People discuss whether or not trade between worlds will be possible in the future, in
doing so they overlook that maybe it already is.
So today we will be looking at Interplanetary Trade, and we'll be reviewing some of the
concepts we see a lot in science fiction and trying to see how practical and realistic
those actually are, along with what the alternatives might be for when they aren't.
We will also take some time to look at interstellar trade too, and the special difficulties it
imposes on us, especially if we have no access to faster than light travel or communication.
Though we will talk about how those would affect things too.
Trade is the lifeblood of humanity, it's how we've exchanged ideas and even bloodlines
for untold centuries.
The usual alternative has been warfare, and most folks would agree the former is typically
preferable to the latter.
We have discussed a lot of the difficulties with Interplanetary Warfare so maybe we should
start with the difficulties of Interplanetary Trade.
The first difficulty is that it is interplanetary.
Right now if you wanted to ship a package to the Martians it would cost you somewhere
around $10,000 a kilogram to get it there and that is being very generous and optimistic.
That's usually the launch cost just to get into low orbit, though that's an important
point to mention from the outset.
Most of the cost of moving between planets is getting off the planet in the first place,
after that it only costs a lot more to move stuff to another planet if you want to get
there fast or if it doesn't have an atmosphere to help you break your speed with.
Now there isn't much we would be willing to ship for $10,000 a kilogram, but there
are some things.
Gold is generally valued at a few times that, as are a few other precious metals.
Various low half-life fissionable materials like plutonium are way more valuable per kilogram
than that.
Key fusion isotopes like deuterium, tritium, and helium-3 aren't cheap either.
That's just in terms of raw materials, basic elements or their isotopes for mining.
I'm not sure how much various processors and chips run on a dollar per kilogram basis
but I'd imagine many of them exceed that $10,000 per kilogram price point too.
Of course there are no chip factories on the moon at the moment, nor anyone looking to
buy them, but that's why so much of the focus in discussing space exploration is on
raw material harvesting from asteroids.
Right now, if we saw a house-sized stack of gold ingots on the moon or an asteroid, it
would indeed be profitable for us to go get them.
And yes, even if the commodity market took a dive, since while a sudden influx of moon
gold might crash prices it won't crash them below the actual cost to go get the stuff.
At least not for longer than it takes some analyst to notice such trips are costing us,
say, $20,000 a kilogram for all costs to launch, land, mine and return home and gold prices
just dropped to $19,000, and he starts screaming 'Buy!
Buy now!'
So don't think of space-based trade as something limited only to the distant future and a few
low-earth orbit projects like launching satellites.
It is already in the realm of viable economics if just barely.
Nonetheless our interest is more in the distant future when there's actually places with
people to send stuff to and from.
Still in terms of the evolution of trade in space from now till then, I'd say you have
two types of markets.
The first is in shipping home very valuable elements as genuine commerce, bringing home
gold and platinum from some asteroid.
The second is in getting the contract to ship stuff to a colony or outpost.
You need to eat to run a mine, and breathe, unless you are a robot, and to be honest you
probably are, but if you're not or if you are a scientist at some countries outpost
on the Moon or Mars you do need food and water and air and what you can't make there needs
to be shipped in even if it costs $10,001 per kilogram, $10,000 to ship a liter bottle
of water and $1 for that bottle.
Scarcity is a relative term.
Now as technology improves we expect the cost per kilogram to keep dropping, though as technology
improves the quantity of stuff you actually need to send probably keeps dropping too,
but it is also worth remembering that the most expensive place in the solar system to
ship from is Earth.
Okay, technically the Sun and all the gas giants but nobody is going to be living on
those, at least not in the early days.
Earth has a big gravity well and a thick atmosphere, which makes getting off of it dreadfully expensive.
Though that atmosphere does make it much easier to get stuff back to it.
If we imagined a fully developed asteroid belt, where they could make or acquire their
fuel and rocket parts as cheaply as on Earth, it would actually be dirt cheap to ship back
and forth between all of those.
The Asteroid Belt is not a particularly dense place like we often see in movies, most decently
sized asteroids are further apart out there than the Earth and the Moon, yet they have
no gravity to speak of and it's a case where you might intentionally burn way more fuel
than you need to in order to get from Asteroid A to Asteroid B faster simply because the
distances are great enough that your cost in supplies and maintenance and not using
your ship for other things would be higher than your fuel costs.
