Interstellar Commerce

[TSBG]

So, according to the interwebs, the Nostromo in “Alien” was hauling “ore.” It’s a little hard to imagine a future tech in which “ore” of whatever kind is not available on Earth, but is so readily obtainable on on other planets, that it makes economic sense to extract it–these resource planets reachable through some type of FTL drive, though the FTL isn’t so fast that it doesn’t require “hypersleep.”

I can certainly imagine a future Earth desperate for petroleum to make plastics–though as we see recently, there are loads of petroleum products still in the crust if you want to spend to get them. However, it seems unlikely to me that the Weyland-Yutani corporation, able to build massive Unobtainium-powered FTL spaceships, couldn’t figure out an easier or different way to produce engineered materials that didn’t involve NOT going to other star systems.

TL; DR I may not agree with your hypothetical, but I will defend to your death my right to win with my hypothetical.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

Thank you all.

[Broomstick]

@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.

That was “stroon” and it came not from a plant but from sick, mutant sheep.

[Mangetout]

@TSBG

So, according to the interwebs, the Nostromo in “Alien” was hauling “ore.” It’s a little hard to imagine a future tech in which “ore” of whatever kind is not available on Earth, but is so readily obtainable on on other planets, that it makes economic sense to extract it–these resource planets reachable through some type of FTL drive, though the FTL isn’t so fast that it doesn’t require “hypersleep.”

Well, certainly not hauling it in unrefined form. I think that’s just a narrative choice so that the story can be told in a heavy-industrial setting, with characters whose primary role is not exobiology or even exploration.

[eburacum45]

I suppose some solar systems - especially those around very old stars, that were formed when the Universe was young - might have very low metal content, and it might be worth carrying certain high-value elements in bulk from another star to the destination. I wonder if some kind of catapult might be useful - maybe one based on Paul Birch’s mass-stream technology (here’s a page about interstellar catapults which I made a few years ago, to demonstrate the idea). You wouldn’t need humans on board a freight-container propelled to a star by an interstellar catapult, and since the container might take thousands of years to arrive then maybe this would be a good thing.

One big problem with an interstellar catapult would be catching the containers in the destination system- no matter how well you aimed them, the target would be incredibly small and difficult to hit. So the container would need some kind of course correction in-flight.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

@eburacum45

I wonder if some kind of catapult might be useful -

Squirrel catapult.

[Darren_Garrison]

Some SF stories use giant coilguns for accelerating interstellar ships/cargo. I was rereading Ken Macleod’s Learning the World over the past couple of days and it mentioned “long tubes” a couple of times in passing but I remembered seeing more detailed descriptions somewhere. I googled up this description from Macleod’s short story Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359:

@Ken Macleod

The Long Tube, which the Long Station existed to shuttle people to and from and generally to maintain, was one hundred and eighty Astronomical Units long. Twenty-seven thousand million kilometres, or, to put it in perspective, one light-day. From the shuttle, it looked like a hairline crack in infinity, but it didn’t add up to a mouse’s whisker in the Oort. It was aimed straight at Sirius, which I could see as a bright star with a fuzzy green haze of habitats. I shivered. I was about to be frozen, placed with the rest of the passengers on the next needle ship out, electromagnetically accelerated for months at 30 g to relativistic velocities in the Long Tube, hurtled across 6.4 light-years, decelerated in Sirius’s matching tube, accelerated again to Procyon, then to Lalande 21185, and finally sent on a fast clipper to Lalande’s next-door neighbour and fellow red dwarf, Wolf 359. It had to be a fast clipper because Wolf 359’s Long Tubes were no longer being calibrated—and when you’re aiming one Long Tube across light-years at the mouth of another, calibration matters.

[Chronos]

Quoth sbunny8:

Even if the colonies don’t have anything to send back, there’s lots of money to be paid by the colonists who are shipping out and want to have supplies when they get there. So, what do they do with the empty freighter? Sending it back empty seems like a waste, but it might be worth it if the cost of sending an empty ship is less than the cost of building another ship back on Earth. Two alternatives come to mind: Dismantle the ship at the destination planet, use the parts to build other useful things like a machine shop and a electrical power plant. Or, fill up the ship with local handcrafts made by the colonists, to be sold back on Earth to people who would like to have a trinket on their shelf that came from another planet.

A third possibility: Hold onto it until the colony planet is built up enough that they’re interested in sending out their own colonies to yet further planets. It’d only take a few centuries at most to develop from hardscrabble dirt farmers to sky-lords, especially with existing knowledge and infrastructure to jumpstart them, and interstellar slowboats need to last a lot longer than that, anyway.

