# Interstellar Commerce **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 11, 2017, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202 "2017-12-11T15:37:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/41 "2017-12-11T22:47:42Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The OP’s question exposes the crumbling pillar on which all sf is based: analogies to Earth history and customs. All space battles are based on WWII movies. All off-planet colonies are based on western movies. All systems of government are based on _Duck Soup_. I have it on very good authority that _Duck Soup_ is a part of the core curriculum at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/42 "2017-12-11T22:58:55Z")
> [@bob\_2](#): > > My WAG would be food. I could imagine a reasonably fertile planet which produced high-quality protein - wheat/corn based maybe - with minimal labour to maintain the machinery. Maybe, but given that the nearest star is 4 light years away, and they faster than light travel ia, so far as we know, theoretically inpossible, I hope they filled up on bread. That’s the thing. Without FTL teavel, you’re not going to have interstellar empires or trade, or even much communication. If we have interstellar communication, it’ll be sticking a bunch of people on a generation ship, pointing them in the direction of a likely star, and then saying goodbye to them, because we’re never going to see them or their descendents again, and probably never hear from them either. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/43 "2017-12-11T23:05:03Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Unless the scenario includes very cheap interstellar travel, then nothing much made from metal or synthesisable chemicals such as plastic is worth shipping, no matter how complex, it’s going to be cheaper to manufacture closer to the market, using local materials. > > And after that, it comes down to ‘naturally-occurring stuff that doesn’t naturally occur everywhere’ - so… I dunno - exotic stuff like gemstones that only form in certain planetary conditions that not every solar system has, or biological materials analogous to timber, ivory, etc - but even then, is it worth hauling it across interstellar distances? Yes, without comparably inexpensive FTP, it won’t work. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/44 "2017-12-11T23:13:39Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > Information could be sent at a higher bandwidth using relay satellites. A few hundred of them between us and Alpha Centauri could do the trick. Which leads to another answer to the OP: > > Relay satellites! > > Send out a big mothership loaded with a bunch of them and have it drop one off here and there along the way. It isn’t clear (to me, at least) how this is advantageous. Setting aside the power limitations they would have for a given mass, if you have a vessel that is capable of deploying “a few hundred” relays across the interstellar space between stars in a relatively short period of time, you may as well just as well send a vessel with the message in it, or send out relay vessels on a regular basis. Any set of relays deployed within the local interstellar neighborhood over a realistic timeframe (hundreds or thousands of years) would almost certainly be obsolete compared to advances in communication technology by the time they were deployed, even if their reliability on those timeframes could be assessed as acceptable. Something I don’t think most people grasp is just how enormous the distance between stars actually is and how much time and energy it would take to travel from one star system to another. The most efficient propulsion systems with any kind of plausible basis (e.g. nuclear fusion) [POST=18236632]would require many decades to send anything from Sol to the nearest star systems and would not be able to carry sufficient propellant to decelerate[/POST]. Without some fundamental revolution in physics, sending anything more than a moderate sized autonomic probe is not plausible, nor is deploying some kind of a interstellar network of cellular repeaters. > [@Voyager](#): > > And all planetary ecologies look like a single state on Earth, or even a single county. Ice planets, jungle planets, desert planets and farm planets drive me bonkers. And of course, nearly all planets have an atmosphere which is easily breathable to humans, which is so fantastically implausible as to be fantasy. Even the composition of Earth’s atmosphere has changed dramatically over its lifespan, and our need for a pretty narrow band of partial pressure of oxygen (and our intolerance for more than a tiny fraction of CO[SUB]2[/SUB] or other toxic gases) makes it enormously impractical that we would ever find a planet with the necessary atmosphere and environment to be inhabitable by unprotected humans. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Blakeyrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecd19e/32.png) [@Blakeyrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blakeyrat)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/45 "2017-12-12T00:06:47Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#): > > What would a space freighter haul? In the Star Trek universe, as seen on the prequel series Enterprise, those warp 1.8 freighters mostly seemed to be hauling dilithium ore, dilithium being a fictional mineral needed to regulate matter-anti-matter reactions. ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/46 "2017-12-12T00:12:06Z")
