by Roger Bourke White Jr., May 2006
It is unlikely that mankind will develop faster than light speed (FTL) space travel or FTL interplanetary communications methods. So, while "warp speed" and subspace or hyper-space communicators are very nice features for advancing story lines in Space Opera-style science fiction, they are unlikely to be available to mankind in our real future.
Since it is unlikely we will have FTL spacecraft or communicators, what will interstellar space commerce really be like in our future?
Let us presume that mankind will be able to develop constant acceleration spacecraft, and that those spacecraft become the primary method for moving, and communicating, between stars. Let us further presume that these interstellar spaceships will maintain a constant 1G acceleration, so that a person will experience a healthy and comfortable Earth-like gravity for the duration of the trip.
(Note: when the fastest communication system is the same as the fastest transportation system, and both take years to make a journey, the situation is similar to that on our world during the 18th and 19th centuries, when sailing ships were the fastest way to move between Europe, Asia and America. I will be modeling what we will experience in the future off what we humans experienced in that era. The development of transcontinental and transoceanic telegraph lines in the 1850's ended that era.)
The following are things that must happen before we have interstellar space commerce, therefore, they are axioms of space commerce.
Axiom One: Space Commerce will happen only after huge profits can be made in moving goods or ideas from one star system to another.
Axiom Two: Even though it will take decades-to-thousands of years for a specific ship to return to its home world, ways will be found to make it profitable for planets to build interstellar space ships.
Axiom One: Space commerce must be profitable or extensive space travel won't happen. Compare the results of Lief Ericson or the Irish monks discovering America to the result of Columbus discovering America. When Ericson and the Irish monks returned with news of their discovery, their respective communities said, "That's nice." and did little to exploit the news. The result: those discoveries became minor curiosities of history. Columbus's discovery was followed by millions of people and millions of investment dollars heading for the New World, and that is why we remember Columbus' discovery so vividly.
Likewise, Neil Armstrong is steadily becoming a curiosity of history as manned space commerce does not develop. What space commerce will require is ways to make billions and trillions of dollars from traveling through space. We won't have space commerce until many people who engage in it become rich beyond our wildest dreams. This is what happened to the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch who opened up the New World and Far East trade routes, and what happened to the Shilla Dynasty Koreans who opened up the China - Japan trade routes in 600AD.
So this is the First Axiom of space commerce: huge profits will be made doing it. Until huge profits can be made, there will be no space commerce, and space travel will consist of fitful and sporadic exploring, and it will be easily interrupted by disasters of the Space Shuttles' sort.
Likewise, we have Axiom Two: planets will not build the thousands-to-ten of thousands of ships that interstellar space commerce implies unless ways are found to make it profitable to do so. This is not as easy as it sounds because of the long travel times. For many decades-to-centuries a planet will build and send out spacecraft before a steady return of "home built" spacecraft can begin to happen. The planet must bear this initial cost. So, Axiom Two is that ways will be found to make planets willing to bear the initial costs of starship construction. This means that part of the development of space commerce is going to be answering the question, "I'm living on Planet X; what's in it for me to invest heavily in spacecraft?"
Now assuming space commerce happens, which is assuming that:
a) many people are making trillions doing it, and
b) that planetary people have figured how to get their share of the trillions,
lets talk about what space commerce will look like....
The space travel we are doing these days (the beginning of the 21st century) is based on boost-and-coast rocket technology -- the propelling rocket engine fires powerfully, but only briefly, and when it is done the spacecraft spends the rest of its journey coasting to the destination. This technology has gotten exploring probes to the planets of the solar system, but it's performance is too low to get people comfortably around the solar system, much less from one star to another. Boost-and-coast technology takes years to get around the solar system and using it for interstellar journeys would mean journeys that would take thousands-to-millions of years. It would take hundreds of years to get a ship from the Solar System to the Alpha Centuri, the near star, 4 light-years (LY) away. This level of performance is just too low to allow space commerce to develop.
For space commerce to happen we will have to jump up to a new level of performance. The new performance level will come from developing constant acceleration space ships -- ships in which the engine firing all the time. It is either constantly pushing the ship faster and faster towards its destination, or constantly slowing the ship down so it will stop when it arrives at the destination. This is what constant acceleration means.
When a ship travels this way, it will spend much of it's time near the speed of light, which means time is going to tick away at very different rates for those on planets and those on the ships.
