Grrl Power #679 – Spree!
I’ve been trying to figure out what someone from a relatively low tech civilization could offer as currency to a higher tech one. I’m sure whole papers (or at least blog posts) have been written about this topic, but there’s only a few things I can think of, and some are dependent on the tech disparity.
If the high tech civilization has not just 3D printers, but something like matter replicators where you can build crap from the molecule up, the only things of real value I can think of would be information, power, labor and entertainment. The only physical material that would have intrinsic value would be things the replicators can’t recreate, like matter with a half-life shorter than, I don’t know, 40 years or something, like plutonium 241. Or maybe energon chips or zero point modules. Then that stuff would have potential value. Not that you’d want a bunch of loose change in your pocket made out of Californium 252. It would be asinine to use as currency.
If a civ does have matter replicators, information would still be valuable, like the plans to print your own Nintendo Switch, or the high tech civilization equivalent. In fact, if you had a civ with matter replicators and unlimited power, information like that would be nearly the only thing of value, I think.
If an advanced civ didn’t have matter replicators, then just about anything could be barterable. Gold has no intrinsic value. It’s a great conductor of heat and electricity and is nearly chemically inert, so it definitely has its uses. Humans generally go bonkers for it, but there’s every chance that an alien civilization could value some random material like aluminum simply because their planet has less of it, or because the aluminum cartel has told everyone that aluminum is desirable, the same way diamonds are here on Earth. Again, diamonds are useful in tools and other applications, but have no intrinsic value other than that we’ve decided as a race that they’re valuable.
Power is obvious. Any civilization would need power, (and let’s assume that the laws of thermodynamics hold true no matter your tech level) unless they’re at a point where they know how to generate so much that it’s moot. Dyson sphere level civilizations would have to be pretty embarrassed with themselves if they needed more power than 100% of a sun. Or… 99%, depending on the efficiency of their solar panels.
Then there’s labor. If your civilization has matter replicators, they probably have robot labor. I mean, we’re getting to that point. We have machines building cars, and in a few years those cars will be driving themselves. Amazon’s warehouses are full of industrial roomba things that carry stuff to and from shelves. Eventually all uber drivers and DoorDash drivers and UPS drivers will be replaced with robots, and we don’t even have matter replicators. But, if a civ has had a robot uprising like in Dune and their robots are no more advanced than roombas, then labor is something a low tech civ can trade on.
The only other thing of value a lower tech civilization can offer is entertainment. I drew Deus picking up a pack full of bars of something. I was thinking rhodium when I drew it, but honestly, let’s pretend those are fancy boxes full of thumb drives with terrabytes of human on human porn. Maybe some Hollywood movies and Buffy and Cheers and The Bob Newhart Show too.
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1. Isn’t the device that created the portal the same one used by Sciona? The same one that ended up being buried under the mountain.
2. How did Deus know where to go? That this place existed? And what the coordinates were to access it?
3. Why is Deus’ bag open? Isn’t that inviting unwanted attention from possible pickpockets and other thieves?
4. How long has Sydney been away? It must have taken months at least to design and build the Portal setup and power source.
1. Yes, it was retrieved in #656
2. Vale isn’t exactly human.
4. Deus has been plotting this for a long time. He already knew about the can opener when it was in the vault.
3. It’s a ‘show the audience’ trope. We’re seeing his bag is full of something that he’s hoping he can use as currency in the alien environment. Otherwise, when the next page shows him producing an ingot from the bag, we’d be all “WTF? Where’d that come from?”
#3 Vale.
1) Yes, Vale retrieved it at Deus’s instructions.
2) Deus met a version of himself from the future and knows all this because his future self told him about it after he did it in the future. :)
3) When you have Vale as a bodyguard you do not need to worry about pickpockets. Also he knows he won’t get robbed because his future self did not get robbed in the past, obviously :)
4) Everything was already designed – he just needed the power source. Sydney’s been gone for less than a day.
Is the “met his future self” thing canon or fanon? I don’t remember seeing that, but might have missed it.
It’s just my own personal fanon. I was making a joke/outlandish prediction. :)
Yknow, the fact that you werent sure if it was real or not does make it a pretty good theory, storywise :)
Nah, it’s pretty dumb really. Going back in time with the lotto numbers is one thing. But going back in time with the location of an object you never knew the location of is a self contained causality failure. Since you never knew the location you can’t tell your past self the location so that your future self can know the location to tell your past self…
Time travel already makes for stupid enough plot lines without going that far out there.
