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How easy would it be to trade with aliens?
Space aliens, that is:
Hickman believes that interplanetary trade could be one of the primary economic drivers for space exploration in the future. The potential problems are by no means minor, however. First of all, the vast distances between solar systems would probably prohibit the transportation of tangible goods. (Though, as Hickman points out, transatlantic trade probably seemed just as fanciful to traders in renaissance Europe.) There may however be potential for trade in non-tangible goods such digital entertainment, or scientific information with newly discovered alien species. But even this is not without dilemmas that would give Austan Goolsbee a migraine.
How will we enforce contracts or copyrights laws on a civiliation 20 light-years away? How will we set up a banking system or transferable currency without any tangible goods to trade? How will we protect ourselves from strange new ideas and ideologies that may destroy the fabric of our society? Worst of all, how will we trade with a species that may not even have a concept of trade?
It's funny, but that last question is the least of my worries. And reciprocal, tit-for-tat exchange would work just fine, provided that a) relativity did not slow down the exchange of information too much, and b) not too many Ohio voters watched that movie where the aliens send us their genetic information, embedded in an apparently innocuous transmission, and trick us into downloading those instructions and then cloning them en masse...
In other words, we probably cannot trade with aliens. Here is the full post.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 6, 2008 at 02:10 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Ah! But you assume space travel would be along a linear path - wormholes or other forms of space-bending technologies would essentially be required to make space trade/travel feasible.
But really, why discuss such things? Our ancestors are going to look back at us the same way we look back at the '50s concept of the future.
Posted by: PUAEmerson at Mar 6, 2008 2:41:32 PM
We need to first figure out how to trade with our own ancestors and offsprings. Once that is done, trading with aliens would be more of a technical issue than of an economic one, for them.
Posted by: Yan Li at Mar 6, 2008 2:44:07 PM
Why does everything assume that alien intelligences would treat us as equals? Too many 50's SciFi flicks.
Practical answer to the posted question: If there were aliens capable of reaching us to trade, we would far more likely end up as their pets than their trading partners.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Mar 6, 2008 2:44:38 PM
If you assume that each round of communication is independent, you get the prisoner's dilemma. Cooperating (by sending good info) for 20 years when the other guy defects and sends garbage for 20 years is a big loss, so that might make cooperation hard. But it is also possible to use cryptographic techniques and multiple rounds of communication. If each round is 20 years then it might take a long time to verify the data with multiple rounds, but it could still be worth it depending on what was traded.
How will we enforce contracts or copyrights laws on a civiliation 20 light-years away? We won't! Just like early America printed up copyrighted European books without royalties, stole typefaces, etc..
Posted by: Nathan Whitehead at Mar 6, 2008 2:49:18 PM
You left out the most important part — how can I use this study to help me sell a story to Escape Pod?
Posted by: Alan at Mar 6, 2008 2:52:02 PM
Go back to a time when trading long distance was possible, but highly impractical, the late Bronze Age. At that time, long distance trading was not a matter of necessities such as food, clothes, etc. Rather it was mostly trading in high end items for the elite. Will there be an incentive for a group of humans to embark on a 100 year trip to trade in luxury novelties under the assumption they will be instant billionaires upon their return (assume some sort of frozen transport/suspended animation will prevent their aging)?
I say yes.
Posted by: pawnking at Mar 6, 2008 2:56:15 PM
It all depends if Hume's "circumstances of justice" are satisfied. If they can just kill us all and take whatever is of value, maybe they will. Or if they are benevolent and discovered us first, there may be nothing we have to offer that would be of value, so perhaps we get astonishing gifts that cost them almost nothing, but are extremely valuable to us. Those are my guesses: utter destruction or massive beneficence. Relationships of reciprocity makes sense in a context of relative equality within which there remain small inequalities. The probability that we will be sufficiently equal to aliens strikes me as low.
Posted by: Will Wilkinson at Mar 6, 2008 2:57:50 PM
I'm a little irked by how solipsistic people get when imagining aliens. Forget species with no concept of trade, how do we trade with a species with no concept of species? Could we trade with a distributed hive-mind? An ooze with no concept of the individual, therefore no concept of ownership? Perhaps the organization of genes into squishy discrete individual organisms that have stages of growth, development, life cycles, death, and capitalism is a bizzare anomaly among intergalactic lifeforms. The idea that scientific information or escapist entertainment will be a universal commodity is not very imaginative.
Posted by: Jolly Bloger at Mar 6, 2008 3:35:34 PM
This concept is one of the things I really liked about Stargate SG-1. Not a particularly great show, but I just loved how their first reaction upon meeting a new civilization was that they sought to trade with them.