We talked about this a bit more in the Asteroid Mining episode but in summary form that is
big chunk of the reason many of us foresee the Asteroid Belt as a better first step for
colonization than the planets.
On Earth, the costs of shipping goods is fairly low, but the cost increases depending on the
distance something has to travel.
The costs of shipping materials around the system will probably be more a function of
the effort required to get those goods and materials out of whatever gravity well they
are located on.
This means that the cost of getting materials from planets are likely to be considerably
more expensive than getting those same materials from an asteroid, where the gravity is much
weaker.
Time is also a factor.
Most projects are time-sensitive and if it is going to take decades to get materials
from the outer system, it is probably not economically feasible.
Relatively speaking, the asteroid belt is in our neighbourhood.
The key concept there is that you can ship stuff like food and water around the asteroid
belt economically, from inside the belt anyway.
You aren't just limited to stuff like gold.
And you can ship that home to Earth pretty cheaply too.
It might cost tens of thousands of dollars to get a kilogram of ship out to an asteroid
but it doesn't cost that much to send a kilogram home if you can make the fuel there,
because again that asteroid has virtually no gravity pulling stuff back toward it while
Earth has an awful lot of it helping pull cargo toward it.
Beyond those precursors of trade that we just mentioned though, real interplanetary trade
has to wait till there's places off Earth with people living there wanting stuff and
making stuff.
You can have trade then even if you are still limited to chemical rockets, but you won't
have anyone to trade with because you are not going to have great big space colonies
getting setup when you are still using refined kerosene to send ships to and from.
We will add one more caveat to that though.
We talked about a lot of alternatives to getting off the planet in the Upward Bound series,
many of which can get you into Earth Orbit for costs not much worse than flying to another
continent.
If those are setup you can move around the solar system on chemical fuels a lot cheaper,
but once you have a pretty big space-based infrastructure in place you are going to be
able to take a second look at nuclear propulsion because you can make bigger ships if you are
building them in Orbit and people won't worry as much about them having radioactive
materials on board if they aren't close to Earth.
The specific economics of interplanetary trade are going to be entirely dependent on how
much the ships cost in terms of speed and fuel and time and construction, but we can
see four basic categories of trade.
The first is big bulky durable cargo, where you want to go slow to save fuel.
The second is high value trade items, which either have an expiration date or are sufficiently
valuable by weight that your shipping costs are trivial.
The third is passengers, where typically time trumps efficiency.
These three are pretty familiar, we do them on Earth all the time and it's why you don't
get ten tons of topsoil delivered to your house by FedEx, and why most passenger services
don't care about passenger weight much, because the costs associated to moving a person
mostly are not about their weight.
We have a fourth type too though, and that is information.
Now that typically is not something you ship, though there's exceptions, but this is not
an episode on Interplanetary Shipping, it's an episode on Interplanetary Trade.
I've mentioned in the Outward Bound series how Mars and Venus and Saturn's moon Titan
all have stuff they want that the others have and that this includes the Asteroid Belt too.
I left Earth out of that though, noting that Earth does not want anything those places
have, except precious metals, and I also mentioned today that Earth is one of the most expensive
places to ship from.
Once you have a fully developed solar economy, one in which at least a few percent of the
population does not live on or near Earth, and possibly the supermajority of them don't,
the Earth has a bit of a problem with that big gravity well.
Now if the various engines or orbital launch megastructures are good enough that won't
matter anymore than whether or not a modern manufacturing city is by a place with good
trade winds, but if it does, Earth still has one very valuable commodity to sell in exchange
for whatever it wants to import home and that is information, entertainment, and so on.
It's going to be a long time before Earth is not the place producing the supermajority
of science, let alone movies and novels and new games.
Early on, Earth is exporting everything, because it is the only source for anything.
Later it ships stuff too complex to manufacture locally, at least economically, and eventually
it ends up exporting data.
Now an empty ship is an empty ship so odds are even if fuel is a big factor in not wanting
to export much from Earth you'd probably still do it a lot, so long as fuel isn't
crushingly expensive, but by and large we'd expect data to be Earth's big product.
Okay, we should talk travel times, currency, and 3D printing.
Let's hit printing first.
3D printers are a wonder, they offer us the possibility of being able to manufacture almost
anything without needing an assembly line.