And I really, really hope that the whole “There were too many of me [Harem]!” thing wasn’t foreshadowing some time travel idiot plot line. This comic is on shaky enough authorial ground as it is without dipping into the worst possible plot absurdities.
And yes that’s just my theory about Deus that I ripped off from Disney’s Gargoyles with David Xanatos’s backstory.
I think he pays in chocolate
You are underestimating the potential of humans to be “skilled labor”. Specifically of highly detailed or highly tedious art. Humans are capable of such precision that “drawing stuff on a grain of rice” is a fairly common stunt for street artists. And art projects that take hundreds of hours are a common hobby!
Dues could be selling a selection of tiny art objects. Painted miniatures, lace, tiny dolls, fabric prints…
If you don’t know what art style the aliens will like – come with one inch version of ALL the art styles. Come back with a larger selection of the ones that sell.
There is also the possibility that the tiny artifacts/art/whatever exist simply because another race _is_ “tiny” compared to us.
Faberge eggs are in actuality Grandiose Theatres for a tiny alien race that performs Shakespeare
It occurs to me there is at least a rudimentary galactic police force, and it also occurs to me that without that galactic police force Earth is basically ground zero for the largest gang war in the universe, so we cannot possibly depend on obscurity to defend ourselves.
So people are coming and going from earth on a regular basis, peace is maintained, and super alien scientists have not flooded our markets with anything worse than smart phones.
So, what does he have in there?
Rhodium is a strong possibility, because the people coming here need something of value to spend.
But even more likely is deeds to houses, time shares, free room and meal coupons.
The contents of each of those boxes may be an all expenses paid year on earth.
It could be a situation as in The Lords Temporal.
An entire civilation built by people who were abducted from their time and place in history, trying to find their way home.
Yeah! (I like your very last point.)
Earlier in the comic it was said that Earth was a popular vacation destination.
Wasn’t Rhodium one of the rare elements used in color CRTs?
Red?
Now that CRTs are obsolete, will it ever be cost effective to recover it?
At $2400 an ounce…. I’m going with yes.
There has to be a point where it isn’t.
Each CRT might have only a few milligrams of it.
Each CRT also has several grams of lead.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5895071/how-to-mine-for-gold-in-your-television-set-and-computer-keyboard
I thought I had heard something aabout this.
Dabbler mentions a group when they first made planetfall through the portal. I can’t recall the name, but she mentioned it along the lines of “…though they typically don’t go straight to genocide.” That would imply that they’re the dominant peacekeepers in the area if Dabbler thought they’d be the ones that would have nuked the Alari homeworld–who as a whole do not seem very benevolent, but that could just be Dabbler’s prejudice.
Cora’s group also mentions tangling with something called the fel, but that could be either a third party or the armed forces of aforementioned group.
Neither of the above seem to be affiliated with the planet wreckers either, so all in all we have three potential powers in the region, and only one or two are possibly benevolent (though I doubt something with the name of ‘the fel’ are up to any good, but hey, it may just be bad publicity, like vampires with Twilight).
My magic 8-ball prediction is..
That fan 9 causes some wider spread failure, causing the doorway to collapse while they are out shopping. They cross paths with Sydney. Then all have to get home ‘the long way’, and que the next ‘Homeward Bound’ movie.
Huh, hadn’t thought about Sydney rescuing Deus (and Vale) – that’d be a great twist!
Kudos for the plot twit suggestion!
*twiSt The plot TWISSSST, twist twist twist!
…There is some supervillain out there whose superpower is to wreak all sorts of havoc via typos on internet forums & twitter accounts, I’m quite sure…
Sometimes I wonder if our plot speculations have DaveB going ‘argh, well, I WAS going to do that, but so’n’so on the forums just posted it, so if I do it NOW it will look like I am stealing their idea..’
We all should have a Plumbus. They are so inexpensive at 6 1/2 Brapples!
