This episode is sponsored by Audible. In the future vast space freighters might
trade between worlds, attracting pirates, and in space, no one can hear you âarrrâ Humanity has a history of romanticizing piracy
and science fiction is no exception, so I reckoned today weâd go ahead and ask how
realistic space pirates are and how they might ply their trade. Like most things in the future, thereâs
not going to be a set answer since it will vary a lot by the time frames, technology,
and level of colonization involved. While real Piracy is a pretty nasty affair,
given that weâre coming up on the darkest day of the year and the holidays season is
upon us, I figured weâd keep things pretty light-hearted this Ar-Thursday and have some
fun with the topic, so grab a drink and snack. In some ways, space is ideal for piracy. Itâs far easier to raid and plunder when
youâre dealing with isolated small communities separated by huge gulfs of distance and time,
and even a fully developed Dyson Swarm with a billion, trillion people is less densely
populated than those Caribbean islands and the trade routes so famous for pirate ships
in the Age of Sail. A classic Space Opera setting of maybe a few
million sparsely inhabited planets in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars would seem
like an ideal place for piracy, so big and empty. On the other hand, space is so big and empty. Itâs very hard to hide in, which makes it
easier to find prey to attack, but itâs very hard to hide from those folks looking
to hunt pirates down too. Ships also have to move very fast to get from
place to place and that makes them hard to rendezvous with, as they are not constantly
running their engines to maintain speed, like you do on Earth, but instead burn almost all
their fuel initially speeding up or slowing down. Though for ultra-fast ships they actually
would run their engine constantly to fight the drag of the not-quite-vacuum of space,
and weâll come back to that. You also need a reason to attack a ship and
plunder it, which usually means its cargo is worth more than the risk of acquiring it. Thatâs not always the case but where it
is, you presumably arenât attacking some bulk freighter hauling ice to some in-system
terraforming project. Raw materials generally arenât super valuable. If our manufacturing gets good enough, that
might be the only real trade item as every small colony can print whatever they want
so long as they have the raw materials. On the other hand you might have massive luxury
markets in unique items. For instance, two places might exchange museum
displays and if those two are fully developed Dyson Swarms, they might literally be shipping
billions of masterpieces back and forth regularly, simply because they have billions of times
more people than we do. Such civilizations are just so immense that
they might need to send a ship the size of the Smithsonian Museum just to contain all
the prized masterworks being lent to a neighbor for a display, yet regard that as only a tiny
fraction of their treasures, as we might regard one museum lending another a single Van Gogh
or Michelangelo work. To such massive civilizations, even if the
idea of buying a bottle of... rum made under an alien sun, rather than one perfectly replicated
closer to home might be considered so crazy-wasteful than only one in a billion people would do
it, but you could still stuff a massive freighter ship full of such bottles and find billions
of buyers at your destination. The space between such systems is almost beyond
imagining, even just the relatively thin column of space connecting those systems, and yet
they might easily have billions of ships running back and forth between them, just carrying
such exotic booty. And of course, thereâs always data. Stealing data is a huge market already, and
data is likely to be the main item of trade in between worlds in the future. That might be beamed out, at the speed of
light, or it might be physically shipped too. So, to look at this notion of space piracy
weâll have to look at some specific cases and naturally we canât be exhaustive. I figure we may as well start near the beginning
and ask what is most likely to be the first act of piracy committed in space in the future. On Earth, pirates are considered Hostis Humani
Generis, enemies of all mankind, and while weâll be treating the topic fairly humorously
today I should add that in my opinion that designation is very proper. There are a handful of historical examples
of pirates that werenât all bad, but even among those, usually the best that could be
said was that they were operating against some factions that were themselves fit for
Davy Jonesâ locker! They sometimes were basically just naval units
of some country operating unofficially or as a proxy in some combat, privateering - where
they act as pirates but hold a commission from a government, preying on an enemyâs
shipping. And thatâs also an example where they need
not turn a profit in their mission as their mission was often just crippling someone elseâs
shipping. So, too, they could also often benefit from
support from whoever they were working with. Such support could involve concealment or
even outright financing, supply, and repair. They might also just have a working relationship
for fencing stolen goods, some country or corporation might be only too happy to see
a competitor take a hit and hide the booty as one of their own exports. An example might be an oil company that sponsors
pirates to steal tankers from a rival then resold that oil themselves, which is apparently
a current practice in some areas. Tankers often hold a value in oil similar
