What do Pentapods do with money?

[SpaceBadger]

Much of the Pentapod interaction with humanity seems to be commercial. We get details of lots of products made by Pentapods for human markets, many successful products, some not so much. Pentapods are selling this stuff to humans and getting paid in human money: Livres, dollars, Euros, whatever.

What do the Pentapods do with all of their profits?

Human money won't be much good in the Pentapod home systems, so they wouldn't be shipping it home. They must be buying something with it in human space, where the money is a store of value and measure for exchange.

Are they buying human products to ship home? If so, what and why?

Are they buying raw materials to ship home?

Are they buying stock in human corporations, or maybe real estate on human worlds?

 

[BMonnery]

Remember, the Pentapods don't really "do" technology. What they want is the things they can't make themselves. Laser rifles, mining robots, computers, stutterwarps, composites materials, metals, electronics and the whole gamult of modern technology sentient oceanic coral never developed.

 

[LemnOc]

It strikes me that among the several things that would be incomprehensible to aliens about humans (as opposed to, y'know, the more common reverse) would be the concepts and attitudes about money, particularly in its abstract.

The usury; interest-bearing currency, particularly issued by the State; stocks, bonds and tranches; deeds and margins; hoarding and goldbuggery; arcane monetary policy; competitive economic theory, etc., etc. Especially all the morality and moralizing that circulates alongside money. Even private profit might seem a bit peculiar to most of the aliens of 2300AD. But it's all very important, one might say central, to us humans.

I mean, almost everything we think about money is an abstraction and a convention of some kind, almost a religion. Aliens could easily master the conventions without understanding (or caring) a thing about the underlying smart-monkey assumptions.

It is fun to think about how crazy this would all seem.

 

[LemnOc]

Remember, the Pentapods don't really "do" technology. What they want is the things they can't make themselves. Laser rifles, mining robots, computers, stutterwarps, composites materials, metals, electronics and the whole gamult of modern technology sentient oceanic coral never developed.

Related to what BMonnery notes, you might think about the Pentapods as akin to Niven's Puppeteers, who used their extensive hoards of cash mostly as instruments of [human] control and manipulation.

 

[epicenter00]

In my view, the Pentapods are creating intentional interdependence between humans and Pentapods. To do this, they trade us goods and they buy goods we offer. It is within the knowledge and ability of both species to do the things the other offers them on their own. This is a voluntary dependence. They do this to encourage and sustain peaceful relations between humans and Pentapods, giving them a good excuse to break the ice when meeting humans by discussing "business" as well as show humans that Pentapods are willing to "play ball" with the humans in the fashion of "when in Rome, do as the Romans."