I have a feeling that this is not Deus’ first venture into creating wormhole technology. In a previous attempt he created a portal, but it only had enough power to connect to another location on Earth. There was also a problem with the temporal stability field and he ended up about 1000 years in the past. The natives he encountered we so impressed by his sudden appearance in their midst they took him for some sort of deity. A cult arose and paid homage by creating statues in his likeness. Unlikely? Just compare panel two with this picture. https://st1.latestly.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Easter-Island-784×441.jpg
Naw, it’s missing his X, you know, the X that’s all up in his face? :P
The X could have happened ‘after’ his visit to the past. Temporal mechanics 105!
Robert Reid’s Year Zero is all about the Aliens being unable to make interesting music, which leads to the entire universe illegally downloading Earth’s music for years… and then they discover our copyright laws. They realize if applied to the amount of illegal downloading they’ve done, it would nearly bankrupt the universe.
Yeah I thought about someone selling media to aliens before there’s a trade agreement in place, then years later, formalized trading becomes established, only for Earth to find out that the whole universe already has all their media. Either some sort of massive remuneration would have to happen, which would have interesting economic consequences on Earth, or the person who originally sold that stuff would have to pay the copyright holders back, which would probably be impossible. The third possibility is that interstellar digital piracy is a real problem, and companies have to spend massive amounts of money policing it themselves or bribing politicians to do it.
That’s a thing in AndyOH!’s Too Much Information universe. In the comic pointed to, part of the transcript says:
Hey what do you know, I’m an alien. That explains so much.
Having worked in Amazon for a few months I can assure you that the picking tower where I was only had humans scurrying about with trolleys and trays and conveyor belts between floors for the orders being sent out to the packing department.
The shelf stacking has no order, it’s just wherever the person could fit something and log it’s location. Targets were unrealistic (20% increase from the previous year) among other reasons not to return.
if you as a civ don’t have the technology to create and engineer atoms then certain materials especially heavy element atoms will have inherent value. it might not be much (highly dependent on supply vs demand, but it exists.
look at the real world for examples and extrapolate.
at a certain level even fairly common materials can be valuable gold has a certain intrinsic value especially in circuitry, germanium and some other elements if you are making semiconductors, and if you believe in stuff like the “troy Rising” series by John Ringo then platinum group metals might be especially valuable to a high tech civilization even if they can construct the stuff if for nothing else than it likely would take a lot of energy to transmute say carbon or similar to platinum, and if the energy cost was high enough they might spend a certain amount of time/energy mining and refining to avoid creating it.
You’re conflating scarcity and utility with value. Just not having very little of something doesn’t make it valuable, nor does something having X number of uses. What makes something valuable (in standard economic theory) is the behavior of the market which transacts the thing; and while scarcity and utility often inform value, there’s no rule that gives them a 1.0 correlating.
Elements iron and heavier cost energy to create by fusion (elements lighter than iron cost energy to create by fission). So, while you couldn’t easily make Pt from littler stuff, if you’ve got the tech making it from heavier stuff would likely be at a negative or null cost (Turning Pb-> Pt would yield energy).
I think we’re all missing another valid point in this whole commerce debate.
There may be an interstellar multi-cultural police force, GalPol (Galactic Police)…but that means there are wars, pirates, and other disruptions to the flow of commerce, artificially creating scarcity (in the sense of not being able to ship from point A to point B safely with everything intact makes a lack of resources at point B).
The entire reason why we even have steel is because of various wars blocking the trade routes of tin and copper, which is rarely found in deposits within close distance of each other. (Southwestern Britain being a notable exception.) Why is this important? Tin and copper make bronze. The Bronze Age came to a grinding halt when various wars broke out, disrupting trade. Suddenly all a region had was either tin, or copper, both of which are too soft to be of much use, compared to the average Mohs hardness of 5 for hammered, worked bronze. (otherwise it’s a 4, but most will work it to a 5)
So though it was originally economically cheaper to smelt bronze and copper (lower firing temperatures, less charcoal & effort needed)…since most regions couldn’t get both tin AND copper together (and arsenic is poisonous as a tin substitute)…various peoples started investing the time and energy to make the charcoal to smelt iron ore at much higher temperatures for much more effort…but much more cheaply ni terms of commerce/transport, because iron ore is pretty much frikkin’ everywhere, or near enough to count, compared to tin and copper. Crudely smelted iron also has a Mohs hardness of 5…but iron has the advantage of, IF you get the carbon mixture just right (about 3%)…you can make Steel, which can be brought up to be as hard as 6 or 7 under low-tech blacksmithing efforts. Bronze cannot do that.