[eschereal]

@Darren_Garrison

Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359:

@Ken MacLeod

… was one hundred and eighty Astronomical Units long. Twenty-seven thousand million kilometres, or, to put it in perspective, one light-day.…

Goddamit. Why are people so ashamed of prefixes? One light-day can easily be described as 26Tm (terameters). This thousand million kilometers is just fucking stupid. Get with the program, people.

[DPRK]

It’s just the oomny way people govoreet in the future.

[Baron_Greenback]

@eschereal

Goddamit. Why are people so ashamed of prefixes? One light-day can easily be described as 26Tm (terameters). This thousand million kilometers is just fucking stupid. Get with the program, people.

No-one has a clue what a terameter is.

An author using a thousand million kilometers as a unit is much better writing - it’s a multiple of two familiar numbers alongside a familiar unit of distance. It’s still an unfathomably large actual distance of course, but using “terameter” means as much as using “centon” or some other bullshit.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

The idea that founders of a hypothetical interstellar settlement are going to farm the land Little House on the Prairie style comes from the notion comes from the conception of space exploration as just being an astronomical version of Wagon Train with said colonists building log cabins and tilling fields with their trusty mule. This is so unrealistic in any number of ways, including that even if we find worlds that are a suitable range of distance and axial tilt to have Earth-like temperatures and seasons, the odds of finding a planet with the narrow range of atmospheric composition, much less soil that is prepared for Earth vegetation is literally infinitesimal. Nearly everything about the surface and atmosphere of our planet is how it is precisely because life evolved on it in a specific progression, and no other body is going to have sufficiently Earth-like conditions to be habitable without substantial planetary engineering, much less suitable to produce goods or foodstuffs to somehow ship back to Earth, surviving for hundreds or thousands of years en route.

In fact, once the technology exists to sustain a human or more likely post-human presence in space for the indefinite period required for any practical interstellar travel, there is little reason to settle on planets, which allow limited access to their mineral resources, often have dramatic and even dangerous weather and seismic events, and the surfaces of which are exposed to all nature of external hazards from bombardment and meteorite impact to star flares and radiation. “Colonists” are more likely to be engineered mechanical or robust biological proxies rather than the human form which fares poorly even in Earth orbit, and would be capable of breaking down space resources into raw elements and producing useable materials or energy, and living in star-orbiting habitats constructed from space resources. Having colonies leapfrog each other using local resources is really the only way to practically expand beyond the local neighborhood of Earth rather than launching successive missions from Sol, especially given how much resources it would take to produce each mission.

The notion of market-based commerce is, again, just not workable over such durations without some extraordinary breakthroughs in physics that reduce the time and energy required to move materials between worlds to that comparable of shipping stuff by ocean today. And while that could occur, there is no way to predict how or when it may.

Stranger

[Darren_Garrison]

@Baron_Greenback

An author using a thousand million kilometers as a unit is much better writing - it’s a multiple of two familiar numbers alongside a familiar unit of distance.

“Thousand million” is also a perfectly cromulent unit to be used by a UK writer (as Ken Macleod is.) They seem to be transitioning from the older UK meaning of billion as a million million to a thousand million, but in 2007 it was probably still in flux.

[carnivorousplant]

@eschereal

Goddamit. Why are people so ashamed of prefixes? One light-day can easily be described as 26Tm (terameters). This thousand million kilometers is just fucking stupid. Get with the program, people.

Just go with light years and exponential notation, dummy.

[Chronos]

Which the author in question did.

[SamuelA]

@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].
Stranger

Stranger, what’s your reasoning behind negating antimatter? The rough sketch of the antimatter proposal is :

a. You make the antimatter by spontaneous pair production - honking space based high frequency lasers with converging beams, you get positrons and antiprotons with a sane level of efficiency. (maybe 1% unless I misunderstand somethign about the technique)

b. You trap the newly created anti-hydrogen and then fuse it (at a big energy deficit) to heavier elements. You stop at an element that forms a solid at a reasonably high temperature and also exhibits Type 1 superconductivity.

You obviously handle the antimatter with nothing but lasers and EM fields in vacuum in microgravity, in separate orbiting stations so an accident won’t blow up more than 1 fuel plant at a time.

c. The anti-fuel is now solid pucks that reject magnetic fields when cold. In a cooled fuel tank with permanent magnets in the walls, they will remain stable, with no active system.

d. The starship engine laser tweezers off tiny bits of fuel, heats them to gas, and accelerates this gas stream into the engine, where it annihilates with matter to form charged pions. The pions get bent by more magnets out the back, and you get steady thrust at something like 20-30% efficiency.