They do not affect three of our types of trade, bulk raw materials, passengers, or data.
They do have a big impact on manufactured goods though.
Your ideal asteroid colony of a few thousand people want to be able to grow all their own
food, recycle all their water and air, and manufacture all their stuff, or at least the
replacement parts for maintaining most of it.
If they have something to export they may opt to buy things they could make there if
they can get them cheaper elsewhere or simply use the people or robots making them for instead
producing what they export in larger volumes.
As I've mentioned in the past, you don't want to think of 3D printers as magic wands,
not only is there stuff they can't print or can't print quickly, the value of them
is mostly their ability to produce things without an assembly line, not better than
an assembly line.
If that changes, this sector of interplanetary trade is going to shrink a lot.
You only are going to trade manufactured goods when you can bulk produce stuff significantly
cheaper than some printer in someone's house can and that there is also sufficient demand
for.
Odds are for some things that will stay true and for others it won't, so that you probably
will have some trade in manufactured goods.
Again information trade, bulk materials, and passengers will be unaffected by printers,
unless you can full blown print an adult human down to their memories, but that's basically
teleportation and a topic for another day.
Interestingly though, this means food is something you can probably trade.
It does not take as much plant biomass to recycle the air we breathe as it does to feed
a person, and if you are using that air recycling biomass for growing stuff like lettuce or
other produce that doesn't keep well then you have a market for shipping food that does
stores well around to places that don't want to grow all their own, or for that matter
any.
I always tend to assume places will recycle their air with plants because I figure they'd
want some fresh veggies and fruit and something green to look at but you probably would have
a fair number of facilities that just want to do that using air scrubbers and devoting
all their personnel to whatever it is they do there.
Let's talk travel times next because currency is more relevant to interstellar trade and
we'll save that for last.
How long does it take to get from A to B?
Where trade is concerned the answer tends to be exactly as fast as its worth getting
there.
There's two ways of looking at space travel in terms of time and neither of them really
has much to do with actual distance.
Either the whole things is running on available delta-v, how much you can change your speed,
then plotting the shortest trip in terms of time, which often involves nothing like a
straight line, or you've got energy to spare and it's all about acceleration and how
much you can handle.
Timelines for the former tend to be in the years, as you carefully plot out every minimum
cost orbital transfer and slingshot and need to pick your launch windows.
That's okay for trying to move a million tons of nitrogen from Titan to that big O'Neill
Cylinder being built out in the Belt, because they will probably be busy designing and building
the thing for years before people move into it.
On the extreme other end of things if you've got good fusion engines that can produce delta-v
of a couple percent of light speed, delta-v is no longer your issue, it's how fast you
can accelerate depending on both your engine and what your cargo can handle.
For people as passengers that's probably going to be 1-gee tops, though if it is important
you can go higher, and with some technologies a lot higher.
Distance gets deceptive here, when you potentially accelerate halfway there and decelerate the
other half.
This is an incredibly energy wasteful way of traveling but if you've got sturdy fusion
reactors that can run on normal hydrogen, nobody will care, because it's not the cost
of energy that matters it's the cost of hydrogen, the most plentiful stuff in the
Universe.
If that's selling for a $1 a kilogram and someone tells you they can get you to Saturn
in 9 days by burning a thousand kilograms of hydrogen or a month by burning only a hundred,
guess which option most folks will go for, even if the amount of energy used doing it
could run the entire US Power Grid for a month.
When you're doing that constant acceleration game at 1-gee it doesn't take twice as long
to go twice as far.
Getting to the Moon takes less than 4 hours, the Sun is 400 times further away, at 1 AU
or Astronomical Unit, but only takes 20 times longer to get to, 20^2 equaling 400.
You'd get there in just under 3 days, To get to something 4 times further than that
would take just under 6 days, twice as long, for 2^2 or 4 times the distance.
Now the inner planets move a lot in terms of their distance relative to Earth but this
tells us that using the constant 1-gee acceleration and turnover method everything in the inner
solar system out to the Asteroid Belt is reachable from each other in days, a week tops.
The outer planets don't move as much in terms of distance from earth, proportionally,
so Jupiter is 6-7 days, Saturn 9 days, Uranus 13 days, and Neptune 16 days, all plus or
minus some hours.