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at Mar 6, 2008 3:38:59 PM
They might trade with us even if they are vastly superior. Farmers do not destroy their own animals and crops, but treat them in a way that maximizes the revenue they can realize from them. Well, if you're a vastly superior alien and you want to maximize the benefit you can get from humans, what is the best way to treat them? Is it to annihilate them immediately? Is it to enslave them? Or is it to leave them be and to trade with them? It might be the last.
How the animals are treated depends on the nature of the animal. Humans have a nature that sets them apart from animals. It is not possible, or at least not easy, to set up a reliable trading relationship with sheep in which they freely volunteer their wool and milk in exchange for things they value, and so there is little choice but simply to take control of them. In contrast, it is possible to trade with humans. It might not be only possible, but advantageous. That being the case, an alien might opt to trade with humans rather than enslave them as humans enslave sheep, not because humans are equal to the alien (they may not be), but because, unlike sheep, humans have the capacity to engage in voluntary trade.
Posted by: Constant at Mar 6, 2008 3:41:18 PM
pawnking has the right idea:
Will there be an incentive for a group of humans to embark on a 100 year trip to trade in luxury novelties under the assumption they will be instant billionaires upon their return (assume some sort of frozen transport/suspended animation will prevent their aging)?
Assuming no faster-than-light communication or travel, and a 20-light-year distant civilization is probably almost impossible to trade with - for earth. But independent traders probably could make a living going back and forth trading with both. Read Niven's short story Flare Time for an example.
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at Mar 6, 2008 3:51:35 PM
trade in non-tangible goods such digital entertainment, or scientific information with newly discovered alien species.
I don't think much of what we have to trade could realistically be traded for much profit: regardless of their view of copyright, our own view is that the vast majority of what we have to trade belongs to all humanity. All of us owns our scientific history.
I don't mean to sound like, "we have no right to charge for it," I mean that the aliens will ALWAYS be able to find a lower bidder until they find someone willing to give that information away for free. The only way to make any kind of trade deal is to drastically restrict the number of people who are able to trade. Without a significant bottleneck, artificial or otherwise, the price would drop to nothing.
Posted by: Dolohov at Mar 6, 2008 4:11:02 PM
Let's not forget that trade is built on decidedly human notions of fairness and justice, which are directly derived from our evolutionary history. Alien species would most certainly have very different evolutionary histories.
Posted by: Doug Colkitt at Mar 6, 2008 4:11:33 PM
The story of the indians that sold Manhattan for beads keeps coming to mind...
Posted by: bastiat at Mar 6, 2008 4:25:15 PM
Posted by: 8 at Mar 6, 2008 4:40:40 PM
IF a wayward spacecraft happens along could not they trade some technology for provisions? Guns and axes for fruit and water?
Posted by: ElamBend at Mar 6, 2008 5:22:54 PM
Ah, but what might relativity do to discount rates, and thus credit markets?
In the Ender's Game books (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD) a few individuals make themselves unfathomably rich by investing a small seed then taking a long relativity-speed flight. In their frame of reference only hours pass, but in their money's frame decades pass, and compound interest does its magic.
How many people would be willing to teleport themselves 30 years into the future to make themselves millionaires? Would space travel providers attempt to capture this value?
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Mar 6, 2008 5:32:33 PM
Earth's history shows that anytime a more highly developed civilization encounters a lesser developed civilization, that the lesser developed civilization is destroyed. It is not always a case where the other group actively seeks to conquer the other. Much of Europe's colonial empires in the Americas, Asia, and Africa were a result of merchant companies expanding, and the government following the companies (sometimes in an attempt to constrain said companies and/or protect the natives). At other times, the other civilization simply couldn't handle the changes in economy or culture. Society self-destructs, often compelling the other group to come in and provide order.
In short, if Earth is ever visited by an alien civilization that is more advanced than us, we're screwed. Likewise, if the first aliens we meet is because we have greatly advanced and discovered a primitive society, that society is screwed.