If you can collect some interstellar hydrogen to use as the matter, you obviously increase your mass efficiency even more.

I don’t see any showstoppers. I mean, we might not develop this kind of tech for 1000+ years, unless the predicted intelligence singularity happens, then we would presumably see it right after the singularity completes. But do you know any credible reason why an engine like this wouldn’t work? Or any basic principle that is being violated if you have arbitrary control of matter and plenty of ability to engineer anything you like?

The only problem I know of is the antimatter annihilation is creating a bonkers amount of waste gamma rays. Some of the gamma rays produced are impinging on the starship and have to be rejected by radiators, and the radiators have to be enormous, and their mass reduces the rate of acceleration greatly and also limits what % of C the ship can ultimately reach. The acceleration might be truly abysmal, requiring decades or more for the ship to burn all it’s fuel. (and I don’t see any reasonable way to speculate how heavy the ship might actually be or how much waste heat it might need to reject, since there’s so many future techniques a civilization that could build one of these would likely discover)

[running_coach]

@SamuelA

Stranger, what’s your reasoning behind negating antimatter? The rough sketch of the antimatter proposal is :

a. You make the antimatter by spontaneous pair production - honking space based high frequency lasers with converging beams, you get positrons and antiprotons with a sane level of efficiency. (maybe 1% unless I misunderstand somethign about the technique)

b. You trap the newly created anti-hydrogen and then fuse it (at a big energy deficit) to heavier elements. You stop at an element that forms a solid at a reasonably high temperature and also exhibits Type 1 superconductivity.

You obviously handle the antimatter with nothing but lasers and EM fields in vacuum in microgravity, in separate orbiting stations so an accident won’t blow up more than 1 fuel plant at a time.

c. The anti-fuel is now solid pucks that reject magnetic fields when cold. In a cooled fuel tank with permanent magnets in the walls, they will remain stable, with no active system.

d. The starship engine laser tweezers off tiny bits of fuel, heats them to gas, and accelerates this gas stream into the engine, where it annihilates with matter to form charged pions. The pions get bent by more magnets out the back, and you get steady thrust at something like 20-30% efficiency.

If you can collect some interstellar hydrogen to use as the matter, you obviously increase your mass efficiency even more.

I don’t see any showstoppers. I mean, we might not develop this kind of tech for 1000+ years, unless the predicted intelligence singularity happens, then we would presumably see it right after the singularity completes. But do you know any credible reason why an engine like this wouldn’t work? Or any basic principle that is being violated if you have arbitrary control of matter and plenty of ability to engineer anything you like?

The only problem I know of is the antimatter annihilation is creating a bonkers amount of waste gamma rays. Some of the gamma rays produced are impinging on the starship and have to be rejected by radiators, and the radiators have to be enormous, and their mass reduces the rate of acceleration greatly and also limits what % of C the ship can ultimately reach. The acceleration might be truly abysmal, requiring decades or more for the ship to burn all it’s fuel. (and I don’t see any reasonable way to speculate how heavy the ship might actually be or how much waste heat it might need to reject, since there’s so many future techniques a civilization that could build one of these would likely discover)

You left out the dilithium crystals.

[splatterpunk]

@running_coach

You left out the dilithium crystals.

Sure, a lack of dilithium crystals would more than likely cause errors in the harmonic security photon banks, but that’s an easy fix:

Equalize the nitrium autocompositors with luvetric phaser banks.

Problem solved. Duh.

[SamuelA]

@running_coach

You left out the dilithium crystals.

Is this a serious criticism? You basically just called me a crackpot. Which piece am I missing? We’ve made antimatter before. Fusing hydrogen is hard to do in a way that emits net energy but dime store fusors have been made since the 1960s. The “pion” part is just “fling the antimatter particle beam into a chamber and cross the streams”. Then there’s some magnets placed in the right spots and boom you get thrust. Positron beams have been created for years now.

It’s not very complicated to understand. Sure, it might take 1000+ years to engineer all the pieces to a level that would work well enough to run for centuries or whatever, but the pieces would work unless there’s some major principle of physics I’m missing…

Please make a specific claim to where you think I went from “stuff you can find early prototypes for at a well funded institution” to “star trek”, please.

[eschereal]

You have to shield against cosmic rays. Major, heavy shielding, because one cosmic ray gets into one of your antimatter pucks, it will explode and make a big mess of everything. All that shielding is that much extra mass you have to move. Sounds dreadfully infeasible to me.