People discuss whether or not trade between
worlds will be possible in the future, in doing so they overlook that maybe it already
is. So today we will be looking at Interplanetary
Trade, and we’ll be reviewing some of the concepts we see a lot in science fiction and
trying to see how practical and realistic those actually are, along with what the alternatives
might be for when they aren’t. We will also take some time to look at interstellar
trade too, and the special difficulties it imposes on us, especially if we have no access
to faster than light travel or communication. Though we will talk about how those would
affect things too. Trade is the lifeblood of humanity, it’s
how we’ve exchanged ideas and even bloodlines for untold centuries. The usual alternative has been warfare, and
most folks would agree the former is typically preferable to the latter. We have discussed a lot of the difficulties
with Interplanetary Warfare so maybe we should start with the difficulties of Interplanetary
Trade. The first difficulty is that it is interplanetary. Right now if you wanted to ship a package
to the Martians it would cost you somewhere around $10,000 a kilogram to get it there
and that is being very generous and optimistic. That’s usually the launch cost just to get
into low orbit, though that’s an important point to mention from the outset. Most of the cost of moving between planets
is getting off the planet in the first place, after that it only costs a lot more to move
stuff to another planet if you want to get there fast or if it doesn’t have an atmosphere
to help you break your speed with. Now there isn’t much we would be willing
to ship for $10,000 a kilogram, but there are some things. Gold is generally valued at a few times that,
as are a few other precious metals. Various low half-life fissionable materials
like plutonium are way more valuable per kilogram than that. Key fusion isotopes like deuterium, tritium,
and helium-3 aren’t cheap either. That’s just in terms of raw materials, basic
elements or their isotopes for mining. I’m not sure how much various processors
and chips run on a dollar per kilogram basis but I’d imagine many of them exceed that
$10,000 per kilogram price point too. Of course there are no chip factories on the
moon at the moment, nor anyone looking to buy them, but that’s why so much of the
focus in discussing space exploration is on raw material harvesting from asteroids. Right now, if we saw a house-sized stack of
gold ingots on the moon or an asteroid, it would indeed be profitable for us to go get
them. And yes, even if the commodity market took
a dive, since while a sudden influx of moon gold might crash prices it won’t crash them
below the actual cost to go get the stuff. At least not for longer than it takes some
analyst to notice such trips are costing us, say, $20,000 a kilogram for all costs to launch,
land, mine and return home and gold prices just dropped to $19,000, and he starts screaming
‘Buy! Buy now!’ So don’t think of space-based trade as something
limited only to the distant future and a few low-earth orbit projects like launching satellites. It is already in the realm of viable economics
if just barely. Nonetheless our interest is more in the distant
future when there’s actually places with people to send stuff to and from. Still in terms of the evolution of trade in
space from now till then, I’d say you have two types of markets. The first is in shipping home very valuable
elements as genuine commerce, bringing home gold and platinum from some asteroid. The second is in getting the contract to ship
stuff to a colony or outpost. You need to eat to run a mine, and breathe,
unless you are a robot, and to be honest you probably are, but if you’re not or if you
are a scientist at some countries outpost on the Moon or Mars you do need food and water
and air and what you can’t make there needs to be shipped in even if it costs $10,001
per kilogram, $10,000 to ship a liter bottle of water and $1 for that bottle. Scarcity is a relative term. Now as technology improves we expect the cost
per kilogram to keep dropping, though as technology improves the quantity of stuff you actually
need to send probably keeps dropping too, but it is also worth remembering that the
most expensive place in the solar system to ship from is Earth. Okay, technically the Sun and all the gas
giants but nobody is going to be living on those, at least not in the early days. Earth has a big gravity well and a thick atmosphere,
which makes getting off of it dreadfully expensive. Though that atmosphere does make it much easier
to get stuff back to it. If we imagined a fully developed asteroid
belt, where they could make or acquire their fuel and rocket parts as cheaply as on Earth,
it would actually be dirt cheap to ship back and forth between all of those. The Asteroid Belt is not a particularly dense
place like we often see in movies, most decently sized asteroids are further apart out there