We literally only got the Iron Age, and the Age of Steel, the Industrial Revolution, all of that, as a result of war and strife and conflict cutting off trade routes. So if there are local civil wars, trade route bandit infestations, or quarantines of planets with one particular commodity that’s hard to get elsewhere in equally cheap abundance, the value of that commodity will go up elsewhere, and people will travel long distances to get a fresh supply. (The Bronze Age ended because war was practically frikkin EVERYWHERE, the supply routes for all those copper and tin ingots were already thousands of miles long, and there just weren’t safe routes to anywhere anymore.)
So Deus, who strikes me as an economics/commodities savy sort, would surely have pre-consulted with some of the aliens he’s banged (or just done business with) recently, and found out which rare commodities are currently, well, rare enough to be worth trading.
A thought has occured to me. Sydney is retracing the footsteps of the previous owner of the orbs – is she going to run into individual/s who knew them?
Depending on the circumstances this could result in mutliple outcomes – for example:
-the previous owner was being hunted
-the orbs themselves are stolen or otherwise being hunted
-someone who cares about the previous owner wants to know what happened and attacks Sydney, holding her responsible for the vanished prior owner
-someone passes the information on to another interested party, who comes looking
To add an additional wrinkle, it’s possible that Dabbler’s friends may know Vale & be less than friendly, but I’ll admit I am reaching with that one :).
What about water? Aliens are always invading Earth to take it… oh wait we’ve been over this. Never mind.
That was one thing that Skyline posited as a potential unique resource for Earth that wouldn’t be more easily acquired from elsewhere in space – valuble complex biochemicals & biologicals, such as human brains.
The whole liquid water thing (looking at you, Battle: LA) was daft. You have the technology to fly between star systems with all the energy and technology that would imply, but decide a ground based soldier invasion with no real support while ignoring the benefits of orbital superiorty is preferble, to, eg, harvesting all those undefended ice moons in orbit around Saturn. If you can cross stellar gulfs, you can flipping well melt some ice.
Honestly, just fighting to take over real estate that your race can colonise would have made more sense.
Porn would be canon. Since we have a strips showing aliens coming to earth for Sex Tourism. And it’s quite popular to jump to earth for the nookie.
So terrabytes upon terrabytes of human porn would be massively lucrative. Especially hentai.
Throw in John Colbert’s Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts, copies of popular youtube videos, and full seasons of popular shows. And he’d have so much money … or at least the equivalent.
I gotta go with no on that one. If porn was that valuable every tourist would pay for their trip by downloading the internet. The only thing you’d have to pay for would be the storage media.
If the replicators usually only build from the molecule up, raw material (atoms) might be still be valuable. Like gold or lead or copper.
And maybe the society is post copyright and has tech to scan thumb drives from a few meters away. If truly post scarcity, maybe all Deus has to do is go to the automated factory and ask to have his birthright of make-anything-nannites.
Sidney is SO gonna discover Deus
I like plums, but I couldn’t eat a whole busload before they started to go bad.
Probably said already. I see a few paths for this.
1) Halo shadows Deus and sees him sell vault objects
2) Halo runs into Deus and is brought home
3)Dabbler’s freinds note another human in a place there should not be one and report
4) this is happening in the past and nothing will happen
5) In a place the size of atlease a small moon they do not run into each other
6) Halo finds the portal and gets back on her own without dues imediutly knowing
5 is nearly impossible in a sci-fi story, but would be a pretty good meta-joke. Having some near-misses (perhaps a short montage?) before they find each other would be a fun way to get a quick tour around the station.
Yes, they should continuously just miss seeing each other
and not know about it until they are both back on Earth.
PS:
Sydney sells some Googley Eyes for quick cash.
Gets 500 Yeets.
Deus sees Googley Eyes for sale, thinks ‘Isn’t it weird these exist here?’
Buys them for 2500 Yeets. (Chump Change to him, he has plenty of Yeets)
Proudly displays them when on Earth next to his other pricey artifacts.
Sydney somehow sees them and somehow recognizes them.
Knows he has been off-world. Tells Maxima.