Now I mentioned earlier that travel times and efforts between nearest asteroids in the
Belt is a lot less, and something similar applies to the collection of Moons the gas
giants all have, that will be important when we get to Colonizing Jupiter later this month.
However channel regulars know that we often talk about developing the solar system way
beyond just settling planets, moons, and asteroids and constructing something called a Dyson
Swarm, see the Dyson Spheres episode for more detail on that.
When discussing those I point out that the image of a densely packed collection of orbital
habitats is almost as inaccurate as the image of a big inverted shell where folks live on
the inside, and that such habitats would be separated by thousands or even hundreds of
thousands of kilometers from each other.
If this is where most folks live, and where most trade goes on, transit is quite quick.
Energy is cheap too since you can in many cases actually have a physical connection
between the habitats with a tether.
It's cheaper than driving a car to the next town and it is an environment where people
could own their own rocket ship that they drove to the neighboring habitat.
There's no air slowing you down so you press the gas pedal, possibly literally since very
little fuel is needed and chemical rockets work just fine in this context and head on
over.
You'd get to a habitat 1000 kilometers away in just ten minutes, doing the constant one-gee
with turnover rate, and reach a maximum speed of about Mach 10.
Needless to say you could save fuel and go slower.
Of course you could go faster, hit 3 or 4 gees.
Doing 4 gees will halve your travel time, it follows that same square root relationship
distance does.
A lot of times you will go slower too, fuel costs in terms of both price and mass will
likely always be an issue and you might find the places you want to travel to don't want
you coming in super-fast.
Keep in mind, all those travel times assume you were slowing down, if you didn't you'd
get there faster and if you used that slow down fuel to speed up more you'd arrive
even faster yet, and even just a passenger vehicle going Mach 10 would hit like it was
full of explosives.
The ones doing interplanetary trips at constant acceleration would hit like an equal weight
of nukes.
And any random bit of space garbage they hit would do the same.
So you could have speed limits inside a solar system and I would tend to bet these would
exist and be under 1% of light speed.
Now we talked a bit about some of the issues with currency, in electronic form, and light
lag issues way back in the Cryptocurrency episode but those are mostly manageable.
You mostly had fraud issues with joint accounts for couples, groups, clones, etc.
It's a bit of bigger issue when we move up to interstellar trade though, especially
if you are limited by the speed of light.
What do you sell between solar systems?
Not manufactured goods, even if 3D printing hasn't obliterated that sector at the interplanetary
scale by the time you're engaging in interstellar trade, it's just not very realistic to imagine
that there'd be any economic advantage of mass production that would translate to those
kind of times and distances.
Information?
Yes, that is just as valid as before, how big the market will be is hard to say, but
there will be one.
Earth ought to do well, or our solar system, in this regard as we are likely to always
be a bit of a center hub for information to flow in and out of even after other systems
are built up, and humanity could easily have a million settled solar systems and still
have 99% of the population living back in our home system, doing almost all the science
for many centuries to come.
Passengers?
Yes those too.
People will want to travel if they can, some might be fine with sending a digital copy
by light speed transmission but many will not be.
Even post-biological beings might not be sanguine about that option, since as we often point
out on this topic, digital mind transfer is not cut and paste, its copy and paste.
How about raw materials?
It is actually viable.
Sending huge bulk freighters between solar systems carrying megatons of metal or even
hydrogen can be done, and if the demand is high enough to justify the cost it might happen.
But what exactly are you paying them with?
What's the money?
Back in the Life in Space Colony series I suggested that an interstellar colony vessel
is almost better employed as a sort of roving factory and people farm, not going to one
system and stopping, but just pausing to drop off most of its passengers and equipment and
taking on more fuel and raw materials.
It then moves on and the remaining folks breed more colonists and spend their time manufacturing
new colonization equipment for the next target system from those raw materials.
A concern one has there with these ships, which we called Gardener Ships, is what the
motivation to continue was.
I mean those ships had crews, and a mission from Earth, but how was Earth paying them?
That's the first Rule of Warfare, make sure your soldiers get paid on time, and it applies
to merchant marine ships and traders too.
If your crews aren't getting paid you probably can't rely on them continuing to do their
jobs.
Earth has the money, no problem, but getting it usefully there is a problem.
Maybe they can have it in an account back home collecting interest?
The same applies for interstellar trade in general, you arrive in a system and you need
to buy stuff for your ship and you need to sell stuff.
