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Star Markets


Asperion

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A society that crosses many star systems will need to operate in a manner similar to what it does today, only on a much greater scale. The government will still need to govern the people and businesses by any means available, possibly the same as what is used today. Even businesses will operate the same way, using the same tricks to convince people to purchase what they do not want or need. The question here is what will these future businesses be selling? It could be essentially the same as a modern device or service or this product or service would be tailored to the future society.

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Well, a lot depends on what technology you assume is possible for that society.

 

In the future I designed as backdrop for my Planetary Romance campaign, it was routine and easy to dissolve anything down into its component atoms, separate the elements and recombine them using, essentially, atomic-scale 3-D printing to make anything you want. Asteroid mining also meant that for advanced worlds, most raw materials were ridiculously abundant. This changed what was cheap and what was valuable.

 

* Just about anything made from abundant elements (iron, carbon, silicon, etc.) was cheap, at least until you get into *really* big things such as O'Neill colony superstructures. Diamond is as cheap as charcoal, because it's just a matter of how you arrange the atoms.

 

* But atomic transmutation is still far too expensive, in terms of energy, to be worth it. So, intrinsically rare elements such as lanthanum, gallium or uranium are still fairly valuable.

 

* The most valuable substances are "hypernuclear" substances not made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which must be made in gigantic particle accelerators: antimatter, strange matter, monopoles, etc. (These were vital to most of the rest of my rubber science such as FTL and artificial gravity.)

 

* Complex organics are still difficult to manufacture. So, gourmet food items are still valuable. Even the most advanced aliens still can't print a top-quality aged wine or cheese -- it's just too complicated. Which suggests the last class of value...

 

* Provenance. Original things are valuable. Even if you can print a thousand copies of the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa, the originals are still valuable for their history. One reason the rest of humanity pays attention to the world that was my setting is that it produced original folk art. Live music is another example: Paying actual people to show up and play (instead of playing a recording, or having a computer generate the performance) was a major form of conspicuous consumption. Or just having live servants instead of robots -- though being a waiter is considered a kind of performance art in its own right.

 

Different available technologies will result in different standards of value.

 

Dean Shomshak

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Governments dont necessarily have to run that way. You can have a civilization that has no economy. Where the population at large shares all the recources it encounters equally among its citizens.

 

You can have an economy based upon slave labor which is able to produce material objects cheaply because it does not pay its workers.

 

Wildly differing needs will oftentimes lead to different cultures not trading with one another. Or perhaps one planet or system holds a resource which is needed across the galaxy making that one system of ultimate import. (Arakis)

 

There are so many variables here, this is a subject that could potentially be discussed endlessly.

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