Intrinsic Value is an oxymoron, there is no such thing. Value is only what someone assigns to something. Nothing is valuable in and of itself, and it’s easy to test by the hypothetical man in the desert. You’re a week away from civilization and you offer him a gold bar or a jug of water…which is he going to value more?
Easy: the gold bar
An interesting question. Will the jug of water last him until he gets to civilization? Is that a 60 lb. keg of water?
If not, the gold bar may actually be the better choice. Since if you encountered him, the possibility of some other traveler coming along before he expires just went up. In which case if he takes the gold he could then likely pay the next traveler to rescue him, since you’re being a rather inhumane jerk and not doing so yourself.
Intrinsic value does have a specific meaning in finance/economics, but the more generally used concept is that something is inherently valuable on its own merits (e.g. water in your example). Something like food or fuel is valuable for your own use, but could also be bartered.
Which is how currency develops – it’s hard to make change for a goat if you left your chickens in your other pants, so you either leave a verbal IOU, assign them the IOU the basketmaker gave you, or agree on some medium that lets you swap around. Bill Gates 2011 post on mobile banking in Africa is a great read on how currency changes opportunities and provides economic growth. He also included mobile banking in his 2015 annual letter as one of the most life-changing things happening around the world.
Side note – my favorite example of an abstract (awkward) currency is Rai stones (or Yap stones). Good article on them at NPR.
An interesting one was about Tide Laundry detergent theft and drugs. each bottle was worth about20$, so was a bit of drugs. people stole the detergent. it was used as a token of value. it’ was also not illega to have a bunch of bottles of it. and could be sold to stores in bulk. It also had no traceable number on it to show where it came from (like dollar bills)
On a Dyson sphere, there’s no ore left to mine. Nuclear synthesis of medium to heavy metals might be possible, but it’s definitely more expensive than fabricating trade goods. I’d guess the bars are likely to be something like tin or antimony, easy to refine from materials on Earth’s crust but heavy enough to be an attractive starting point for adding nucleons to get whatever heavy metals they want.
K1s will still need raw materials, but K2 and up are likely pulling it directly out of stars. The only thing they’d be hurting for would be hydrogen to feed back in, to keep the stellar fusion furnace going.
With stellar lifespans measured in billions of years, feeding hydrogen back in to your star to keep it young really shouldn’t ever be a thing.
And if Sydney is right about the star at the center of this Dysan sphere being a neutron star, however improbable that is, then there is no stellar furnace remaining at all to feed in any event.
So is there going to be an open wormhole on the deck? Are they accurate enough to (presumably) find the transportation hub of the trade world?
@DaveB The other possible reason why a commodity might be valuable is if the spiritual/magical/superpoweric nature of a substance can’t be replicated by a …replicator. Some sensitive people for example might even tell the difference between synthetic burgers and genuine ripped up animal flesh. If everyone is getting by on food that tastes ok but isn’t quite right, genuine meat and plants might be quite the luxury… but like the food service industry on the planet’s surface, it’s all about the logistics, since food doesn’t stay fresh forever.
Anyway, food aside, there might be a magical difference between diamonds forged in the heart of a young planet versus diamonds assembled industrially, or genuine plant fibers/wood compared to synthetics, or materials that have spent a long time being around life forms, or objects of worship. The whole chain of thought leads down a number of rabbit holes. Have steel beams in the middle of a city absorbed some kind of life flow? Does anyone care, unless they are using it to cast a curse on the population? Is material extracted from a star to serve its Dyson sphere population somehow overloaded, cooked until it no longer has any magic in it? Or are stars more magical than planets?
On a more utilitarian note, I am sure foreign species also love new drugs. And, I guess, maybe also new fruits or something.
A new material might be interesting, at least until they can replicate it.
“How can you not have theobromine?!”
“That is what you call the active ingredient in this ‘chocolate?'”
There’s a saying: No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
I can’t wait to see what happens to Deus’ plan when it meets Sydney.
Even matter replicators need feedstock. If they are building something “from the molecule up” then the feedstock is atoms and there will always be some atoms that are rare and hard to come by, and therefore – valuable.
question is do raido waves pass the portal.. If so Sydney going to have a shock when her pitboy and cell phone start getting a signal. and Max is most likely having arclight keeping an eye out for a network ping from them as well.
could you just imagine the roaming data charges that would rack up?