When a ship leaves one star system and heads for another at 1G acceleration, it will take about six months to reach .9C, and that is close to as fast as the space ship will go when one is watching it from a planet. (The top speed is C.) So from a planetary perspective, constant acceleration starcraft journeys look as if they have three "legs": first, an accelerating-to-lightspeed leg that lasts about six months, then an at-lightspeed leg that lasts most of the journey, and finally a deaccelerating-from-lightspeed leg that also lasts about six months. The rule-of-thumb time to make a journey, any constant acceleration journey, is the light years to the destination, plus a year for starting and stopping. A trip to Alpha Centuri (4 LY away) takes 5 years, and a trip to the center of the Milky Way (30,000 LY away) takes 30,000 years.
A second note on constant acceleration journeys when viewed from the planetary perspective: the ship's acceleration makes almost no difference to the duration of the journey, because all constant acceleration ships will get to near light speed comparatively quickly, and then spend the rest of the journey traveling at light speed. This means that a ship traveling at .5G will take just about the same time to make a journey as a ship traveling 5G.
For the ship and the people on the ship, the journey duration looks dramatically different than it does from the planetary perspective. For the people on the ship the journey duration looks like "vanilla" Newtonian physics: the ships accelerates towards the destination for half the journey and breaks for half the journey. All the time the ship is accelerating, it looks as if it's coming at the destination faster and faster, and all the time it is decelerating it sees the approach slowing down. In sum, the journey always takes a lot less time from the ship perspective than from the planetary perspective, and, the duration of the journey is quite sensitive to the acceleration -- the more acceleration that is applied, the shorter the journey. The difference between ship time and planetary time can be dramatic: a ship journeying from the Solar System to the Galaxy Center at 1G acceleration will take about 340 years to make the journey -- ship's time, and 30,000 years to make the journey -- planetary time.
(Note: since stars and planets in the Milky Way galaxy do not move at near light speed relative to each other, clocks on all the planets tick at pretty much the same rate. Planetary time applies to both the departure planet and the destination planet.)
| Destination | 1G | 2G | 5G | 10G | Planet time |
| Alpha Centuri | 4 | 2.8 | 1.8 | 1.3 | 5 |
| Serius | 7 | 5 | 3 | 2.2 | 13 |
| Galactic Core | 340 | 244 | 155 | 110 | 30,000 |
Since interstellar spaceships will travel for years-to-decades in space (ship time), and, because of the difference in time passage between planets and spaceships, the crew will rarely meet up again with planetary friends and relatives, so the crew will become a community unto itself. The smallest successful social unit for mankind living on Earth is small tribes or villages, so it's likely that successful interstellar space ships will carry crews at least the size of small villages (50-100 people), and more likely the size of small towns to small cities (100-10,000 people).
For the same reason, the wealth that the crew accumulates from successful ventures will be associated with the ship. There will be no "home planet" that the ship returns to where the crew will retire and add to the wealth of their community. This is because as the ship travels, its home planet will age dramatically, so it will become as strange a place to the crew as any other planet they travel to.
For these reasons the ship's crews will have a social structure and a social feel similar to contemporary gypsies -- the ships and their crews will circulate among various planetary communities, and trade with those communities they travel among, but the crew will not consider themselves a part of any of these communities.
The ship's cargo is the hardest thing to speculate on. It must be hugely valuable. (See the First Axiom), but what that will be is hard to guess -- just as it would have been hard to guess in 1300 that in 1600 moving silks and spices would make the Dutch masters of Holland the richest people in the world, by far. It would likewise have been unpredictable that potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco would have become South America's most valuable exports.
Even with the best technology imaginable (but still possible), interstellar journeys will be long and expensive. (Once again, the sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries provide a good model. The wind they used was a free fuel, but the ship required to harness that free fuel for a transoceanic journey was expensive to build, maintain and crew.)
The journeys of interstellar craft will take years to hundreds of years from ship perspective and decades to tens of thousands of years from planetary perspective. This means that in conventional interstellar commerce ordering something for delivery from another planet is impossible: a planetary merchant will not be able to look at his shelves and say, "Umm... I need some more Zenubian Worm Wine, I'll fax an order to Planet Zenube today." Instead the space ship crew will have to look at what is available to buy on a world, and guess what will be sellable at some planet down the line. (and, like silks, china and spices in the 18th and 19th centuries the profit margins will have to be huge by contemporary Earth standards. For instance, the gross profit margin on spices in that era was about 3,000 percent.)