Charlie Stross has his accountants in space book [Neptune’s Brood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood) in which he sets up an interstellar economy in a slower than light universe. The main thing transported between worlds is knowledge and cryptocurrency. Interstellar investments may take a millennia or three to mature. Transmission is through lasers or radio pulses or whatever. If I recall the book correctly, actual interstellar travel is done for religious reasons. I do think the only way interstellar freighters work is to assume an age of sail like universe, as Stranger on a Train says, or even a universe where interstellar travel is about as expensive as ocean shipping today. Then what is carried is irrelevant, as long as arbitrage makes it profitable. As the price of travel increases, I think it gets to a point where the only thing profitable to send is information. A tiny space wisp carrying petabytes of data about how to build the factory to make the goods that would otherwise be shipped is worth more than the goods themselves. That’s post colonization. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/47 "2017-12-12T00:14:56Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Drugs. The answer is drugs. > > Oh, sorry … “spice”. Certainly one answer. I think it was Cordwainer Smith who wrote a story in which one planet extracted an anti-agathic (anti dying) drug from a plant that grew nowhere else. ---
**Author:** ![BuckChongo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@BuckChongo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BuckChongo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/48 "2017-12-12T00:20:58Z")
More prosaic, what is there on the Moon or Mars that could be profitably extracted or manufactured and shipped to Earth? ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/49 "2017-12-12T01:32:36Z")
> [@BuckChongo](#): > > More prosaic, what is there on the Moon or Mars that could be profitably extracted or manufactured and shipped to Earth? Nothing. (No, not [SUP]3[/SUP]He or uranium.) Even assuming a two or three magnitude of order reduction in transportation costs, there is no resource which would be worth the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per kilogram it would cost for transportation not withstanding the actual costs of mining and refining materials. One might be able to make a better case for materials from Near Earth Objects provided that there already exists an infrastructure to perform automated extraction and sending the material on low energy trajectories to be collected in Earth orbit and then sent down but the real reason to extract space materials in situ is to use them there rather than haul them up from Earth. It may someday come to pass that we may run out reserves of some terrestrial element such as copper and not have a suitable substitute, but it is far more likely that it would be more cost effective to make due with the resources available than to engage in an effort to go out and mine them specifically to support terrestrial demand. And of course, dumping the massive mineral resources available in even a single moderate sized NEO into terrestrial commodity markets would blow the floor out of those markets. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/50 "2017-12-12T01:41:35Z")
All in all, normal trade is not sustainable. We would have to assume a insanely-rich Star Trek model to make it work. Then we can send a new mining factory to Peanutbutter 7 and get nothing back. We don’t want anything from that system. We just have a hobby of sending factories, deep=space telescopes and probably food very long distances more or less for fun. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/51 "2017-12-12T02:09:15Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Certainly one answer. I think it was Cordwainer Smith who wrote a story in which one planet extracted an anti-agathic (anti dying) drug from a plant that grew nowhere else. [Norstrilia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norstrilia) was the novel, although the planet and the drug stroon were mentioned in some of his short stories. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/52 "2017-12-12T02:13:27Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Drugs. The answer is drugs. > > Oh, sorry … “spice”. > [@Mangetout](#): > > And after that, it comes down to ‘naturally-occurring stuff that doesn’t naturally occur everywhere’ - so… > [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Certainly one answer. I think it was Cordwainer Smith who wrote a story in which one planet extracted an anti-agathic (anti dying) drug from a plant that grew nowhere else. Right, if you have a product of one specific planetary or system ecology (that you can’t really reproduce or transplant efficiently, this is key), that is itself essential to the interstellar civilization to function, by either permitting interstellar travel itself or allowing the lifespans needed to function in galactic-spread culture, then that becomes Commodity Supreme. But even there we have the issue with RL science lapping the fiction: for us of the world of 2017, it seems like the makeup of any material substance, given enough time and effort, be can be analytically determined down to each atom and then more of it assembled synthetically, and that the same can be done for what are the processes by which it does its work. So in Space Opera we are often forced to say that there is this X or Y thing that somehow can’t be efficiently synthesized, or gene-sequenced, or hothouse-grown, or put through the matter replicator, and has only one known source (or very few) and that’s why it’s so valuable. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/53 "2017-12-12T02:25:13Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Certainly one answer. I think it was Cordwainer Smith who wrote a story in which one planet extracted an anti-agathic (anti dying) drug from a plant that grew nowhere else. BTW, stroon was not extracted from a plant, but from gigantic sick mutant sheep. The stroon was a side effect of their illness. When taken off-planet, the sheep got well and stopped producing stroon. ---
