a suitably modified humanity would support any length of transgalactic investment cycle you might wish to contemplate.
If you started with some Wikipedian root stock (barely qualifying as human as it stands), you could even set things up so that people compete for the opportunity to deliver your goods for free. Just be sure to suppress the "crow" complex, or they'll bring you back a cargo container filled with shiny lumps of carbon.
Re:This still doesn't solve the right problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Your fleet *is* the company. From what little information you gather, you take things with you that are probably tradeable at destination, and as well you take tools that can work on a wide variety of raw materials, in case you have to do this work yourself (if the locals aren't friendly, aren't at the right tech speed, or just aren't). If you're running to and from a base in the middle, you'll end up having to work out what home base might find useful when you get back from extrapolation of your current trends, while being aware that commodity consumables probably won't cut it.
That actually makes it worse (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, take the two following scenario:
1. We send a bloody huge colony ship there, and it all stays there. Then all it sends back are some smaller container ships with the ore they want to export.
2. We send a bloody huge colony ship there. But on the way back we have to carry the ore _and_ the same bloody huge colony ship, with all the people and the life support and everything.
Scenario 2 doesn't just involve hauling a lot more weight on the way back (hence bigger engines, more fuel, etc), but also hauling a bigger ship on the way there. Since, you know, it has to also have some space for the ore.
But at the very least, that way back is what really sucks. The same big colony ship which would normally be a one-way trip, now has to do the trip back too.
I also don't think it solves the problem of fluctuating prices. In fact, methinks it makes it worse. Let's look at two scenarios again. Let's say, Tau Ceti in both cases, and as I was saying, an average of half the speed of light for the whole trip, just as example values.
1. Ordering a shipment of unobtanium from a colony. You send a radio signal, it takes 12 years to get there, it takes the container ships 24 years to come here. Total: 36 years.
2. Your corporation-ship "sails" off to find unobtanium on Tau Ceti. The ship takes 24 years to get there, and another 24 years to come back. Total: 48 years.
In the second case, you now have to predict what the prices will be in 48 years from now.
And the whole point was that extrapolation of current trends sometimes doesn't cut it. You can look at the steadily increasing price for some resource over a whole century, and think "man, this thing will be worth a fortune in 48 years." Then you come back and discover that somewhere in the middle of that interval, someone discovered something that made your resource dirt cheap.
Think cloth and the introduction of the powered looms in the 19'th century. You could look at a graph of the prices throughout the 18'th century and think, "man, by 1848, the prices will be sky high. Let's buy the biggest container ships available and go bring some cloth from Tau Ceti." And you'd be wrong, because by the middle of the 19'th century, the price had dropped a lot.
Or look at Aluminium. In 1884 it was selected as the material for the capstone of the Washington Monument because it was a very expensive metal, more expensive than silver. An ounce of it cost more than a worker's daily wage. In just 2 years after that, and actually before that monument was finished, a new production process hit and caused the price of aluminium to collapse. It's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. That was a forecast for the next four years: that when the monument is finished, aluminium would still be, pretty much, a precious metal and a whole capstone made of it would be a thing that makes people go, "wow!" It only took 2 years for that to turn out wrong.
And nowadays it's a bit over a dollar per _pound_. So by the same comparison with a worker's wage, what was once worth a whole day's work, nowadays won't even hire someone for a minute. (Going by the federal minimum wage, anyway.) How's that for a price drop?
Re:That actually makes it worse (Score:5, Informative)
In the Qeng Ho business, there's no "ordering" and not necessarily a trip back. If a trip takes 24 years, then you only need to predict prices 24 years into the future, not 48. You load up your ship with things that you think are going to be valuable at the destination. You go. Then, when you get there, you make decisions about what to trade and where to go next.
And yeah, if your ships are full of stuff that the destination doesn't consider valuable, you're screwed.
Though in Vinge's stories, there are some points in your favor:
You're just as likely to be trading technology as commodities. Your destination might have all sorts of raw materials (e.g. they're not particularly interested in buying Uranium) but not certain technologies or the industrial base to build the things they want. Earth 1700 has all the raw materials needed to build spaceships, but can't actually do it. Sell spaceships to Earth 1700. Earth 2008 is probably a great market for nanotech. And so on.
Vinge's stories suggest the existence of a higher level social science than we have right now. People know how to abstractly summarize entire civilizations. (e.g. "That civilization is a typical tyranny, and that group of solar systems is a Class 2 Perversion.") Perhaps practitioners of this science can make better guesses than we can imagine, e.g. "I bet those guys have great surveillance nanobots for us to buy, but low genetic tech so we can sell them text-to-DNA fabs."