It is unlikely that simple minerals, such as gold or diamonds, or simple knowledge, such as new math formulas, will be profitable cargoes for star ships. If something is of simple structure, it's likely to be easier to build a factory to make it at the destination planet. Likewise, if the something is composed of simple knowledge, such as the DNA which makes a particular antibody, it will be cheaper to build a research lab at the destination to learn the knowledge. What will be profitable to carry across the depths of space will be complex goods -- goods that are hard to fabricate unless several conditions are met at the same place and same time.
Surprisingly, this means that foodstuffs and clothing are likely to be good cargoes -- the same stuff that the merchant sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries shipped. Attractive cargoes won't be commodity foodstuffs -- those prepared because they are cheap, easy and nutritious -- but delicacy foodstuffs. Ingredients for recipes that are devilishly difficult to prepare even under the best of circumstances, those will be prize cargoes. A fine French Wine might be a suitable cargo, and perhaps something as specific as a Big Mac would be, but a generic hamburger, or a generic hamburger recipe, would not be.
Another quite complex and quite versatile item is a human being. It is likely moving humans -- consensual or coerced (passengers or slaves) -- will be a profitable trade.
One big difference between sailing ships of old and space ships of the future is that the arrival of a ship will be no surprise. A ship will be headed at a destination star system for decades-to-hundreds of years, and it will be braking the whole 2nd half of the journey. This means that the ship's engine will be spewing exhaust in the destination star's general direction. That exhaust will be visible to the destination planet -- looking like a new and distinctive kind of "star." It will look distinctive because the exhaust is created by an object headed at the planet at near light speed which will blue shift all the radiation -- the ship will first appear to the destination planet as some sort of gamma ray or X-ray star. It will appear in the destination star system's sky long before the ship arrives, so there will be a long time to prepare for the arrival, both on the planet and on the ship.
Second, a space ship making an arrival at a star system will be a risky event for both the ship and the planet -- either the space ship or the planet could suffer catastrophe from the contact. Because the journeys take years-to-centuries, there is likely to be a huge technology difference between the ship and the planet, which means one or the other will be at risk of being dominated by the other. If the ship is higher technology, the situation is similar to high-tech Europeans engaging in the spice, silk and china trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. At first the Europeans had little impact, but as their technology grew in power and desirability, they came to dominate the Asian and African communities, even though their numbers were comparatively few. They came to dominate for two reasons: first, because they had valuable tools, and second, because they were invited use those tools to intervene in local disputes. The domination of space ships over planets won't be so pervasive because the space ships have so few people and usually no desire to stay. But they can dominate, and they can drop off colonists who will set up space-ship-friendly governments that are potentially long-lived. (The stories of Ancient Egyptians being aliens from space describe roughly how such a relation might look to a primitive planetary inhabitant.)
If the space ships are of lower technology than the planet, the space ship risks being taken over and looted by the planet's people. The situation becomes similar to what happens if stone age people visit a modern city. If the stone age visitors unknowingly violate some of the city's rules, they will end up in jail. An example would be if the stone age people get thrown in jail for public drunkenness after finishing their business in the city, and getting a little too feisty in their celebrating before they head back home.
If there is continual traffic with a planet, the departing space ships can give arriving space ships details on the planet's condition. But if the traffic is sparse, what conditions will be on arrival is just a big guess, until the space ship gets close enough to start monitoring intra-solar system radio traffic.
So, an arriving space ship will encounter three different planetary scenarios:
A) the "busy planet" where there are outgoing ships that can talk to the incoming ships,
B) the "lonely planet" where the planet gets enough ships to know what space commerce is all about, but not enough that arriving and departing ships can talk to each other.
C) the "virgin planet" where ships come by so infrequently that space commerce is considered legendary or mythical.
In the busy planet scenario, business is the most predictable and most orderly. Regardless of the planet's tech level, the incoming ship will know where it stands with the planet because it can talk with outgoing ships to catch up on planetary current events. If the planet is mistreating ships, the outgoing ships can tell this to the incoming ships, and they will either avoid the planet or dominate it and punish the mistreaters. Business is easy to do and predictable at busy planets.