As for the idea of taking trips the speed of light to make oneself a billionaire by compound interest, it won't happen. During the time that you are gone, those assets just won't sit idly by. Governments will either seize them for abandonment, or one's heirs will seize them for themselves. You aren't there to protect your property rights, so how do you think the courts will rule? When you return hundreds of thousands of years later, you'll not know anyone in power who would be sympathetic to you. Furthermore, what are the odds your investments will survive anyway? Few companies last that long, and even banks fail.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at Mar 6, 2008 5:57:59 PM
"Earth's history shows that anytime a more highly developed civilization encounters a lesser developed civilization, that the lesser developed civilization is destroyed...In short...we're screwed"
If an advocate of French civilization complains that Americans movies are "destroying" French cinema, this probably means that the French are watching American movies in preference to French movies. It probably does not mean that the average French man-in-the-street is "screwed". (I am not making a claim about whether American civilization is more "highly developed", I am talking only about whether the destruction of a civilization necessarily is bad news for the individuals. It may instead mean that the individuals are abandoning one civilization and adopting another, e.g., hunter-gatherers moving out of the forests and into cities, Japanese and others being "Westernized" and so forth.
Posted by: Constant at Mar 6, 2008 6:22:15 PM
Barring FTL magic wands, it seems that most of what would be tradable with an alien species would have to be information. The easiest way to facilitate information trade would be to first send a delegate to arrange trades in-situ. This delegate would itself be an information construct (ideally an AI), sent to the aliens specifically to arrange IP-for-IP trades, and communicate the goods back to us. Getting our trade goods to the delegate, keeping them secure until trades are validated, and preventing the trade delegate construct from becoming subverted are serious engineering challenges, but nothing like as difficult as transferring fragile bags of meat multiple light-years.
Posted by: Dave at Mar 6, 2008 6:24:10 PM
Of course, with my Cobra mk III and a 100 credits, I've already cornered the market in Arcturian Megaweed from Lave to Sol...
Posted by: Elite Trading Co. at Mar 6, 2008 6:24:38 PM
A further complication to trade is that aliens might not live at the same clock rate as us. For instance, an alien species with a very slow metabolism in a very cold environment might have a lifespan measured in millennia.
Or alternatively, an alien species may have downloaded itself into computer hardware and accelerated themselves thanks to Moore's law, so that every millisecond of clock time might subjectively seem like a day to them. Such a species would not be interested even in trading with their local equivalent of Mars within their own solar system, since the subjective time lapse to them would be like an interstellar voyage to us. In fact, they would probably not be interested in travelling more than a few hundred meters geographically from fellow species members because of speed-of-light latency issues screwing up their internet protocols. Traveling to the other end of their own planet would probably seem like being marooned alone on a desert island for decades or centuries.
The desire for real-time connectivity probably grows as a species becomes more advanced. Consider recent advances: many of you would consider giving up your cellphone or Internet access for an extended period to be an extreme hardship, yet these technologies didn't even exist for most people only 15 years ago. Now extrapolate that forward. You can't play World of Warcraft if you're living on the Moon: latency issues make it impossible. Within our own lifetimes there will probably be some must-have can't-imagine-how-you-lived-without-it Internet connectivity application that requires you to permanently remain physically within a fraction of a light second of the rest of the human race. Our ancestors only a century ago were willing to live in snowbound log cabins on a godforsaken windswept prairie in winter with only a copy of the Bible for entertainment and intellectual stimulation; our descendants in the near future will consider physical relocation anywhere beyond near-Earth orbit to be a similar dreadful fate. Within our own lifetimes, we ourselves will lose interest in interstellar travel.
Alternatively, as I posted in another recent thread: Consider movie special effects: once you have the technology, it's far more cost-efficient to use CGI to paint pixels on a frame of film rather than building some large objects out of atoms and pointing a camera at them. Similarly, once we have the technology in a few decades, it will be far more cost-efficient to "paint" our nerve endings rather than build large objects using concrete and steel and fossil fuels and live among them. That's the answer to the Fermi Paradox: sufficiently advanced intelligent life doesn't live in the physical universe anymore.
Posted by: at Mar 6, 2008 6:27:44 PM
And reciprocal, tit-for-tat exchange would work just fine, provided that a) relativity did not slow down the exchange of information too much....Just to set the record straight for your readers, relativity has pretty much nothing to do with that. The apparent constancy of the speed of light was well known before Einstein's Special Theory, and was in fact the main observed fact that it sought to explain. But, assuming we're talking about some kind of electromagnetic transmission from A to B, relativity is not needed at all, just the fact of the speed of light. If you meant physically shipping data from A to B, then relativity might be very relevant indeed, if you could get high enough speeds. But it would be quite impractical compared to direct transmission.
Posted by: Randy Owens at Mar 6, 2008 7:19:35 PM
what are you talking about? relativity cannot slow down the exchange of information. It might have some effects for travelers on the space vehicle but not on the exchange of information.
For a galaxy x light years away it will take x years or longer to exchange anything. only way this fails is if relativity stops being true.
