I tossed my thoughts out to the world about light speed economics earlier. As I was reading Dan Simmons’ Hyperion I noticed a character espouse ideas similar to mine and made a quick decision to note it. Going forward I’ll continue to note how relativistic economics is portrayed in science fiction as I find examples.
A character in Hyperion, the poet Martin Silenus begins his story telling his audience how he was set on a slower than light ship in cryosleep in order to accrue a bunch of interest on his investments, similar to how Ender got rich in those books. Silenus was packaged onboard with “cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate and feeder viruses … with an objective time-debt of one hundred and sixty-seven standard years!” This implies that even though the Hyperion universe has farcaster technology that allows for instant teleportation between locations, there is still a market for standard shipments of cargo.
Two pages later, Silenus complains about “a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind” and how technology progresses so incredibly slow. The technology involved is “instantly identifiable – and operable! – to our great-grandfathers.” Silenus presents this lack of progress as a symptom of people becoming lazy, less inquisitive, and generally bemoaning the current state of affairs. I would argue, and already have in my previous post, that this sort of inventive Dark Age is inevitable with interstellar travel simply because the time-cost necessary to move goods back and forth is a death sentence for innovation. How can food scientists innovate more nutritious milk when it takes nearly two centuries for cattle embryos to arrive?
Hopefully this will become a repeated column because the more I think about interstellar trade, the more interested I become. This has to be some fertile ground in science fiction; there is no way I am the first person to come up with this idea.
The Keasy Depot 