There was a book I read a few years back where the most valuable thing Earth produced turned out to be Maple Syrup. :)
Speaking as a Canadian: Hands off our liquid gold!
That would be Live Free or Die, first book in the Troy Rising series. Good reading.
I really despise Ringo, so I can’t help but be skeptical that he has managed to keep his sexual fetishes out of this series or novels. He certainly didn’t manage to keep them out of a couple other series, which is why I no longer purchase his books.
That’s why stopped reading Piers Anthony books: a lot of his early works are great, butt then he started slipping in his fetishes into works where it didn’t belong (like a hundreds year old zombie chasing after a teenaged girl in one of the Xanth books, and this was well long before the Twilight vampire paedophile)
Heh, yeah he certainly was pretty hung up on Irene’s panties, and I think the character was a child when first introduced.
if Amber is tree sap, and Maple syrup is tree sap, would it be feasible to make an amber bottle and fill it wit Maple syrup?
Actually, the question of what someone from Earth could trade for money is easy to answer. Rich people are always collecting rare and exotic things so they can display them to their friends. Offer them the chance to own the only Beanie Baby in their galaxy and they’ll pay big space bucks for it, especially if you spin up some story about it being a religious artifact or something.
What’s in the bag? The One thing valued by all alien races as the best protection in the galaxy. Towels.
iirc, isaac arthur and rbempathy on youtube have some decent discussions on how k2+ civilisations would trade and what they might value.
Say what you will about Deus’ underhanded tactics and distorted view of morality, at least when HE wants a portal to another planet, he powers it with renewable green energy sources and keeps his portal device properly grounded.
To be fair Sconia powered it with murder which also probably counts as renewable and green, juts not “cruelty free”.
Nice discussion of replicator tech and economics. One thing you have to ask when having this kind of after-gaming conversation is: how far is replicator tech likely to go? Your answer is the difference between science-fiction and science-fantasy.
The science-fiction answer is that future replicator tech is likely to remain at the molecular level; restructure arrangements between atoms, yes, transmute atoms on a macro-scale, no. Simply put, even if large scale atomic transmutation becomes doable, the energy requirements will be so massive that it will be cheaper just to mine the stuff even if you have to go great distances to do it. You won’t dedicate power plants capable of powering cities to transforming tiny amounts of lead into tiny amounts of uranium, forget about gold.
So pure rare and useful elements will still tend to hold their values in science-fiction universes. In science-fantasy universes (think Star Trek), all bets are off.
Actually, the energy input requirements don’t go crazy when you built atoms from energy because you can also do the reverse. You don’t setup massive power plants to power your replicator from scratch, you just have an input slot that takes literally any mass, then converts it to 99.999% of that mass in a different product, (the remainder going to inefficiency/powering the process.)
So you put in literal garbage, (or sewage) and get out whatever product you want, (as long as the mass amounts match you have enough energy to make the new thing.)
Plus 3 AAA batteries.
Again, science-fiction vs. science-fantasy.
I’m not sure why you are insistent that being able to use e=mc2 in a practical sense is fantasy. Science fiction is speculation on possible future technology and the science is solid on converting both ways between matter and energy being possible, (just not remotely practical yet on the scale I’m talking about.)
Of course, it’s clear which genre we’re in, here! ;) After all, superheroes, Master Frodo!
Would pay in Universal Bonding Agent (AKA Duct Tape).
You are forgetting art. Something that is entirely unique to the culture that produced it. When western explorers first discovered New Guinea a realm of people previously undiscovered by global civilization one of the things that was highest in demand from there was the completely unique art that they produced. Of course these exchanges go both ways and when the inhabitants of new guinea started being exposed to all the wonders of modern art it influenced them and now no one wants it because it’s considered derivative. Still though, art would be one thing that a low tech insulated society could trade to a higher one.
Regarding other forms of currency or items to sell for their currency could actually be anything that’s a byproduct of a plant or an animal on earth. Assuming this is an alien world something like cheese, whiskey, or Alo Vera topical medication could be used for trade. Depending on how alien the trade center is and how rare cows, earth based plants or the ingredients for alcohol production are, then a finished product from earth could be at least a bit valueble. Even if they can synthase it with their technology the sample to make a blueprint from fould be a valuable trade. Be creative in the trade. This is an alien world. Who knows if a planet like earth is rare, making many things unusually valuable. :)
Hardwoods, ivory, ambergris, fossils, anything that’s either a bitch to manufacture because its the result of a natural process and/or its value is derived from being the result of a natural processes.
