Non OTU: Galactic economics

[Adam Dray]

How does this really work?

I'm envisioning an ATU with NAFAL expansion to Earth-like planets around Sol. Once the planet is reached via NAFAL means, a sungate is installed and instantaneous sun-to-sun travel is possible.

Let's say those sungates cost $1 billion to make and $100 billion to send to a nearby star.

Why do people do it? I mean, after the first few stars, does the sheen of "because it's there" wear off?

What is the economic drive?

Population pressure

My first thought is population pressure. Given declining world population growth (it's a little over 1% now but is getting smaller), we're looking at population doubling every 70-100 years. If that stays constant, that doesn't really beg for rapid colonization of other planets.

If cloning and life extension and other factors increase the effective population growth to 5% (a really high number), that's a double in population every 14 years. Maybe that's enough pressure to expand. I'm not sure mankind can keep that up for a century, though.

Raw materials

Increased population means increased demand for stuff. The asteroid belts and outer planets contain a billion times the material that's on Earth. I figure that would keep Earth busy for a long time.

Why go to Proxima Centauri for platinum if your back yard is full of it?

Organic materials

But what if all these nearby exoplanets turn out to not only be Earthlike, but also fully populated with non-sentient life (flora and fauna)? This is a giant unexplored ecosystem full of new opportunities for scientific discovery in the way the Amazon jungle is. New organic compounds and such, creating a New Organic Renaissance for the pharma and chemicals industries. Maybe there are trillions of dollars of opportunities here.

But what about demand?

This is all supply. It sounds like a future with cheap material, cheap production, high supply, and low prices. Who is going to buy all of this stuff?

I see initial deflation, initial jaunts into "post-scarcity" economic territory. What does that do to society? When does exponential population growth surpass material and energy supply?

Will companies stockpile stuff and create artificial scarcity, the way it's done in, say, the diamond industry (or even in the gas and oil industry)?

 

[wellis]

Could there also be a possible pride thing going on between the nations or grouls? Like they and those before them tried to settle a bunch of star systems as a means of saying "I own more stuff than you?"

 

[kilemall]

Missing a whole lot of other reasons.


Cultural/religious escape into a New World to get away from oppression and do their thing.


Missionary impulse to 'save' the aliens or wayward humans and incidentally profit by them (conquistador).




Genetic research wonderland is definitely in the cards (and biotech should be rampant and ubiquitous in that sort of setting), but also think of unique and cheaper processes that can be done in different atmos (completely different economics in chemical engineering not to mention different rocks and therefore ores).


Moving out to outbreed the mother culture and come back and retake the home planet.


Provide gating to other races and civilizations so you get trade and interaction advantages.


Keep spreading humanity out so no one disaster kills us all.

 

[Adam Dray]

Great suggestions!

Most of them assume that normal folks can make sungates and build a fleet of spaceships. The sungates are pretty difficult to make. Most of the bits of spaceships are easy to make, but it's hard to build ships that can survive a 0.2c trip across 7 LY (sungates have to travel NAFAL to their destination).

I guess a megacorporation might "go rogue" and try to scoop up a planet before a government got it, but then they're basically a government, too, and they're probably at war now.

So fleeing for religious reasons, a la Pilgrims, doesn't work as well in my setting. Likewise, there aren't aliens.

Is "different atmosphere" really that big of a deal? Is spending billions of dollars to open up a new planet, get colonists there, build infrastructure there, etc. cheaper than, you know, just putting up some kind of big bubble on Earth and changing the atmosphere inside it?

Once you're on a few different planets, is a disaster likely to kill everyone? I guess a nearby star could go supernova, but we'd know well in advance.

 

[mike wightman]

When are sungates developed tech wise?

Do the solies in your game achieve cheap fusion power plants and maneuver drives for their spaceships a few decades prior to sungate technology? A century or two before?


TL9 in classic Traveller is a game changer for space industry - getting into space with the maneuver drive and fusion power plants makes even our real world near future solutions for cheaper space access and insystem ships redundant.