than the Earth and the Moon, yet they have no gravity to speak of and it’s a case where
you might intentionally burn way more fuel than you need to in order to get from Asteroid
A to Asteroid B faster simply because the distances are great enough that your cost
in supplies and maintenance and not using your ship for other things would be higher
than your fuel costs. We talked about this a bit more in the Asteroid
Mining episode but in summary form that is big chunk of the reason many of us foresee
the Asteroid Belt as a better first step for colonization than the planets. On Earth, the costs of shipping goods is fairly
low, but the cost increases depending on the distance something has to travel. The costs of shipping materials around the
system will probably be more a function of the effort required to get those goods and
materials out of whatever gravity well they are located on. This means that the cost of getting materials
from planets are likely to be considerably more expensive than getting those same materials
from an asteroid, where the gravity is much weaker. Time is also a factor. Most projects are time-sensitive and if it
is going to take decades to get materials from the outer system, it is probably not
economically feasible. Relatively speaking, the asteroid belt is
in our neighbourhood. The key concept there is that you can ship
stuff like food and water around the asteroid belt economically, from inside the belt anyway. You aren’t just limited to stuff like gold. And you can ship that home to Earth pretty
cheaply too. It might cost tens of thousands of dollars
to get a kilogram of ship out to an asteroid but it doesn’t cost that much to send a
kilogram home if you can make the fuel there, because again that asteroid has virtually
no gravity pulling stuff back toward it while Earth has an awful lot of it helping pull
cargo toward it. Beyond those precursors of trade that we just
mentioned though, real interplanetary trade has to wait till there’s places off Earth
with people living there wanting stuff and making stuff. You can have trade then even if you are still
limited to chemical rockets, but you won’t have anyone to trade with because you are
not going to have great big space colonies getting setup when you are still using refined
kerosene to send ships to and from. We will add one more caveat to that though. We talked about a lot of alternatives to getting
off the planet in the Upward Bound series, many of which can get you into Earth Orbit
for costs not much worse than flying to another continent. If those are setup you can move around the
solar system on chemical fuels a lot cheaper, but once you have a pretty big space-based
infrastructure in place you are going to be able to take a second look at nuclear propulsion
because you can make bigger ships if you are building them in Orbit and people won’t
worry as much about them having radioactive materials on board if they aren’t close
to Earth. The specific economics of interplanetary trade
are going to be entirely dependent on how much the ships cost in terms of speed and
fuel and time and construction, but we can see four basic categories of trade. The first is big bulky durable cargo, where
you want to go slow to save fuel. The second is high value trade items, which
either have an expiration date or are sufficiently valuable by weight that your shipping costs
are trivial. The third is passengers, where typically time
trumps efficiency. These three are pretty familiar, we do them
on Earth all the time and it’s why you don’t get ten tons of topsoil delivered to your
house by FedEx, and why most passenger services don’t care about passenger weight much,
because the costs associated to moving a person mostly are not about their weight. We have a fourth type too though, and that
is information. Now that typically is not something you ship,
though there’s exceptions, but this is not an episode on Interplanetary Shipping, it’s
an episode on Interplanetary Trade. I’ve mentioned in the Outward Bound series
how Mars and Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan all have stuff they want that the others have
and that this includes the Asteroid Belt too. I left Earth out of that though, noting that
Earth does not want anything those places have, except precious metals, and I also mentioned
today that Earth is one of the most expensive places to ship from. Once you have a fully developed solar economy,
one in which at least a few percent of the population does not live on or near Earth,
and possibly the supermajority of them don’t, the Earth has a bit of a problem with that
big gravity well. Now if the various engines or orbital launch
megastructures are good enough that won’t matter anymore than whether or not a modern
manufacturing city is by a place with good trade winds, but if it does, Earth still has
one very valuable commodity to sell in exchange for whatever it wants to import home and that