In addition, there's likely a bio market everywhere. Assuming all colonies are founded by earthlings, then everyone probably has roses and cattle. But Tau Ceti does not have Centauri's fungus lifeforms or anything based on its interesting secretions. And Romulan Ale is valuable everywhere; it's made from grains and hop-like-things that you just can't get anywhere else. Also, even when seeds/DNA/etc get shared, environmental conditions (soil, weather, and so on) make it hard to really copy the other guys' stuff. Take some DNA-identical Tettnanger hop rhizomes from Germany and grow 'em in America, and the resulting hops just don't taste and smell the same. Some things contain subtleties that keep them from ever really becoming commodities. Tau Ceti will probably always want Northwest-America-grown Cascade hops. :-)
Damn, I totally have beer on my mind right now.
Hmm.. but I think I see where I'm going with this: for intersteller trade, don' deal in commodities. Deal in very unique things. Somebody on Tau Ceti might pay quite a fortune for the bragging rights of having the only Van Gogh painting on the whole planet.
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No, because you are assuming knowledge of the current conditions at the destination. At best your information on the destination is lightspeed out of date. So you're still looking at prices 40 years out (randomly assuming 0.66c average travel speed).
You're just as likely to be trading technology as commodities.
In general physically transporting technology is pointless as well.
The significance of technology is in the infor
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How would you design a probe short of magic to extract, refine, test and smelt an arbitrarily large number of metals without those pieces taking up a significant portion of the payload?
Really big space-borne electromagnets to assist in or directly to pull it out of the gravity well into orbit, tethering to a large natural satellite (or suitable relocated asteroid) as a counterweight.
Or just rail-gun it into orbit. Then divert it to your near stellar orbit refinery to take advantage of that natural furnace, then rail-gun it back out to your fabrication platform.
If dealing with a substance that doesn't impel well with magnetism, encase it in something that does.
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E.g., ok, you put an order for, say, uranium from that far far colony. How do you know that you'll even still need it by the time you get it? How do you know that the price will still be OK?
Let's say we know that the colony will be needing lots of uranium: say its going to be using nuclear fission for power and that's not going to change inside of 100 years. I think for some far-off space colony that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption.
Now, for some reason, you want to sell them uranium, and for some reason they need a lot of it because they use an enormous amount of energy (an American colony I guess). Pipeline the process! You send shipments periodically, such as every month. After
You're not going to just transfer money at c (Score:2)
Money is just something that mediates transfers of goods, so to speak. You can buy something from Japan for dollars, only because Japan then plans to (eventually) buy something back from you and pay with those dollars.
If you can't sell as much stuff as you buy, the value of your coin drops until you reach equilibrium. It's a kind of supply and demand. And if you don't sell anything, the value of your money is exactly ze
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The third thing you do is profit.
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That's why instead of massive colony ships you will send out small robots weighing 100 grams. You build the robots using nanotech, so they can be more sophisticated than any 20 mile long spacecraft we could build with conventional means. They would have the ability to bootstrap themselves in new environments to manufacture ecosystems from raw materials on site. Thus, we colonize other planets with Earth life by sending only a database and a universal nanotech constructor.
Except that we'll suffer some sort of world-wide catastrofuck like a world war, plague, asteroid impact, Windows release, etc, and spend a hundred years clawing our way back from the brink. The old probes will have been forgotten, only for them to either a) return and try to conquer Earth, having mistaken their definition for "serving man," b) they'll have colonized planets and developed their own civilization at this point and declare war on us when we stumble into their territory or c) will have built up
Some observations. (Score:2)
Assuming these to hold true, and the first is the basis of all modern economic theory (and socialism), then tra
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The second point is probably true in some sense but is functionally meaningless for most cases
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Intercept them en route, pick them up, and deliver them to their destination ?
Or, if we are talking about a constant stream of shipments of, say, uranium, simply cease sending shipments until the last one en route is almost there, then resume sending them, this time with the new fast method. If you time it right, the rate of arrival remains constant.
Here come the gold freaks (Score:3, Insightful)
Aluminum (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Aluminum (Score:5, Funny)
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Virgin brides (Score:2, Offtopic)
Source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VBB9D00&show_article=1 [breitbart.com]
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A link to a discussion and some context (Score:2)
But... (Score:5, Funny)
OK totally OT I admit, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, maybe I have been lucky before but that's a first for me. Also possibly the beginning of the end as a
Bad, BAD
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Companies often forget how important it is to invest in their image... please
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Plural of abacus (Score:3, Informative)
Richard Stallman's keynote chat at AbacusWorld (Score:3, Interesting)
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Isn't the secret to deal in collector's items (Score:4, Funny)
Or cultural information (Score:2)
Theory of relativity and economics (Score:2)
The theory of general relativity clearly proves that my sole experience on a hot stove even if for a minute can seem like an hour, while a friday romping with my GF those wonderful 30 mins would seem like 1 minute to me.