Business is riskier at the lonely planet. The incoming ship has no idea what the planetary tech level is, what the planet inhabitants want to buy and sell, or if the planet will attempt to capture and loot the ship. However, a lonely planet has heard about space commerce, and knows it is beneficial, so it will communicate with the incoming space ship, and it knows how to do so. It is risky, but at least both sides know what the game is all about.
The Virgin Planet not been visited in so long that it has forgotten space commerce. The planet's inhabitants have no idea what's in store. This means that their reactions are quite unpredictable, and that they will take a long time to get organized for space commerce compared to a lonely planet or a busy planet. Most spaceships won't like visiting a virgin planet because it will take them so long to conduct trade compared to visiting a lonely planet or a busy planet.
The planet knows the ship is coming, and the ship knows exactly when it will be arriving. Because ships are city-size and take years to travel from place to place, they will have manufacturing capability. In the busy planet and lonely planet scenarios, the ships and planets will do a lot of information sharing and negotiating while the ship is inbound. It is while the ship is inbound that 90-to-100% of the trading will be negotiated. The planet and ship will then use their manufacturing capabilities to prepare the goods they have negotiated to trade. All that is left to do once the ship arrives is on- and off-load cargo.
These cargos are worth trillions to the ship and planet respectively. They are important, so there is both a lot of pressure to get commerce conducted successfully, and a lot of temptation to "defect" and try to make even more money by breaking the agreement in some fashion.
On busy planets defecting is not going to happen often because word of the defection will travel quickly to the incoming spaceships. Lonely planets have experienced the benefits of space commerce within the culture's memory, but because there is no one around to "tattletale", defection may produce benefits. Virgin planets have no experience with space commerce, so defection is very likely until both sides have had the chance to "take the measure" of the other, and both have decided that cooperation will be the most profitable tactic.
The journey to the next star system will take decades to centuries, so there is little pressure for a spaceship to leave a star system quickly. If there is something to be gained by mixing spaceship manufacturing capability with planetary resources, the spaceship will be happy to remain in the star system for years or decades. Two cases for staying a long time that come to mind are: a) the starship is participating in building a new starship, b) the starship is off-loading colonists who are going to build a starship-friendly world and then produce valuable cargo for the starship.
It is likely that both the planet and the spaceship will have official communicating organizations, and those will declare that they have a monopoly on the ship-planet communication business. It is also likely that there will be attempts to "back channel" on both sides. Those attempts will originate from numerous motives ranging from trying to do legitimate business with less red tape, to trying to organize smuggling, to trying to get help with political intrigues and conflicts of various sorts.
How successful these back channel communications processes will be depends on the social organizations of both the ship and the planet, so it will vary a lot from one planetary encounter to the next.
On a modern cargo jet, ship or truck, the owner of the craft, the owner of the cargo, and the operator of the craft are usually three different entities -- a FedX jet carrying Intel chips that have been bought by Dell Computer is flown by Pilot Jones (who is an employee, not an owner). In interstellar commerce the cargo and ship will be owned by the spaceship crew. This makes a big difference in deciding what cargo is valuable to carry. In modern Earthly commerce, the owners of stores and factories decide what cargo planes, ships and trucks should carry. They do so by ordering goods and contacting shipping companies to carry those goods. In space commerce the crew will decide what to carry, and they will decide by guessing what will sell well at subsequent destinations. The only "ordering" that can be done is the communication that goes on while the ship is inbound to the star system. By modern Earth standards this system will be hugely inefficient at getting the right goods to the right place. The modern concepts of Just-In-Time manufacturing systems and Supply Chain Management of inventories will have no meaning in space commerce. This is one more indicator of how really big the intrinsic margins for potential cargo must be before space commerce will develop.
What will conflict and conflict resolution be like in this environment?
First off, talking about a galactic empire makes no sense. Even having one star system conquer or "own" another star system makes no sense. With 1G constant acceleration starships, star systems are too far apart in terms of travel distance to have ownership mean anything. Plus, those who move between the star systems, the space ships, are their own community. They have no inherent interest in promoting multi-star system governments. The only way they will be interested in supporting a war between star systems is if a star system is wealthy enough to pay them to move an army. They will be happy to do that, but, once that army gets moved, it doesn't have to worry much about retribution from the "mother" planet, so it will run the newly conquered planet as the army leaders on the new planet see fit. To the space ship community this is just another form of colonization.
