tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post4139401868099480598..comments2024-03-22T08:58:54.753-06:00Comments on Hugo Book Club Blog: The Movement of Goods In Science FictionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-31637349285361735272023-09-21T17:10:01.094-06:002023-09-21T17:10:01.094-06:00Yes, and FTL starships will also never exist, but ...Yes, and FTL starships will also never exist, but even if you use magic technology for them in your story, the requirements in resources, personnel, and expertise to build such vehicles makes it extremely unlikely that an individual would be able to acquire one in the market place and zip around in it. At least Dune got this part right.aaronparrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12977403608550351662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-11720066978612897022020-12-15T11:54:42.295-07:002020-12-15T11:54:42.295-07:00Nice article. Personally, the presence of interste...Nice article. Personally, the presence of interstellar trade in space opera is just another element that reminds me that they are fundamentally fantasies, not very constrained (or informed) by reality--including this kind of commerce is a way to keep the story relatable to the reader's current situation. The cost of moving mass between stars is just a non-starter for any kind of capital mercantilism if you have an ounce of realism in your set-up--one that you can't get around with economies of scale with any currently-plausible technology.<br /><br />(Larger aside here on how our idea that "of course" our current system of disparate production & shipping makes sense is reliant on ultimately unsustainable systems with lots of unpaid externalities [e.g. affordable shipping due to fossil fuels] that simply don't have space correlates.)<br /><br />That said, if there are magical technologies for e.g. extremely cheap FTL and extremely cheap surface-to-orbit tech, one would expect to see economic structures emerge mirroring current production--as you point out, exploiting lower costs of production or extremely specialized/rare products. These discussions often make me think of Cherryh's Alliance-Union books, which do have magic FTL, but otherwise shoot for a fairly high level of realism--there, the space-faring merchants move specialized products between high-tech but low-pop stations, with the implication that 1.) they're massively underwritten by being data couriers and 2.) space-based trade is largely superfluous/luxury to any established planetary civilization.<br /><br />(Also, I don't think I've ever caught the reasoning on why anyone in the Trek universe ships anything that can be replicated.)Casella Brookinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10700379201245273504noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-42065358887925595392020-01-10T18:57:05.292-07:002020-01-10T18:57:05.292-07:00As someone who wrote a story set on an interplanet...As someone who wrote a story set on an interplanetary merchant ship, I have given some thought to interplanetary trade. First of all, all developed planets would be economically self-sufficient and that interplanetary trade would account for only a small portion of their economic activity – essentially trade in luxury or specialized goods. However, since one is dealing with the luxury or specialized demands of an entire planet, the volume of these products could be quite substantial.<br /><br />So what would be traded between planets? I, at least, find that it is easy to imagine natural products unique to a planet – say a type of marble stone or wood, for which there is a specialized market on other planets. Or it could be a unique manufactured product, which, while it could be imitated on any planet, the authenticity of the original would still command a price that justified the expense of interplanetary shipments. And you can extend this to ordinary manufactured goods. The USA is perfectly capable of building all sorts of automobiles and yet we import shiploads of them from Germany and other countries, not because of any manufacturing cost advantage, but because they are viewed by some consumers as superior products. Indeed, we import something as common as washing machines and fridges from overseas, while we produce them, cheaper, here. It is entirely imaginable that consumer demand for products famous for their quality could justify the expense of shipping them from one planet to the next in the volume necessary to make them competitive with the domestically produced products. And then there are agricultural products like, say, coffee or tea that can not be produced in the USA and must be imported. While one would imagine that most agricultural products could be grown somewhere on any human inhabited planet, one could also imagine that one planet or another might be simply more suited to growing certain products, either producing superior products, or being able to produce them cheaper in greater volume that would allow them to be exported at a profit. For example, a pound of Darjeeling tea can command a hundred time the price of supermarket teas. A planet that grew superior tea could well export their tea at a profit to satisfy the demand of the millions of tea connoisseurs on one planet. The key is that the supplying the needs of an entire planet for even very specialized goods would likely still create a great enough demand to make bulk shipments economically feasible. And we could also add to products the shipment of interplanetary tourists either in passenger ships or in some form of suspended animation as cargo.<br /><br />Distance, of course, would play a factor in all of this, but vast fortunes were made importing tea from China and spices from Indonesia even though the round trip voyage took a year. <br /><br />Of course, shipping a pallet of something to another planet, ala Firefly, is silly. But when you start to look at it on the scale of those vast container ships of today, which given the likely scale of supplying even very specialized products to an entire world of billions of people, is seems to me entirely feasible that interplanetary trade could be supported. Charles Litkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15182265039055575093noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-54342293422534360912020-01-07T15:29:15.329-07:002020-01-07T15:29:15.329-07:00I'm reminded of the pre-neo-liberal works of H...I'm reminded of the pre-neo-liberal works of H.Beam Piper. He generally had it that bulk shipping was necessary only when a planet was in a pre-industrial phase (like Zarathustra had just climbed out of in _Little Fuzzy_) or when society was collapsing and the industrial sector was in serious trouble (like in _Space Viking_); in the latter case, many of the characters found the situation fairly unsatisfactory. Other than that, he posited that the only things that needed shipping were unique local luxury products that couldn't be produced elsewhere due to specific conditions/biology, so you'd get a giant damn ship carrying a couple of suitcases of Zarathustran sun-stones as the prime paying cargo, some passengers and their dunnage, and the remaining space would be any old crap that *might* find a market somewhere along the route.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03314842552401248443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-82850683009004127512020-01-07T09:02:23.517-07:002020-01-07T09:02:23.517-07:00Greg, that is an excellent point, and one that (de...Greg, that is an excellent point, and one that (despite jawing over this topic for months on end), my co-authors and I never actually thought of. Olav Roknehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15774675440752504523noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9022769091032248225.post-10320875788163946992020-01-04T18:21:01.789-07:002020-01-04T18:21:01.789-07:00Within a single solar system, you could imagine pu...Within a single solar system, you could imagine putting highly polluting industries on uninhabitable planets. For example, if we could strip mine Luna for rare-earth metals, that would arguably be much better than producing them here, even if the cost to produce and ship were higher.<br /><br />But trade <i>between solar systems</i> is a lot harder to explain. And if you've got a replicator, it's hard to see how you'd trade anything other than intellectual property.Greg Hullenderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com