to the cost of the ship itself, so even if you canât repurpose the ship or cannibalize
it for parts, you got that oil your rival lost and the ship, and even just scuttling
their ship and denying them its use might alter your respective profit margins enough
to beat them out. Of course thatâs why thereâs insurance
and also insurance investigators, and itâs kind of hard to hide a million barrels of
oil in surplus production, let alone a new ship, even assuming anyone could run a chop
shop for oil tankers. They and standard law enforcement donât
need to be too clever to even just notice that youâre not buying as many replacement
parts as your shipping should require or as your oil pumping and refining operations should
require for that much extra oil to have been produced. I mention that because a big part of space
piracy tends to revolve around whether or not stealth in space is possible, either in
a practical sense of just being hard to detect or full-blown cloaking. On this channel we take the standpoint that
under known science no cloaking of ships is possible which tends to put a dent in the
viability of classic piracy adapted to space operations, but itâs worth noting that even
if someone does invent some way of hiding against a given mode of detection, thereâs
plenty of forensic ways to track the culprits down. Which is nothing new either, and why piracy
tends to flourish where thereâs conflict or instability or corruption in a region either
aiding them or simply running unintentional interference against investigation or enforcement
by being unable or unwilling to assist. That is a factor that really does not relate
to a civilizationâs technological advancement too much, as even a very advanced civilization
might still harbor pirates simply because they arenât organized for dealing with them. Thatâs not necessarily a corruption or incapacity
issue either, a civilization that is very opposed to governments being able to look
at private files or track and regulate such things might feel some piracy was an acceptable
cost for increased personal privacy. So nobody can track space yachts being used
as pirate vessels even though they have massive radar arrays that can easily see them because
they canât share or store ship identities, or ships can dock at ports without being inspected
to see what their cargo was or if that freshly painted ship used to be under a different
name and recently got stolen. One can easily imagine an industrialized orbital
space over Earth full of hundreds of thousands of orbital factories, refineries, docks, space
habitats, farms, hotels, defensive batteries, and ships. Many of those ships might never leave orbit,
simply slowly moving between elements of that swarm, and potentially through regions this
or that Earth nation might consider their space and jurisdiction. Itâs not hard to imagine some problems with
piracy popping up, simply from the massive and confused tangle. This could be even worse if we started adding
orbital rings and space towers and elevators into the mix, since ships might be getting
raided while docked at any of those rather than in transit. But Iâd not expect that to be the first
place for space piracy. We often talk about things that might kickstart
space industry on the show and a popular one is asteroid mining for rare elements like
gold or platinum. Or anything where you can mine it out there
and give it a shove back to Earthâs space for less cost and fuel than mining it on Earth
and dragging it up to space. Ironically it will often be cheaper to drag
iron ore a couple hundred million kilometers through space than to push them just a couple
hundred kilometers through air and into orbit. So long as youâre in no hurry to deliver
them so they can make a low fuel transit over a few years to get there. Needless to say iron is not too hard to find
and grab, though doing so might cost you more fuel, in the near-term, than the stuff was
worth. But for stuff like Gold and Platinum, where
we would likely be shipping it down to Earth itself, the story is quite different. Even at modern launch costs, a pile of gold
bars sitting on the Moon is absolutely worth going and retrieving, and a big unmanned pod
full of gold headed from the Asteroid Belt to Earth is too. Now, you canât hide spaceships well, a rocket
flame isnât even a little bit covert, and you can see the Space Warfare episode for
some more discussion of this âno stealth in spaceâ issue, but it relies on the assumption
that you are able to look at a given spot and look well enough to see it, and neither
detection gear, operation and maintenance costs, nor all the associated data gathering
and analysis are free. Weâve got mountain sized rocks floating
around the Belt weâve never actually seen, thereâs around a million of them, and even
those we have seen weâve really only looked at briefly and seen as little blurs. We have telescopes right now that if they
were pointed at one would notice a spaceship lighting off its engine there, but barely
and maybe, so when we say you canât hide a ship moving around the Belt from detection,
what we mean is against local detection or a massively upscaled planetary detection grid. For now, if someone was getting attacked,
theyâd have to send a signal back letting us know it was happening and their current
location and trajectory so we could swing a telescope their way and about all we might
detect is that yes, there was a ship there with its engines on. Or a blob with a bright tail, maybe two of
them or maybe the resolution wouldnât be good enough and it would just be one blob