So, an external view and perspective of time is essential to calculate interest and charges.
The crew can think it took them only 1 day, but the the parties involved it meant waiting 11 days.
Take my example for instance: i thought m
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And FYI, i do get it about 4 times a week, much more than the average slashdotter.
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check the references (Score:5, Informative)
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(As a physicist who took a *lot* of undergraduate courses, and has maintained a continuing interest, in economics I found this paper hilarious.)
Maximizing profits? (Score:2)
Local investment: -long-term investments in variety of domains and countries, 100% of the capital.
Go there and back, collect percentage.
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Assuming I don't have my physics
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But, if we could somehow build a spaceship full of computers, we programmed those computers to 'solve all of humanities probblems' and accelerated them really quickly, then they would
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And, of course, in "The restaurant at the end of the universe", by douglas adams, in which patrons pay for their extravagent meals by depositing 1 penny at compound interest before travelling billions of years into the future to the restatrant.
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The "rich" are those with large w
In the future one or two things will have value (Score:2, Insightful)
2. Knowledge of what can be done with said elements.
When you have post human super AI and nano-tech then the cost of making things is zero once the elemental materials and energy are accounted for, that folds into just elements because energy is derived from elements (fusion or fission feed stock)
Knowledge can travel at light speed, or perhaps faster if quantum coherence becomes usable over interstellar distances, then the coherence of particle p
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Intersteller delivery...what a headache (Score:3, Funny)
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Interstellar Trade? On it! (Score:2)
My favourite quote (Score:2)
this is silly (Score:2)
I don't care what you do with the goods or how much you age in the time I age. If I loan you money, all I care about is that the payments are in my bank account regularly according to my time.
It's funny how much cost affects scifi ideas (Score:2)
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Re:Figure 2 is really informative (Score:4, Insightful)
If the transporters were "traveling salesmen" who flew around the galaxy buying and selling, they would need to be both long-lived and long-sighted since the demand for product X is entirely dependent upon time. Let's say they were selling a brand new Earth. 6000 years ago, such a thing would not have been necessary, while today it would be quite attractive at the right price. How could those beings know and prepare such a product 6000 years in the past in anticipation of demand 6000 years into the future? It wouldn't be trade so much as gambling.
Re:Figure 2 is really informative (Score:5, Funny)
The buyer? Well, he dresses all in white, has a big white beard, talks out of burning bushes...
Hmm (Score:2)
An old guy dressing in white, playing with fire, and hiding in bushes, sounds more like a mentally disturbed person than the almighty Creator.
That or Moses spent a little too much time in the sun...
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Also, there's the problem that $1 today is worth more than $1 delivered in 10 years, how much more depend on your deprecation-rate, but even at miniscule deprecation (which would only be possible in a stagnant economy) long time-periods means that the trade must be monumentally profitable for it to be worthwhile.
If there exists a place where gold is $1/lb, shipping it to earth for a shipping-cost of $0 is still
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interstellar mining operations where the crew went out on multi-year tours, lessening the effects of time with deep sleep/hibernation.
i beleive it was called 'aliens' and revolved around the working day of one 'lt. ripley' aboard the cargo/mining ship 'the nostromo'.
a difficult hitch-hiking insect problem too IIRC.
anyway, it was an earth -> deep space -> earth round trip over a pro
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I seem to recall that the medical research was a little sloppy too.
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The time taken to travel in the reference frame of the ship might be short enough to make trade worthwhile.
The best novel I've read that considers interstellar trade seriously is Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The only items proposed as valuable enough for trade are techn
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The only items proposed as valuable enough for trade are technologies and crewmembers
This is not entirely true. What about art? What is it worth to ship say an original painting across light years of space? A shit load comes to mind but it might be worth that to someone to have an original Leonid Afremov. For some people a copy won't do but only the real thing.
Then there might be some "mystical" compound or element that might not exist in the earth system. Say naquadah or Q-40. How much would it be worth to ship something like that? Of course common scientific sense says there is
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Of course common scientific sense says there is no such thing as "mystical" compounds or elements out there but you never can tell.
SCOInterstellar. Give us money and we'll all get rich.
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They could be dealers of antiques and antiquities, which usually become more valuable as time passes.