is information, entertainment, and so on. It’s going to be a long time before Earth
is not the place producing the supermajority of science, let alone movies and novels and
new games. Early on, Earth is exporting everything, because
it is the only source for anything. Later it ships stuff too complex to manufacture
locally, at least economically, and eventually it ends up exporting data. Now an empty ship is an empty ship so odds
are even if fuel is a big factor in not wanting to export much from Earth you’d probably
still do it a lot, so long as fuel isn’t crushingly expensive, but by and large we’d
expect data to be Earth’s big product. Okay, we should talk travel times, currency,
and 3D printing. Let’s hit printing first. 3D printers are a wonder, they offer us the
possibility of being able to manufacture almost anything without needing an assembly line. They do not affect three of our types of trade,
bulk raw materials, passengers, or data. They do have a big impact on manufactured
goods though. Your ideal asteroid colony of a few thousand
people want to be able to grow all their own food, recycle all their water and air, and
manufacture all their stuff, or at least the replacement parts for maintaining most of
it. If they have something to export they may
opt to buy things they could make there if they can get them cheaper elsewhere or simply
use the people or robots making them for instead producing what they export in larger volumes. As I’ve mentioned in the past, you don’t
want to think of 3D printers as magic wands, not only is there stuff they can’t print
or can’t print quickly, the value of them is mostly their ability to produce things
without an assembly line, not better than an assembly line. If that changes, this sector of interplanetary
trade is going to shrink a lot. You only are going to trade manufactured goods
when you can bulk produce stuff significantly cheaper than some printer in someone’s house
can and that there is also sufficient demand for. Odds are for some things that will stay true
and for others it won’t, so that you probably will have some trade in manufactured goods. Again information trade, bulk materials, and
passengers will be unaffected by printers, unless you can full blown print an adult human
down to their memories, but that’s basically teleportation and a topic for another day. Interestingly though, this means food is something
you can probably trade. It does not take as much plant biomass to
recycle the air we breathe as it does to feed a person, and if you are using that air recycling
biomass for growing stuff like lettuce or other produce that doesn’t keep well then
you have a market for shipping food that does stores well around to places that don’t
want to grow all their own, or for that matter any. I always tend to assume places will recycle
their air with plants because I figure they’d want some fresh veggies and fruit and something
green to look at but you probably would have a fair number of facilities that just want
to do that using air scrubbers and devoting all their personnel to whatever it is they
do there. Let’s talk travel times next because currency
is more relevant to interstellar trade and we’ll save that for last. How long does it take to get from A to B? Where trade is concerned the answer tends
to be exactly as fast as its worth getting there. There’s two ways of looking at space travel
in terms of time and neither of them really has much to do with actual distance. Either the whole things is running on available
delta-v, how much you can change your speed, then plotting the shortest trip in terms of
time, which often involves nothing like a straight line, or you’ve got energy to spare
and it’s all about acceleration and how much you can handle. Timelines for the former tend to be in the
years, as you carefully plot out every minimum cost orbital transfer and slingshot and need
to pick your launch windows. That’s okay for trying to move a million
tons of nitrogen from Titan to that big O’Neill Cylinder being built out in the Belt, because
they will probably be busy designing and building the thing for years before people move into
it. On the extreme other end of things if you’ve
got good fusion engines that can produce delta-v of a couple percent of light speed, delta-v
is no longer your issue, it’s how fast you can accelerate depending on both your engine
and what your cargo can handle. For people as passengers that’s probably
going to be 1-gee tops, though if it is important you can go higher, and with some technologies
a lot higher. Distance gets deceptive here, when you potentially
accelerate halfway there and decelerate the other half. This is an incredibly energy wasteful way
of traveling but if you’ve got sturdy fusion reactors that can run on normal hydrogen,
nobody will care, because it’s not the cost of energy that matters it’s the cost of
hydrogen, the most plentiful stuff in the Universe. If that’s selling for a $1 a kilogram and