**Author:** ![boytyperanma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4491bb/32.png) [@boytyperanma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/boytyperanma)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/54 "2017-12-12T03:23:34Z")
People might be willing to make huge investments in things of preference rather than actual resource value. If someone wants an original painting from earth they’ll have to have it shipped to them. In my RPG experience our generic trade items were E-wok pelts and Kender topknots. There was always a market for one or the other. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/55 "2017-12-12T03:56:56Z")
I’ll go along with genetic material and intellectual property; plus, at the outset, the pioneer planets will not have the industry to create the fantastical ultra-tech goods of the central worlds with planet-scale advanced technology. I.e. people in Greenland and Bangladesh import flat-screen TV’s from the places that have the tech to make them. We import because they’re cheaper. However, the price differential just means it’s cheaper to import flat screen TVs to Greenland - technologies of scale and levels of technical production make a difference. Price -less important. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/56 "2017-12-12T04:15:05Z")
Many centuries might be required for a journey, but this isn’t a show-stopper. The travelers might be long-lived creatures or machines; or several generations of short-lived creatures might live and die en route. Light-speed communication would be almost instantaneous compared with the speed of transporting goods, so systems could request different goods from each other. What’s a shipping delay of a few thousand years, if big terraforming projects take millions of years? Certain elements (e.g. gold, U-235, rare earths) might still be important for an advanced technology, yet extremely rare in some stellar systems. These might be mined on systems where plentiful, and then sent on to other systems where needed. > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > … The most efficient propulsion systems with any kind of plausible basis (e.g. nuclear fusion) [POST=18236632]would require many decades to send anything from Sol to the nearest star systems and would not be able to carry sufficient propellant to decelerate[/POST]. … In my sci-fi epic, I’m planning to use [magnetic sails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail) to address the deceleration problem. Won’t these work? (And my plan was [laser beamed propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion) for acceleration. Will this work?) ---
**Author:** ![Claude\_Remains](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/898d66/32.png) [@Claude\_Remains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claude_Remains)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/57 "2017-12-12T05:24:11Z")
Not sure if my Ambien is kicking in or GQ has gone straight down the toilet.😕 ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/58 "2017-12-12T06:24:22Z")
Since I don’t think FTL is possible within physics as we understand it, I don’t think it will ever make much sense to transmit raw materials from one solar system to another. I don’t believe we have discovered any materials that would be worth the cost in energy to move across interstellar distances. But if you truly are trying to maintain a coherent civilization across multiple star systems, there will be one large trade - people. If your people disconnect from each other genetically, they’ll begin to drift. If they lose connection emotionally and practically with other star systems, they will also lose the need and desire for alliance. So I think you would want to have significant population transfer to keep the whole thing stable. I could also see a smaller level of population transfer. For example, I could imagine an astrophysicist graduate student who might join a research vessel to another star system - spend a decade of ship time basically studying the universe from within a large, well equipped traveling space telescope, and then being able to study a new solar system when they arrive at their destination. The key is that people have to travel because whatever they need to see/use is unique to that system. Location, star system type, exbiology, etc. A lot of people would want to go to a star system if we discovered complex life there and had a way of getting people there in a decade or less at a cost within reach of national governments or consortiums of billionaires or something. The only goods that would make sense to transport would be things that are utterly unique, like an original artwork or a sample of an alien species. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/59 "2017-12-12T06:33:30Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Certainly one answer. I think it was Cordwainer Smith who wrote a story in which one planet extracted an anti-agathic (anti dying) drug from a plant that grew nowhere else. Norstrilia, in the Instrumentality Universe - as seen in _Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons_ and other stories. But see also Arrakian Melange and the Spice Mines of Kessel. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2017, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202/60 "2017-12-12T07:07:02Z")
One thing that might be a valuable commodity _for one trip_ - one end of a traversable wormhole. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interstellar-commerce/804202.md?page=4)