Posted by: DIS at Mar 6, 2008 7:25:03 PM
"Earth's history shows that anytime a more highly developed civilization encounters a lesser developed civilization, that the lesser developed civilization is destroyed...In short...we're screwed"
Not every time.
Arab civilization was probably "more developed" when it met up against European civilization in the 800s.
Roman civilization was DEFINITELY more developed when it met up with the Goths and Vandals in the 300s.
Chinese civilization was arguably more developed when it met up with Arabs in the 700s, and with Europeans in the 1400s.
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Earth's history shows that anytime a more highly developed civilization encounters a lesser developed civilization, that the lesser developed civilization is destroyed...In short...we're screwed"
In addition to doctorpat's post can't some argument be made towards a positive relationship between technology development and social equity and fairness? The causality can be debated at some other time, however, there are many recent examples (in contrast to fewer historical examples) of superior forces not eliminating indigenous populations.
the Allies and Germany
US and Japan
Arguably Israel and Egypt/Syria/Jordan
and the list goes on
Of course, was this out of a moral sense, resource efficiency, international pressure...?
Posted by: Chris M at Mar 7, 2008 12:21:21 AM
DIS: Were you responding to me or to the original post? Your first paragraph seems to be pretty much agreeing with me, but your second seems to want to disagree. But my point was, for your formulation, "[f]or a galaxy x light years away it will take x years or longer to exchange anything," for it to fail to be true, not only would relativity have to be false, but also all those light measurement experiments that preceded and led up to relativity. Those experiments alone are adequate for Cowen's point, without bringing relativity into it.
Posted by: Randy Owens at Mar 7, 2008 1:01:35 AM
The above spam post involving "cams" oddly has some relevance...
Posted by: Dan Maas at Mar 7, 2008 3:37:35 AM
How will we set up a banking system or transferable currency without any tangible goods to trade?
Does this guy really think this is a problem?
I've made money off the Australians without trading any tangible bits. I sent them electronic messages that encoded my opinions on various matters, this being sent via phone and via the Internet, they sent their bank electronic messages that told their bank to send electronic messages to my bank that had the effect of decreasing the numbers in their bank account and increasing the numbers in mine. Since the bank accounts are in different currencies the fall and rise did not correspond exactly, but trade certainly happened merely by exchanging information.
For a currency, all you need is some good that is valuable to people on both ends of the exchange. This value can be complex. Australian dollars are not valuable in themselves to me, but they are valuable because I can trade them with poeple who do want Australian dollars and therefore turn them into my currency, which is valuable. If we have trade at all, we can have a currency.
Posted by: Tracy W at Mar 7, 2008 7:02:20 AM
They'll probably want plastic beads a "bedazzlers" from the QVC store.
Posted by: josh at Mar 7, 2008 7:30:18 AM
Piers Anthony's Macroscope has an interstellar informational gift economy. It had ftl communication (and it broke down into war when ftl physical travel became possible), but being unable to trade doesn't mean you have to do nothing.
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at Mar 7, 2008 8:45:33 AM
Nancy, I thought I had first encountered the idea in some Arthur C. Clarke book, but maybe it was Piers Anthony. Or maybe they both had a similar idea. Anyway, as I remember it, the idea was that there's a galaxy-level information exchange (something like the Internet) that advanced civilizations download all their scientific knowledge to. Anybody has the ability to access it--you just have to be advanced enough to figure out how the information is broadcast.
Posted by: Thelonious_Nick at Mar 7, 2008 11:58:31 AM
Someone commented on a short story by Larry Niven, but his Ringworld does a great job imagining interspecies/interplanetary trade and how it might effect human technology.
Posted by: Noah at Mar 7, 2008 12:05:28 PM
The real question is who supports free trade with aliens more? Obama or Clinton? Has Goolsbee been meeting with little men from Mars to reassure them that it's just rhetoric...
Posted by: at Mar 7, 2008 1:19:45 PM
One other good "trade SF" universe is the one described by Verner Vinge in "A Deepness in the Sky". In this universe, FTL travel isn't possible in the part of the galaxy where Earth is, so interplanetary travel is done in huge ships using Bussard ramjets and hibernation tech. A trading civilization develops that only lives on the ships and that travels between worlds doing trade with people living on planets.
Posted by: Foobarista at Mar 7, 2008 2:17:56 PM
Its practical questions like this that prove the usefullness of economists.
Posted by: Dave at Mar 8, 2008 12:12:26 AM
If an advanced society saw us produce an information good that they liked, they could farm it from us without our knowing. Trade would require the existence of a good we could make for them that we wouldn't make if we didn't expect them to pay us for it. Such a good might not exist.