someone tells you they can get you to Saturn in 9 days by burning a thousand kilograms
of hydrogen or a month by burning only a hundred, guess which option most folks will go for,
even if the amount of energy used doing it could run the entire US Power Grid for a month. When you’re doing that constant acceleration
game at 1-gee it doesn’t take twice as long to go twice as far. Getting to the Moon takes less than 4 hours,
the Sun is 400 times further away, at 1 AU or Astronomical Unit, but only takes 20 times
longer to get to, 20^2 equaling 400. You’d get there in just under 3 days,
To get to something 4 times further than that would take just under 6 days, twice as long,
for 2^2 or 4 times the distance. Now the inner planets move a lot in terms
of their distance relative to Earth but this tells us that using the constant 1-gee acceleration
and turnover method everything in the inner solar system out to the Asteroid Belt is reachable
from each other in days, a week tops. The outer planets don’t move as much in
terms of distance from earth, proportionally, so Jupiter is 6-7 days, Saturn 9 days, Uranus
13 days, and Neptune 16 days, all plus or minus some hours. Now I mentioned earlier that travel times
and efforts between nearest asteroids in the Belt is a lot less, and something similar
applies to the collection of Moons the gas giants all have, that will be important when
we get to Colonizing Jupiter later this month. However channel regulars know that we often
talk about developing the solar system way beyond just settling planets, moons, and asteroids
and constructing something called a Dyson Swarm, see the Dyson Spheres episode for more
detail on that. When discussing those I point out that the
image of a densely packed collection of orbital habitats is almost as inaccurate as the image
of a big inverted shell where folks live on the inside, and that such habitats would be
separated by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers from each other. If this is where most folks live, and where
most trade goes on, transit is quite quick. Energy is cheap too since you can in many
cases actually have a physical connection between the habitats with a tether. It’s cheaper than driving a car to the next
town and it is an environment where people could own their own rocket ship that they
drove to the neighboring habitat. There’s no air slowing you down so you press
the gas pedal, possibly literally since very little fuel is needed and chemical rockets
work just fine in this context and head on over. You’d get to a habitat 1000 kilometers away
in just ten minutes, doing the constant one-gee with turnover rate, and reach a maximum speed
of about Mach 10. Needless to say you could save fuel and go
slower. Of course you could go faster, hit 3 or 4
gees. Doing 4 gees will halve your travel time,
it follows that same square root relationship distance does. A lot of times you will go slower too, fuel
costs in terms of both price and mass will likely always be an issue and you might find
the places you want to travel to don’t want you coming in super-fast. Keep in mind, all those travel times assume
you were slowing down, if you didn’t you’d get there faster and if you used that slow
down fuel to speed up more you’d arrive even faster yet, and even just a passenger
vehicle going Mach 10 would hit like it was full of explosives. The ones doing interplanetary trips at constant
acceleration would hit like an equal weight of nukes. And any random bit of space garbage they hit
would do the same. So you could have speed limits inside a solar
system and I would tend to bet these would exist and be under 1% of light speed. Now we talked a bit about some of the issues
with currency, in electronic form, and light lag issues way back in the Cryptocurrency
episode but those are mostly manageable. You mostly had fraud issues with joint accounts
for couples, groups, clones, etc. It’s a bit of bigger issue when we move
up to interstellar trade though, especially if you are limited by the speed of light. What do you sell between solar systems? Not manufactured goods, even if 3D printing
hasn’t obliterated that sector at the interplanetary scale by the time you’re engaging in interstellar
trade, it’s just not very realistic to imagine that there’d be any economic advantage of
mass production that would translate to those kind of times and distances. Information? Yes, that is just as valid as before, how
big the market will be is hard to say, but there will be one. Earth ought to do well, or our solar system,
in this regard as we are likely to always be a bit of a center hub for information to
flow in and out of even after other systems are built up, and humanity could easily have
a million settled solar systems and still have 99% of the population living back in
our home system, doing almost all the science for many centuries to come. Passengers? Yes those too. People will want to travel if they can, some