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Then the traveling salesman solution could be possible in that, if "unibtainium wishalloy" is not needed in one place, all they would do is to pack up and go to the next planet in their trade route. Chances are they would sell or barter something in every stop. Since the time outside the spaceship would not be on the same scales as the time inside it, every trade would have to be decided on the spot
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"It w
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Failure of imagination? (Score:4, Interesting)
So... you're allowing the trader's society to have sufficient technology and resources to accelerate a shipload of titanium to virtually c, to navigate across instellar voids, and then decelerate again... but you also think that society will not have conquered aging?
That seems far-fetched to me.
And of course, once aging becomes an outpatient condition, then a species' horizon is going open wide again. Thinking in terms of centuries or millenia will not be uncommon.
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I think you missed a possibility. You're thinking of the ship owner in terms of a person. Not many ships are owned by a person, but by a corporation, a company. Corporations have no inherent lifespan, so the owner could easily still be active at the end of the trip.
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Re:Figure 2 is really informative (Score:5, Insightful)
Second -- I'm not sure that a transaction that takes longer to complete than the life of any trader is necessarily impossible. People make investments they know will outlast them, largely because they hope to sell to somebody younger when they need the money. If I set cargo in motion that will return a $100 million payment in 100 years, I know that I'm not going to live long enough to ever see the return. But, in 50 years I can probably sell the right to the value of the cargo for $5 to $20 million, depending on interest rates (see present discounted value [wikipedia.org]). Some young whippersnapper (or an institution with a long horizon, or somebody else who hopes to trade again) would be happy to take the deal. It doesn't matter that I'll personally never see the dividends; if the payment down the line is certain enough then somebody will be happy to buy it from me.
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Oh exploitable (Score:5, Funny)
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Investments which outlast the investors... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is largely just a pointy headed clarification: interstellar trade would be impossible for a host of other reasons. We'll start with "There is nobody to trade with, and finding somebody to trade with would require the 12th century Catholic Church making a deal with Microsoft on behalf of the 28th century Catholic church, without of course knowing that Microsoft exists, what form it takes, or what it values."
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It gets better.
Now, I have a bit of land where I have planted a small forrest (3000 m - a very small forrest).
Consider one my mighty oaks out there (barely taller than me at this point).
In 200 years time it will be mature and can at a price of p. But that means it can be sold "on the root" in 199 years time at a price of p(1-r), where r denotes interest.
Or in general in 200 - n years time at a price of p(1-r)^n. That is, it has a value today of p(1-r)^200
The point is (and I think it's akin to the
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Sure it's easy to estimate the value of an oak tree you plant today. All you have to do is estimate the price of the oak tree in 200 years, and the interest rate over that same period. Straightforward.
Err, wait. Do you think there might be a risk of fire? You had better estimate that, as well, and discount the present value by the risk of it burning to the ground. And, I guess drought, as well, now that I think about it. Maybe disease. What if oaks become so rare that a future government nationalizes all o
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Uncommon? The average lifespan of majority of modern companies is 10 years. In fact, companies that last longer than 100 years is quite rare.
People may look at companies like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Apple but those major companies are actually quite lucky compared to the thousands of companies that go belly up or merge or get divested every year.
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How much did you invest to get those $100 million ? If we assume that a bank pays, say, 2% interest annually, you could end up with $100 million in a 100 years with an initial investment of just $14 milli
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Re:Figure 2 is really informative (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed I've always thought that that's the way the Federation really worked in Star Trek. All the feel good stuff we see is just propaganda from inside the system like Starship Troopers was. If you really were a primitive species then the Enterprise would arrive for peaceful contact and leave. But it would send your coordinates and description of your planetary defences (i.e. none worth mentioning) back to the Federation. A bit later swarms of starships would arrive and your planet could be turned into more starships and any survivors could be reprogrammed to serve on them, which doesn't seem a very skilled job. People seem curiously inhuman too. My explanation is that they're not really people. Physically they are mostly human with a few aliens, but socially they are more like insects in a hive. They follow orders without question and work without payment and show little concern for their individual interests or safety. If they'd been programmed to do their job without any choice in the matter it would all make sense.
It explains why they don't have money, or politics, or arguments of any sort. In the best 1984 style of course they criticise the Borg for behaving like this because it's always useful to have an enemy. I suspect that it's not really necessary anymore of course since their drones have long since lost even the possibility even considering that the system they are in is anything other than totally benign.
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Did anybody notice... (Score:3, Funny)
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Yup. Obviously *temporal* trade is where the money is.
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This could be off of course, the last time I read that paper was around 10 years from now.
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That said, my estimation of Mr. Krugman has jumped considerably after reading this article. I hope his sense of humor and whimsy has not left him.
He'll need it in the coming decades.