Hilariously he could be selling sea shells (to a collector), one of our most “primitive” forms of currency.
Petoskey stones. Stones with miniature seashells from millions of years ago.
In Michigan around the lakes they are all over the place. Very pretty when polished/
The item in the box came from the vault.
For the general argument, raw materials are universally needed. It’s not just how abundant they may be, but what the cost of gathering and trsnsporting them. Take for example the hydrogen engine designed by Honda. It can’t replace replace petroleum based combustion engines because the hydrogen conversion process requires platinum. There is not enough platinum on earth for this to be a prolific technology.
Heavy metals are created in stars and become the basis for other objects, planets etc when the star dies. The creation of those metals is the catalyst of Star death. So there is a finite amount of heavy elements (iron and heavier). A technology that transmutes less dense materials into more dense requires a lot of energy. Stars use fusion to create these metals. I suspect a transmutation technology would not be based on fusion, but would work in the other direction from a cost stand point. So, raw materials are a good trade good for low tech to high tech societies.
DaveB missed the obvious form of labor-barter for Earth: super powers.
Think about it. The Twilight Council includes several people with extraterrestrial connections, and yet they are frequently impressed and intimidated by what supers can do, to the point where their security didn’t even anticipate it. That means that (some) superpowers are outside of what non-terrestrials can routinely do, which means they’ll be in demand.
The geokinetic that mined an Olympic swimming pool worth of gold will be valuable to an alien society in any mining effort (and probably construction too). Jiggawatt can just CREATE ANTIPARTICLES with minimal effort, which would have excellent energy-production potential and probably violates conservation of energy. A teleporter like Opal or even Harem could revolutionize a dozen industries. And, of course, there’s the military applications. I know he was something of a joke, but Death Toll could have wiped the floor with those civilization-ending (we presume) squid-walkers.
Sure, Deus has a great thing going with Opal handling some of his bulk container shipping, but there’s no way UPS can have her deliver their 10’s of millions of packages a day, every day. Or even for her to deal with the 200 million annual shipping container trips.
The problem with super powers exchange is that they don’t work at world scale, and certainly not at a galactic scale. Some great opportunities for a few individuals, but Deus likely wouldn’t be satisfied until he had significant share of the overall trade. Especially as the first guy to get to market.
Did we ever see Opal in the mail room?
Maybe she opens a short range portal and railcars just zip through.
I’m pretty sure that the distinction is, the value of art is always a gamble when dealing with an unknown audience. Deus would be looking to bring something that would be less of a gamble.
Of course, carrying bars of some radioactive metal is still something of a gamble; even if the civilization he’s trying to barter with has interest in power, the question of what form of power they are willing to accept will be an issue. Some advanced civilizations might insist on only taking energy in the form of antimatter, while others might only accept tritium. Or maybe they want one radioactive material, and you need to properly determine which one.
That said, there’s also Deus’s super power of knowing inconvenient stuff that he shouldn’t. So he’s probably going to deal with a particular alien race that trades in a particular item that Deus has brought in large supply, and looking for a particular thing that he happens to know they have on offer. And to make it truly inconvenient, Deus is going to upstage an existing contract they have, causing the race to break out of their agreement with another race for the same materials at a worse exchange rate for them, and the other race will declare war on Earth as a result.
You know, I think you’re on to something, there. That would be his superpower, wouldn’t it? He clearly knows all sorts of info inconvenient for other people to have him know…and he’s made a distinct artform out of leveraging it for money and power.
I love the Rick and Morty references. Gazorpazovum and now plumbus. Even though at the time of the comic, technically Rick and Morty was not yet on TV (unless you assume that the timeline for Grrlpower is from the end of the comic and works its way back, which actually makes sense when I think about it. :)
I am choosing to ignore any frame of chronological relative reference to the real world and just go with (its another reality, don’t ask questions).
Just like with Marvel and DC comics where they would make references to pop culture and politics of the time, but in-universe supposedly a lot less time has passed (depending on the writer sometimes), than could excuse these references.
I’m sure there’s a term for it always being ‘now’, like on The Simpsons and
in the Archie comics.
It’s just called “comic book time.”