might be fine with sending a digital copy by light speed transmission but many will
not be. Even post-biological beings might not be sanguine
about that option, since as we often point out on this topic, digital mind transfer is
not cut and paste, its copy and paste. How about raw materials? It is actually viable. Sending huge bulk freighters between solar
systems carrying megatons of metal or even hydrogen can be done, and if the demand is
high enough to justify the cost it might happen. But what exactly are you paying them with? What’s the money? Back in the Life in Space Colony series I
suggested that an interstellar colony vessel is almost better employed as a sort of roving
factory and people farm, not going to one system and stopping, but just pausing to drop
off most of its passengers and equipment and taking on more fuel and raw materials. It then moves on and the remaining folks breed
more colonists and spend their time manufacturing new colonization equipment for the next target
system from those raw materials. A concern one has there with these ships,
which we called Gardener Ships, is what the motivation to continue was. I mean those ships had crews, and a mission
from Earth, but how was Earth paying them? That’s the first Rule of Warfare, make sure
your soldiers get paid on time, and it applies to merchant marine ships and traders too. If your crews aren’t getting paid you probably
can’t rely on them continuing to do their jobs. Earth has the money, no problem, but getting
it usefully there is a problem. Maybe they can have it in an account back
home collecting interest? The same applies for interstellar trade in
general, you arrive in a system and you need to buy stuff for your ship and you need to
sell stuff. Hypothetically you sell it for the local currency
and use that to buy stuff but you have no idea what the selling rate for your cargo
will be until you arrive and that’s years off. You get a message from a nearby system that
they need colonists, especially those with a background in chemistry, and that they’ll
pay handsomely for them. You load up interested people, presumably
agreeing to split that reward fee to pay for their passage, and arrive twenty years later
only to find out they instituted a new educational policy to train more chemists and no longer
need the ones you brought. It doesn’t even matter that you might get
news en route, because unlike interplanetary ships with fusion engines, interstellar ones
do not accelerate the whole way, they mostly coast. So once they are en route they are en route. They can’t just slow down and turn around
because they only have the fuel to slow down, they probably have some reserves that might
be enough to steer them toward another system further off in the same general direction
but that’s it. These sorts of problems are serious issues
with interstellar trade that might prevent it ever being more than a bit of novelty,
though the sheer population size of a solar system, even one that hasn’t gone full Kardashev
2 Dyson Swarm, is enough to support a lot of novelty and you might still have ships
arriving regularly, even if they represented not a percent of a percent of the gross system
economy. I’ve never heard anyone satisfactorily overcome
these issues, and it’s arguably even more severe when discussing interstellar empires,
which we will look at next month, but they could be solvable. After all it remains a topic mostly discussed
in science fiction and that usually has faster than light travel or at least communication. Of course if you do have FTL, Faster Than
Light Travel, it makes a big difference. As would also be the case if you only had
FTL communications. We could do a whole episode just on the various
permutations of how trade would work depending on a given FTL system but a few deserve mention
for circumventing the norm. In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series
we only have light speed travel but instant communication. This has the interesting effect of allowing
essentially all information to be available anywhere anywhen, same as with the modern
internet, which the books mostly predate. We never want to forget that trade, especially
for high tech civilizations, tends to be as much in information as actual goods. Also in a civilization which has gone postbiological,
you can send a copy of yourself anywhere instantaneously this way. Another example that tosses out the normal
convention of spaceships plying the space lanes is wormholes. The classic theoretical wormhole can't be
on a planet because they are insanely massive, but most fictional portrayals treat it as
a simple portal window from point A to B. Such being the case, there’s no need to
have them in space when you can just have them on a planet. We see an example of that in the Stargate
Franchise, but we get another example in Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga where they aren’t