but too bright a blob for that single ship to produce. They definitely arenât going to be running
a radar thatâs going to spot another ship approaching until itâs already close enough
to be shooting at them and they may already be getting boarded by the time their message
gets back to Earth. Currently they might be able to pillage that
ship and just fly off without us being able to see who or what did it or where theyâre
going next, but even with decently better detection systems, they probably only need
to plot a course to pass behind another asteroid relative to Earth and burn hard on a new trajectory
while there, then coast as they leave that shadow. We could see a big spike in radiation around
that object, but have a hard time determining which way it was pointed. They might bounce a few times, to help shake
tracking, fly toward one, burn on a new trajectory to another, rinse and repeat until theyâre
confident we lost them and they can return to their base. Now that is easily defeatable, you just need
to build bigger telescopes or scatter scopes out in the belt or the shipping lanes, but
that costs money and a lot of money right now. I donât think most countries would feel
like dumping tens of billions of dollars into a big detection grid just to protect a bunch
of probably unmanned pods carrying gold or platinum, at least not until the quantities
involved massively exceeded the cost of building and maintaining that detection grid. Even if the cost was being paid in whole or
part by the asteroid miners, that simply lowers their own profit margins by spiking their
operating costs and thereâs likely to be cheaper ways, since that gold has to be brought
home and sold. Of course some nation or spacedock of dubious
morality might be only too happy to let them funnel their stolen merchandise through them. Also, the miners might have less savory motives
for not wanting to pay for such a grid too. Itâs hard to guess how mining will go in
terms of the legalities but Iâd tilt to assuming theyâd be buying the rights off
either some Earth nation for an asteroid they had claim on or some multinational oversight
body like the UN. They probably are getting stung pretty hard
for those rights too, after all its money weâre talking about and governments and
taxpayers are fond of money, so the licensing cost is likely to be a pretty big chunk of
whatever the difference is between raw operating costs and revenue generated on each sale,
so operations will probably be marginally profitable in many cases, and more so as people
are increasingly competing to ship precious metals home, particularly as the price for
those metals will probably start to drop as the supply rises. If your competitors are getting raided, you
profit. Similarly, itâs a lot easier to sneak in
and plunder an asteroid of raw materials instead of paying for a license if there isnât some
massive detection grid in place, and you just claim the one you did license had a lot more
gold than you thought it did. So a lot of miners might not be too sanguine
about such a detection grid even if they werenât expected to pay for it. And thereâs the more directed type of piracy
too, sneaking up on a mining base, jamming its signals, and going in with space marines
to seize the place. Now youâve got its loot, its equipment,
and an operating base, at least temporarily. And gold has no provenance, so as long as
you have a means of selling lots of gold without raising eyebrows, nobody knows where you got
it or how you got it. You might not necessarily be doing this with
big ships and crews either. A lot of times these sort of cargoes will
be an unmanned pod with just a beacon and a little maneuvering thrusters and guidance
gear falling toward Earth to be scooped up. You might only need a ship the size of pirateâs
parrot to swoop in, attach to that pod, sever its guidance computer and beacon and replace
them with the parrotâs, then detour that package to a pickup spot. Now this all has any number of possible countermeasures,
thereâs many ways you might foil that space parrot for instance with tamper proof or encrypted
gear and controls, but those cost money and take time to develop and implement. They doubtless would get implemented eventually
but we might easily see a period of space piracy like this, during early space colonization. As the Belt develops, as more mining bases
turn into permanent communities and trade and refining hubs develop out there, as we
discussed in Colonizing Ceres, that period will come to a close the same as it did for
piracy in the Caribbean. Thatâs not the only type of piracy though. For instance, as we get more developed in
space, people will be moving around and probably on dedicated passenger liners. You could obviously classically kidnap and
ransom those folks but thatâs a lot harder to do and get away with than it sounds, and
youâre dealing with lots of people now not some unmanned cargo pod or even a lightly
manned ship or asteroid mining base. If you attempt such a thing, every hand will
be turned against you, and hunt you even at great cost, except for those hands so stained
dark that youâd be a fool to clasp them with any trust. But just because the ship is manned and has
passengers, doesnât mean the pirate ship has to be. That parrot-puppet approach we mentioned a
moment ago for hijacking pods can be modified to just be a bomb that can sneak up and latch
on a ship and threaten to blow it up if money is not paid. Itâs rather likely that the future will
have means of moving money around anonymously, cryptocurrency being the most likely method,
