Comment by Nevermark
14 hours ago
> Furthermore, light-speed lag and distance mean that child civilizations must be functionally independent of parent cultures.
Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system.
That might sound uneconomical. Why not just go to the other system? But moving trillions of beings, and disrupting all their practical considerations and dependencies, would be a far more costly enterprise.
In the short run it would be resource acquisition. In the long run, the new system would accumulate entities, and then a civilization of its own. But there might still be strong value, or incentives, for the original system to continue acting as a kind of capital/dominant/higher value location.
Long distance/time dependencies could develop and be naturally maintained via complex decentralized indirect but intertwined economic arrangements. Just as shareholders who have done nothing but push a button on their phone to get an electronic record of having some stock in a company, have strong property rights over complex systems they may never see or understand, because it is in everyone's interest for the system to keep working.
Also, automated systems that defend themselves and their owners positions, even across a few light years. With the owners being able to trade their value in real time, even if the physical returns are long term.
> Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system.
You mean colonize and feed the empire?
Exactomundo.
> Long distance/time dependencies could develop and be naturally maintained via complex decentralized indirect but intertwined economic arrangements.
But that would require causality-breaking FTL, no? Otherwise the speed of light itself would create enough of an obstacle to make any trade impractical. Property rights only work if they are enforceable, which is the case on Earth but not over interstellar distances.
If a system is distributed enough, with complex financial and legal dependencies, a great deal of indirection becomes stable, because to violate the indirection would put so many direct relationships in peril.
And when there is reliability, even over vast distances and time, that future-value can be traded as today-value. With risk assessments of course, but this is how a great deal of the economy works. More and more of the economy, as it becomes growth and innovation focused, operates on the currency of expectation.
> Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system.
This reminds me of those old 4X-type games like "Stars!" where I would often do exactly this. Basically some planets were good for living on and others were good for mining and you'd have a constant caravan of freighters from the latter to the former.