portals people walk through but through which they drive whole freight trains. They don’t even initially have spaceships
because they’re mostly worthless to them. We talked about that technology more in the
Wormholes episode, but from a trade perspective you can use wormholes for other things like
disposing of garbage or waste heat, or for providing raw materials or energy by opening
a portal up to the molten metal core of another planet or a star. That’s a point to always remember, we know
the kind of Black Swan disruptions we can get to an economy and civilization in general
from a new technology, obvious in hindsight but totally surprising at the time. However science fiction is often bad about
introducing technologies that have some very obvious consequences that the writers missed
or ignored. In a Star Trek style Universe with replicators
there should be no ships that don’t exist to either move people around or raw materials
around, because there’s no need for manufacturing or agriculture, and since there should be
no materials only available in one system, you would not expect any interstellar vessels
meant for any purpose other than defense, exploration, and passenger or colonist carrying. You also wouldn’t expect there to be commercial
hub systems or space piracy unless the FTL system required specific paths, because space
is ridiculously huge and while the shortest distance between two points is a straight
line, it is a constantly moving straight line for interstellar paths and more like a very
wide corridor probably several billion kilometers in diameter, which you can easily widen a
whole order of magnitude if you need to worry about pirates. Try as I might, I’ve never been able to
figure out a way in which space piracy could work outside of very specific fictional FTL
systems. There’s just no rivers or currents or mountain
passes that make an ideal place to both hide and expect traffic through. We might revisit interstellar trade more in
the future and we will be revisiting interstellar civilizations next month, but while interstellar
trade in anything but information seems dubious under known physics, it is possible. And as we’ve seen today, interplanetary
trade certainly is, even with just the technology we have now or on the near-horizon. Next week will be exploring interstellar space
some more in the Cosmic Ocean, and the week after that we will be looking at Mega-Earths,
artificial planets that dwarf our own homeworld, and which potentially can be provide more
living area than most interstellar empires we see in fiction. For alerts when those and other episode come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
If they exist - they're far more speculative - and imo probably don't.. exotic possibly non-baryonic materials might be tradable, or spacetime constructs. If it requires ridiculous constructs to produce them. I always think it might be cool to imagine megastructures using magmatter filaments getting destroyed in a war/disaster and "pirates" coming to try steal them. For science, just profit or "non-backdoored" versions.(if higher toposophic entities only produce the stuff)
Growing plants for air.. Problem is, you accumulate plant matter instead of CO2 to the extent you don't use the plant matter for food? You can get rid of it, but that largely produces CO2 again.
Bit of a nitpick,(possibly annoyingly political) but think the implication that it is either trade or violence awfully reductive. Cultures always gonna trade to some extent if they're in contact.. It doesn't necessary mean that is the cause for the peace between them.
Also, combining ideas that colonists need to be be paid(distinguish between that and well supplied) and post scarcity, i mean.. I suppose there are "you get 1% of new systems" or something possibly post-humanly used.. But there are also potential implications where the payment is basically domineering other persons..
If you take the reasons people want to go to Mars, it isn't exactly necessary payment that is the motivation. It seems like other motivations exist and play a large role. Stuff like Patreon is also kindah trade, but it largely forgos excludability on one side.
Again, I think this video lacks the rejuvenation angle. With eternal youth the wealthy will eventually trek out into space by self-bought self-sufficient spaceships (1), in order to mine resources in the solar system for further goals. That makes a HUGE impact to the entire subject. Because you no longer need to make a buck from the Earth-centric perspective for it to make financial sense.
(1) 3D printers capable of printing materials mined. Nutrient-replicators that recycle biological elements so that there is no need for a 2000 ton spacefarm per person. Even perhaps bioprinters that make rejuvenation treatments, to avoid having to go pick up new treatments in Earth orbit. Solar panels for energy for the nutrient recycling and resource extraction.