and it would be very hard to track some pencil thin communication beam from the parrot-bomb
to its controller, which could also be rigged as a dead man switch to explode if the beam
got blocked for too long. You could use this same approach to demand
bribes on unmanned cargo pods too, threatening to detonate the cargo pod and scatter its
precious gold to the solar winds. Doesnât take much to make such a thing and
you might litter a space lane with them. Now itâs worth remembering that space is
huge and patrolling, detecting, or mining it all is rather tricky, but at the same time,
there are paths things would tend to follow. Theyâre a lot broader than some road or
sealane, and theyâre mobile and changing as stuff orbits around, but they are predictable
and detouring much from them can get a bit expensive in time and fuel. The more you detour, the more your operating
costs rise and your profits sink as you deliver slower, and also the less protection youâre
likely to have from any patrols, space forts, or detection systems on that path. As we widen our sphere to include the outer
planets, youâd also have to deal with shipping between the moons of those various gas giants,
who likely would all be separate nations or entities, possibly part or separate from some
nation back here on Earth. Places like Jupiter with dozens of moons,
or Saturn, with its own flock of moons and planetary ring of icy bodies, might be very
vulnerable to hijacking and ransom issues. Once we go further out to the Kuiper Belt,
while there is far more material and bodies there than in the Asteroid Belt, they are
quite far apart, where even if every mountain-sized place had an outpost you might still have
an hour of signal lag time between many of your close neighbors. This gets worse in the Oort Cloud where it
might be days before a signal even reached any sizable outposts and months to get a response
force there. Itâs also a huge volume to patrol and detect
inside. So you might get a second period of space
piracy like we predict for the Asteroid Belt out in the Kuiper Belt and a Third in the
Oort Cloud, though they wonât have too much more beside ice to sell. Still, if folks are pushing ice in-system
for terraforming Mars or similar, that can be hijacked or ransomed. But it also starts giving us options for Interstellar
Piracy, because folks can hide bases out in those distant Oort Bodies. Itâs also, as we mentioned in Colonizing
the Oort Cloud, a great place for folks to settle and build colonies who just want to
be alone and isolated. You can never really expect to just colonize
a new star system and stay isolated, for all that theyâre further away, because they
just contain so many assets and are so densely packed, relatively speaking, that youâd
expect others to arrive or for your own numbers to grow and diversify. If your goal is a community of a million or
so folks living in some small isolated community, some religion or ideologyâs private utopia,
the Oort Cloud is your best bet for long term isolation. Such places would be rather vulnerable to
quiet annexation by some pirate fleet as theyâd be quiet and private by nature. So too, they might host such pirates freely
but quietly, to discourage neighbors arriving. In many ways a big icy rock a few dozen kilometers
across floating in the Oort Cloud just light weeks from Earth is more isolated than some
star system hundreds of light years from Earth. And again, part of that is the time and growth
factor, which weâll discuss a bit more next week, because something as big as a star system
hosting a dozen major planets and untold minor planets is going to grow in numbers and develop
with time. Probably into a Dyson Swarm. One that probably has huge interstellar laser
highways connecting it to all its near neighbors and maybe even some fairly distant ones that
serve as hub-systems in the galaxy. See the Interstellar Laser Highways episode
for details, but those are likely to be rather thin columns, again relatively speaking, that
traffic moves down. Depending on setup you might have massive
pushing laser relay bases along the way every light day or so. Now those relays would be Star Fortresses
of devastating power and detection ability, they do after all have those huge pushing
lasers which can obviously be altered to be weapons or great big spot lights and detection
beams, and indeed need that capacity for detecting and clearing debris on the highway. Still theyâre likely to have a big lag time
and theyâre likely to have lots of ships moving around them that could attack each
other. Stealth comes in many forms and a well-placed
bribe might let you get a false identity for your ship, then you just alter course a little
to come alongside a fellow traveler and board them. That Star Fort Relay can absolutely see you
and vaporize you but it has a huge lag time for detection and targeting and canât be
firing off at random down that crowded space lane. But you do either have to leave it or continue
down it. If you do the latter, the next relay-fortress
is going to have gotten word and will deal with you easily. If you jump the highway and flee, you are
doing so under your own power and fuel, while that fortress can send out waves of laser-propelled
ships, drones, detectors, relativistic kill missiles and so on to hunt you down, as can
all its sister fortresses. Now, I mentioned leaving the track and having
to do it under your own power and thatâs a big issue in ship-to-ship engagements in
space. Unless you have some infinite power source
or external one, like the laser-propulsion relays, you have a speed based on your available