The urgency of trade shrinks when you're talking about advanced civilizations. All our basic needs, and an inconceivable number of entertainment whims, will have already been met. If we can't trade with the aliens we meet, even a deadweight loss that's huge in technological terms might still be tiny in utility terms.
Trade currently motivates people to do work they otherwise would find distasteful, because someone else wants the result. I put a high probability on the outcome that upon reaching some technological threshold, the gains from doing work you dislike don't outweigh the disutility from the work itself, and everyone from then on does whatever they would most like to do.
Generally, as scarcity diminishes, the behavioral implications of property rights change. They might, beyond some point, stop making sense.
Regarding Tracy's comment on money and Australia, we've seen trade that's entirely electronic, but we haven't yet seen it done via a medium of exchange that was limited to such exchanges. I don't know much about search theory, but I know enough to know that we still don't have a full grasp of how money derives value. The option to buy excludable, rival goods with it might be important.
Posted by: Jeff Brown at Mar 9, 2008 5:26:09 PM
We've been broadcasting radio and TV signals for over 80 years and hundreds of star systems are within 80 light-years of us.
Aliens at our tech level or higher within 40 light-years could have listened and responded. We haven't heard from any yet, so either there are none, or for some reason, they haven't yet replied.
Maybe all the WWII movies and war TV footage has made them cautious.
Every now and then I toy with the idea that cautious aliens have set up shop at a safe distance - say in orbit around Triton - and are watching us.
They're collecting our TV shows, movies, watching sports, downloading our music, and exploring everything we broadcast for the same reason we would listen to them: extreme curiosity.
And maybe they have standards for when to contact another civilization, and we don't meet them yet.
Posted by: Bob Sigall at Mar 9, 2008 8:27:30 PM
Clifford Simak, in the 1960's I think,
wrote a story where a farmer discovers a portal into other
parts of the universe, used for trade. It turns out, they trade ideas.
The farmer trades the idea of "paint".
Posted by: Rudy at Mar 11, 2008 12:31:34 PM
When I mentioned a more advanced civilization meeting a lesser advanced one, I meant one more advanced in terms of magnitude rather than degrees. Sorry if I was not clear.
Rome was certainly more advanced than the barbarians, but the Goths and Vandals had improved their fighting capabilities to be equal to the Romans - a result of centuries of interaction. The Goths had closed the gap considerably in a way the Gauls had not. Remember that many of the barbarians that destroyed Rome were ones that served in Rome's own armies and were part of the culture of the Roman world Plus both were essentially iron age cultures. Likewise, the Arabs were culturally more advanced (and politically united) than Dark Ages Europe, but they were very alike. Europe was momentarily weaker, but both had inherited Classical culture, monotheism, and technology. Same thing when Europeans met the Chinese and Japanese directly. Each civilization was "better" at doing certain things than the others, but they were very similar. Europe had windmills. China had wheelbarrows. But they were the same in many respects.
In contrast, when Renaissance Europe encountered the Americas, they had gunpowder, the printing press, and ocean crossing maritime technology. Although culturally advanced, much of the technology level of the Americas was still in the stone age. That was clearly a bigger gap than the others. Same thing when Europeans encountered the Australian aborigines. Or for that matter, when the iron using Bantu moved into the lands of the Khoisan. Or when the iron age using Japanese pushed out the Ainu aborigines of Japan. Their culture was obliterated and they were assimilated, or they were exirpated from their best lands and moved into much more marginal lands. This is what happens when one civilziation is higher in terms of magnitude. This is not the same as comparing Europe with windmills, but China with wheelbarrows.
Now imagine an alien civilization who is technologically advanced enough to master FTL travel and Earth. In this a case of comparing wheelbarrows and windmills, or is this a case where Earth is more like being in the stone age?
Posted by: Chris Durnell at Mar 11, 2008 8:49:14 PM
The option to buy excludable, rival goods with it might be important.
Well to some extent what I was selling to the Australians was a rival good - it was my time and experience devoted to some specific problems of some particular Australians. The time I spent doing that I could not spend doing some other work, so the time was excludable and rival. Some of the work I did consisted of editing their documents for technical content so even if someone had intercepted and stolen it, it wouldn't have benefited them any (the main purpose of that piece of work was QA for the Australians).
So the object of value here might be time - exchange ten minutes of thinking time of one of the aliens with your fellow earthlings. There would be some serious questions about quality, but I think that's how a market could get started.
Posted by: Tracy W at Mar 13, 2008 6:59:50 AM