A couple of hundred years with said technologies and space industry would be thriving, space colony stations, asteroid settlements and bases on the Moon, Mars, even Mercury.

Several generations would have been born and raised off Earth. Such people would be the pool of explorers for extrasolar colonies, since NAFL on a sungate constructor ship wouldn't be all that different to day to day life on an O'Neil cylinder.

As to why they would go in the first place - all it takes is a billionaire with the ambition to be the first to settle a distant system. Hands up everyone who would volunteer to go.

<raises hand>

 

[Adam Dray]

When are sungates developed tech wise?

Do the solies in your game achieve cheap fusion power plants and maneuver drives for their spaceships a few decades prior to sungate technology? A century or two before?

They have cheap fusion and Em-drives, no jump drive. Sungates effectively are wormhole travel, but require NAFAL installation of paired gates.

I'm flexible about when they get TL9 if it makes the economics work.

A couple of hundred years with said technologies and space industry would be thriving, space colony stations, asteroid settlements and bases on the Moon, Mars, even Mercury.

Several generations would have been born and raised off Earth. Such people would be the pool of explorers for extrasolar colonies, since NAFL on a sungate constructor ship wouldn't be all that different to day to day life on an O'Neil cylinder.

As to why they would go in the first place - all it takes is a billionaire with the ambition to be the first to settle a distant system. Hands up everyone who would volunteer to go.

<raises hand>

Sure. That gets us to the first colonized system and maybe the third.

Why do people keep doing this? Exponential population growth (70-100 year doubling) only pushes people out at a slow, century rate.

Are you saying that the rest of the impetus to explore new planets comes from billionaires who want their own planets?

 

[wellis]

They have cheap fusion and Em-drives, no jump drive. Sungates effectively are wormhole travel, but require NAFAL installation of paired gates.

I'm flexible about when they get TL9 if it makes the economics work.

I thought they relied primarily on fission?

And is the EM drive akin to Traveller grav/maneuver drives or are there differences there?

Sure. That gets us to the first colonized system and maybe the third.

Why do people keep doing this? Exponential population growth (70-100 year doubling) only pushes people out at a slow, century rate.

Are you saying that the rest of the impetus to explore new planets comes from billionaires who want their own planets?

What about groups, communities, or organizations that pool money together to send off a sungate somewhere so they can call dibs on the planets to colonize there?

 

[kilemall]

What about groups, communities, or organizations that pool money together to send off a sungate somewhere so they can call dibs on the planets to colonize there?

The urge to build their own paradise is strong, thats what I was getting at with the pilgrims.


Or of course, space Mormons.

 

[Straybow]

Let's say those sungates cost $1 billion to make and $100 billion to send to a nearby star.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. And then you find out a billion isn't a billion any more.


It takes two billion bucks for a B-2 stealth bomber. When you say "sungate" I'm thinking a megaconstruct that would be planetary GDP scale, 100+ trillion. When you say STL travel to another star, I'm thinking that cost would be comparable. We've never made anything that can function for decades without external support. All our high tech stuff needs constant attention at thousands of dollars per operational hour per ton and a full-time expert maintenance crew.

 

[aramis]

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. And then you find out a billion isn't a billion any more.


It takes two billion bucks for a B-2 stealth bomber. When you say "sungate" I'm thinking a megaconstruct that would be planetary GDP scale, 100+ trillion. When you say STL travel to another star, I'm thinking that cost would be comparable. We've never made anything that can function for decades without external support. All our high tech stuff needs constant attention at thousands of dollars per operational hour per ton and a full-time expert maintenance crew.

The Voyager probes are still functional... except that their power curve is below full operation levels. Pioneer 10 is thought to be still semi-functional, but is beyond contact range. All three are over 40 years old...

 

[epicenter00]

I have some serious doubts about this 'post scarcity' economy in many of the forms that are discussed. I think it's possible, but many of these ideas feel a lot like those old 1950s films where they claimed with fission power, we'd have electricity "too cheap to meter." (Mind you, I'm sure that is possible, even today - but with market-based economies you couldn't pay for those reactors or their upkeep if it what was being produced was too cheap to meter.)