fuel to accelerate, maneuver, and decelerate with. Anybody youâre hijacking is probably already
at their cruising speed with their engines off, because itâs a vacuum and they donât
need to run their engines to keep moving at that speed. You need more speed and fuel to vector in,
match trajectories, and then alter course since you probably donât want to go to their
original destination after you rob them. Same as things change a bit if someone develops
some bit of Stealth Clarketech, they change if someone develops an effective infinite
fuel engine. Now a shipâs cruising speed is whatever
its engines can keep pushing against in terms of drag, as at high enough speeds ships in
the not-quite-vacuum of space begin experiencing the same resistance as objects in air or water
do. This happens at speeds so fast time is running
much slower on board and objects move toward or away from places about as fast as their
signal move, so it alters the game quite a bit. There is nothing like stealth involved here,
as the sorts of power involved in those engines is going to be gigantic enough to be spotted
by detection arrays in neighboring systems, especially considering the implied power generation
capability of those ships would make for breathtakingly powerful radar systems using those same reactors,
but it does permit that more classic pursuit, boarding, and getaway method of terrestrial
piracy and space opera. Faster than light travel also brings its own
special considerations into play, including ambushing people via time travel and weâll
be looking at those concepts more in the upcoming months. Of course any such method will have its own
unique approaches and characteristics and thatâs something of our limit for today. We can hypothesize some clever method of concealment
or stealth for instance, but each method would have its own unique concepts for adapting
it to piracy or trade or warfare. Thatâs always a challenge for a science
fiction writer too, especially if they leave known physics. They come up with some physics-breaking technology
and donât really think about the full impact on things like trade, warfare, society, and
so on. Some fan writes asking why they donât seem
to use some really obvious application like ramming the enemy with FTL drones or such
and some handwave has to be cobbled together. Indeed this is generally inevitable no matter
how good a writer is with any science fiction technologies, or for that matter, magic systems
in fantasy. I have a special fondness for authors who
do their research and try to put together their setting to consider all the impacts
on strategy that might result, and one of my favorites for that is David Weber, who
has a book series following the protagonist Honor Harrington, a naval commander of the
Manticorian Star Kingdom. Weber really tries to look at how the naval
strategies would adapt to three dimensions, the propulsion technologies this setting has,
and the scale of the civilizations involved. While fundamentally still space opera, itâs
a cut above most in its devotion to realism inside the permitted technologies, and the
storylines and characters are excellent. It also spends a lot of time looking at space
piracy in later novels, particularly Honor Among Enemies, though I do suggest starting
with the first novel, On Basilisk Station. If youâd like to grab a copy of either book
to listen to, or any of the others in the series, theyâre all available on Audible,
just use my link Audible.com/Isaac or text Isaac to 500-500. Audible offers a 30 day free trial, but each
month youâre a member you now get a free audiobook and 2 audible originals, and those
credits rollover to the next month or year and stay yours, along with any books you got,
even if you later discontinue your membership. And with their convenient app, you can listen
on any of your devices and seamlessly pick up where you left off, whether youâre commuting,
at the gym, or during your holiday travels. And speaking of holidays, how about giving
yourself the gift of an Audible membership? Now is the best time to do it with a special
offer of 53% off your first 3 months. Right now, for a limited time, you can get
3 months of Audible for just $6.95 a month. Thatâs more than half off the regular price. Give yourself the gift of listening, go to
Audible.com/Isaac. Next week weâll be looking at another dilemma
that will trouble future spacefaring civilizations even more than piracy, Time itself, as we
examine the myriad issues of how time complicates things. From calendars needing different days and
years to how time distortion from relativity can throw of timekeeping. But weâll also contemplate the impact that
ultra-long lives, century long voyages, and million year megaegineering projects will
have, in Interstellar Civilizations and Time. That will close us out for the year, but not
for the topic, as weâll start 2020 off by looking at Time Travel, both why this is thought
to be impossible and what it would mean if it turned out not to be. For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if youâd like to support the channel,
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Holidays, and have a great week!
There are an uncomfortable amount of opportunities for piracy, more than I thought possible. Great job!
I also really enjoyed the deeper look at stealth in space.
There is no stealth in space. *
*=If you have a surveillance web big enough.**
**=If everyone agrees on the same surveillance web and no one has shared incentive to poke holes in it.***
***= The Space Whales are looking into this.
You didn't take alien pirates into account!