So, most conflict will be of the intra-star system sort (planet versus planet within a star system), and there will be some spaceship-versus-planet conflict of the sort I have already discussed.
This holds true even if nasty conquering aliens show up. Suppose a scouting Earth spaceship heads for the Galactic Core and there encounters "Borg" -- a vicious conquering space race that will now come after humanity. The scout ship eludes the Borg and hotfoots it back to the Solar System to sound the alarm. How long does this simple process take?
It takes 30,000 years to get to the Galactic Core in planetary time, and about 340 years ship time. The return trip takes equally long, so it will have been 60,000 years on Earth since the scout ship left! It's not a question of how countries will have changed when the crew returns, it's a question of how species have changed when they return! (Writing dates back to 5,000 years ago, and modern mankind has only been on the Earth for about 20,000 years.)
In conclusion: we will not have meaningful interstellar wars until we have some warp speed drive equivalent, so we can get from star system to star system in a reasonably short time.
There may be ship-versus-ship conflict. At each stop a ship will gain trillions in wealth, and because it has no meaningful home planet, it will keep that wealth on board the ship in some fashion. This will make the ships attractive targets for robbery to others who have ships. Ships will worry about pirates.
Ships have a lot of people, too, so there is going to be a ship government, and there are going to be "haves" and "have nots" on the ships. There will be ship protests and ship mutinies. Ship security will be concerned with external pirates and internal troublemakers.
Keep in mind Axiom One: space commerce is not going to happen until many people can get rich doing it. This means that space commerce will have an enormous and surprising impact on ship and planetary societies. Keep in mind how much Europe was changed by the discovery of the New World.
Keep in mind that gold and silver -- the expected wealth producers from the New World -- ended up being small potatoes compared to the "surprise" finds of potatoes and other useful crops. Likewise, those worlds who participate in space commerce will be wealthy, exciting and surprising places compared to Earth today, and to those worlds which don't participate. The rich worlds that George Lucas showed us in his last three Star Wars episodes are the kind of wealth we can expect from space commerce. (But, unlike George Lucas' movies, spaceships will not come and go quickly, each one will come and go very slowly.)
Again using a historical example, think of South America as a "spaceship" docking next to Europe in 1492. First to come from that docking was a whole bunch of gold and silver that enriches the risk takers of Europe. After that came the clearly positive lifestyle changers that become the french fries and tomato sauce of our day. Along with those clearly positive lifestyle changers came the equally popular but more controversial lifestyle changers that today are cigarettes and cocaine. And, if you're on the South American side of the docking, you get an alien invasion and colonization program that wipes out all existing political structures and religions in less than one hundred years. Whew! That's a gamble-and-lose-big surprise!
This is the kind of high stakes game that will be played each time a spaceship docks at a star system. There will be a lot of people who get wealthy beyond imagination, and a lot of people who don't want to play. Because of the axioms, this change-the-world nature of space commerce is an integral part of what space commerce will be.
Space commerce will produce rich, exciting and surprising communities, but those communities will not be tightly knit. Each star system will have it's own community, and those communities will be tied together by a community of spaceship dwellers.
Time will pass on the spaceships very differently than it does on the planets. Travel times between stars as witnessed by planet inhabitants will be the distance in light years, plus a couple of years for starting and stopping. Travel times as witnessed by spaceship inhabitants will be much shorter, but still measured in years-to-decades.
The arrival of a space ship will be long anticipated, and much communication will go on between a spaceship and its destination planet before it arrives. Much of the trading activity will be decided upon before the spaceship actually docks.
Spaceships will be city-size in population and do a lot of manufacturing while they are enroute to star systems.
Because they are complex and can adapt well to many different circumstances, colonists will be a significant part of typical spaceship cargo.
Star system versus star system conflict will not be common in the constant acceleration drive environment because of the long travel times. Ship versus planet and ship versus ship will be more common.
Landing at a lonely planet or a virgin planet will be a time of great uncertainty for a spaceship crew. They will not know what to expect from the planet's inhabitants, and they could get hurt by them. Landing at a busy planet is a much more predictable event because the crew can talk to other spaceships before they land.
Space ships will dramatically change every world the come to. A visit will dramaticlly enrich both the star system and the space ship, and the lives of the planets and the starships will not be the same.
-- The End --