However, at the same time, I do wonder if humans will ever feel it necessary to leave our solar system for the reasons you describe (presumably until Sol starts to act up as it grows older, but that's so far in the future it as might well as be 'never' as far as humans are concerned). It's exceedingly unlikely we'll find a shirtsleeves world similar enough to our planet to settle. If any real estate in another solar system requires a spacesuit or domes or whatever to live on, why bother going there? We can do that right here.

But, I have some ideas why people would want to leave the solar system, even so:

1) Economy. Since the industrial revolution has developed, human development has been constrained primarily by resources. People will not produce more than can at least recoup the costs of production. There are examples of "resource gluts" in human history - but these are always temporary, until the markets adjust to the new supply. At some point, I think economies of scale will be able to react almost instantly to increased supply; the more we gather, the more we want because we can make stuff with it then we'll need more. We'll always find a use for stuff no matter how fast we gather it. At scales like that, we might exhaust our solar system's resources, or more likely, we'll decide we don't want to convert Mars or Jupiter into building material for our Dyson Swarm, the stuff in the Scattered Disc isn't worth the energy to gather, and we'll decide we're going to use those sungates to get stuff from elsewhere where it's closer the star so we can leech power from the star while doing our work.

2) Alliance Wars. Humans don't like to get along with each other beyond our "tribe." We might overcome this at some point, but what if we don't? These lofty ideas of Dyson Swarms or whatever assume that humans can be trusted to get along at some level. But what if we don't? It'd only take one "Solar System War I" between segments of the Dyson Swarm and the outer planets and so on to make a bunch of people decide maybe the solar system (the good parts) are too crowded and go puttering off to another star to gather their free solar power in the Life Zone there, far away from alliance politics of the Sol system, is the way to go.

3) Alliance Politics. Imagine a future where the entire inner solar system is more or less divvied up, either by groups exploiting it or perhaps set aside by treaty to be left untouched (or likely, both with some parts being exploited, others being kept). Yet, the solar system is divided into different rival groups. One hares off to set up a settlement to feed resources back the Sol system (while many are stuck in some romantic American view of colonies going independent, our Earth shows us there's plenty of cases of ways to set up "colonies" where the people there have no desire to be independent). The others realize the extra wealth this alliance is getting is problematic. Everyone else follows suit. It only takes one to do this, and everyone's going to follow suit.

4) Power. Yeah, fusion, Traveller's baby exists. But solar power is simply there for the taking and it's so easy to gather. But what happens on the day we actually finish our Dyson Swarm? Oops. We need more power for whatever project, maybe making the computer that we're using to solve how we can get around the Heat Death of the universe or whatever. Regardless, we want more solar power. So we hop off to other solar systems to build there, gathering the power there instead. In fact, humanity might feel it is a philosophical imperative - all those stars, blazing all this power and it's doing nothing.

 

[Adam Dray]

Thanks for the ideas, epicenter00. A lot to chew on there.

At some point, exponential birth rates (doubling every 70-100 years) forces us to move somewhere. If we expand outward at that rate, we will cross the 100-planet mark within 500-700 years. Is it easier to just curb human growth rate than to colonize other earthlike planets? Is it easier to just build arcologies on the ocean or on the moon or on Mars?

How many times does Earth population need to double before we really have a crisis on the planet over space and resources?

Also, this assumes that we're finding earthlike planets that have similar amounts of colonizable surface. A water world offers little. A rocky superearth might offer 10 times the surface area of Earth; that can absorb overpopulation a lot longer than a planet comparable in size to Earth.

 

[Adam Dray]

When you say "sungate" I'm thinking a megaconstruct that would be planetary GDP scale, 100+ trillion. When you say STL travel to another star, I'm thinking that cost would be comparable.

Sungates are 7- to 15-meter rings using edge technology involving superconductors and magnets. Each ring is quantum-entanglement-paired, molecule-by-molecule (where it counts), with its twin. They're not megastructures. They do use a lot of Thulium-169, but a modern world can produce enough metal for a new sungate in a month or two.