Hypothetically you sell it for the local currency and use that to buy stuff but you have no
idea what the selling rate for your cargo will be until you arrive and that's years
off.
You get a message from a nearby system that they need colonists, especially those with
a background in chemistry, and that they'll pay handsomely for them.
You load up interested people, presumably agreeing to split that reward fee to pay for
their passage, and arrive twenty years later only to find out they instituted a new educational
policy to train more chemists and no longer need the ones you brought.
It doesn't even matter that you might get news en route, because unlike interplanetary
ships with fusion engines, interstellar ones do not accelerate the whole way, they mostly
coast.
So once they are en route they are en route.
They can't just slow down and turn around because they only have the fuel to slow down,
they probably have some reserves that might be enough to steer them toward another system
further off in the same general direction but that's it.
These sorts of problems are serious issues with interstellar trade that might prevent
it ever being more than a bit of novelty, though the sheer population size of a solar
system, even one that hasn't gone full Kardashev 2 Dyson Swarm, is enough to support a lot
of novelty and you might still have ships arriving regularly, even if they represented
not a percent of a percent of the gross system economy.
I've never heard anyone satisfactorily overcome these issues, and it's arguably even more
severe when discussing interstellar empires, which we will look at next month, but they
could be solvable.
After all it remains a topic mostly discussed in science fiction and that usually has faster
than light travel or at least communication.
Of course if you do have FTL, Faster Than Light Travel, it makes a big difference.
As would also be the case if you only had FTL communications.
We could do a whole episode just on the various permutations of how trade would work depending
on a given FTL system but a few deserve mention for circumventing the norm.
In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series we only have light speed travel but instant
communication.
This has the interesting effect of allowing essentially all information to be available
anywhere anywhen, same as with the modern internet, which the books mostly predate.
We never want to forget that trade, especially for high tech civilizations, tends to be as
much in information as actual goods.
Also in a civilization which has gone postbiological, you can send a copy of yourself anywhere instantaneously
this way.
Another example that tosses out the normal convention of spaceships plying the space
lanes is wormholes.
The classic theoretical wormhole can't be on a planet because they are insanely massive,
but most fictional portrayals treat it as a simple portal window from point A to B.
Such being the case, there's no need to have them in space when you can just have
them on a planet.
We see an example of that in the Stargate Franchise, but we get another example in Peter
Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga where they aren't portals people walk through but through which
they drive whole freight trains.
They don't even initially have spaceships because they're mostly worthless to them.
We talked about that technology more in the Wormholes episode, but from a trade perspective
you can use wormholes for other things like disposing of garbage or waste heat, or for
providing raw materials or energy by opening a portal up to the molten metal core of another
planet or a star.
That's a point to always remember, we know the kind of Black Swan disruptions we can
get to an economy and civilization in general from a new technology, obvious in hindsight
but totally surprising at the time.
However science fiction is often bad about introducing technologies that have some very
obvious consequences that the writers missed or ignored.
In a Star Trek style Universe with replicators there should be no ships that don't exist
to either move people around or raw materials around, because there's no need for manufacturing
or agriculture, and since there should be no materials only available in one system,
you would not expect any interstellar vessels meant for any purpose other than defense,
exploration, and passenger or colonist carrying.
You also wouldn't expect there to be commercial hub systems or space piracy unless the FTL
system required specific paths, because space is ridiculously huge and while the shortest
distance between two points is a straight line, it is a constantly moving straight line
for interstellar paths and more like a very wide corridor probably several billion kilometers
in diameter, which you can easily widen a whole order of magnitude if you need to worry
about pirates.
Try as I might, I've never been able to figure out a way in which space piracy could
work outside of very specific fictional FTL systems.
There's just no rivers or currents or mountain passes that make an ideal place to both hide
and expect traffic through.
We might revisit interstellar trade more in the future and we will be revisiting interstellar
civilizations next month, but while interstellar trade in anything but information seems dubious
under known physics, it is possible.
And as we've seen today, interplanetary trade certainly is, even with just the technology
we have now or on the near-horizon.
Next week will be exploring interstellar space some more in the Cosmic Ocean, and the week
after that we will be looking at Mega-Earths, artificial planets that dwarf our own homeworld,
and which potentially can be provide more living area than most interstellar empires
we see in fiction.
For alerts when those and other episode come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
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