The STL travel for the sungate typically takes 5-10 years, depending on distance (3-7 ly). Missions beyond 7 ly seem to have diminishing success rates. Shielding from cosmic dust is the main problem that abends missions. Because of ansible technology, mission leaders know immediately when the mission fails and can send the next gateship.

Maybe it costs $1T to install a new sungate factory on a world, but I doubt it. You can ship the Thulium-169 in from existing mining operations, even through a sungate. Since sungates decohere when they pass through another sungate, they can only travel STL. So once you get to a new star, you start building a new sungate factory to reach the next star. If that costs $1T, why do you bother?

 

[whartung]

4) Power. Yeah, fusion, Traveller's baby exists. But solar power is simply there for the taking and it's so easy to gather. But what happens on the day we actually finish our Dyson Swarm? Oops. We need more power for whatever project, maybe making the computer that we're using to solve how we can get around the Heat Death of the universe or whatever. Regardless, we want more solar power. So we hop off to other solar systems to build there, gathering the power there instead. In fact, humanity might feel it is a philosophical imperative - all those stars, blazing all this power and it's doing nothing.

There was a fun analysis about energy use several years ago:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

 

[wellis]

Sungates are 7- to 15-meter rings using edge technology involving superconductors and magnets. Each ring is quantum-entanglement-paired, molecule-by-molecule (where it counts), with its twin. They're not megastructures. They do use a lot of Thulium-169, but a modern world can produce enough metal for a new sungate in a month or two.

The STL travel for the sungate typically takes 5-10 years, depending on distance (3-7 ly). Missions beyond 7 ly seem to have diminishing success rates. Shielding from cosmic dust is the main problem that abends missions. Because of ansible technology, mission leaders know immediately when the mission fails and can send the next gateship.

Maybe it costs $1T to install a new sungate factory on a world, but I doubt it. You can ship the Thulium-169 in from existing mining operations, even through a sungate. Since sungates decohere when they pass through another sungate, they can only travel STL. So once you get to a new star, you start building a new sungate factory to reach the next star. If that costs $1T, why do you bother?

Considering you've mentioned before your setting having some gravitics, is there some sort of gravitic shield, in addition to ice and other ablstive materials, that can be used to shield the sungate probe ships as they're deployed to different star systems?

 

[Adam Dray]

Considering you've mentioned before your setting having some gravitics, is there some sort of gravitic shield, in addition to ice and other ablstive materials, that can be used to shield the sungate probe ships as they're deployed to different star systems?

Yeah, but it doesn't work as well as you'd like at very high speeds.

 

[Adam Dray]

There was a fun analysis about energy use several years ago:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

That's very helpful. I hadn't realized that energy consumption is ^10 where population is ^2. That's huge.

If the Main Sequence universe is weirdly full of Earthlike planets with a diverse biosphere, one major reason to go there is to extract fossil fuels, which are still a great way to port energy around (if you can't get fusion power).

At what point is it easier for a Kardashev-I civilization to go find another planet than to expand into the solar system to farm solar power as a Kardashev-II civilization?

 

[wellis]

Yeah, but it doesn't work as well as you'd like at very high speeds.

But can it still provide some shielding? Maybe weaken any impacts enough that is slows down the degredation of the ablative shielding on the probes so they can possibly travel further than 7 LY?

 

[Adam Dray]

The thermodynamic argument builds the case that around 2300, we're starting to cook our planet at a very alarmingly increasing rate, and people can't ignore it anymore. If it takes 20 years to open the first sungate to Alpha Proxima, that's when people start to invest in that solution, rather than suffer brownouts and other "zero-heat-growth" laws.

 

[wellis]

The thermodynamic argument builds the case that around 2300, we're starting to cook our planet at a very alarmingly increasing rate, and people can't ignore it anymore. If it takes 20 years to open the first sungate to Alpha Proxima, that's when people start to invest in that solution, rather than suffer brownouts and other "zero-heat-growth" laws.

But wouldn't emigration to other planets and places innthe Solar System ease some of that issue? Before sending off a sungate to Alpha Proxima I mean.