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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Are….we the only ones hearing the Stargate sound effects for that ring portal opening up? The “DOWAA DOWAA DOWAA” would be the device spinning the crescent thing, while the “whooshing water” would be the actual portal opening? Anyone?
Was kinda surprised to learn Daniel The Human was thinking the same thing…
Daniel here. SOMEONE didn’t wait till I finished finding the sound effects we are talking about. I know this is someone’s CGI of it, but they used the actual sound effects from the show…
As for what he is bringing for money, I’m in the Entertainment and/or Genetic Data camp. There was this serial novel (now taken down and paper-published) called, funny enough, “Children of the Halo.” They met a sentient, talking, and quite intelligent bird. Similar to a mynah here on earth. These binahs come in pairs that are telepathically linked. To exploit them for long-distance communication, you would normally need to capture one as a hostage against the other half’s obedience. Characters from Earth that got transplanted in a magical land convinced a binah to flip on it’s master in exchange for letting it watch episodes of Lost. The bird itself said it was addicted, and just had to see how it ended.
He’s actually trading several seasons of Rick and Morty. :)
or is he buying Rick and Morty seasons from the alien creators who made it (with the “loosely based on true events!” bit photoshopped out)?
See “Business as usual, during alterations”
https://www.vb-tech.co.za/ebooks/Williams%20Ralph%20-%20Business%20as%20Usual%20During%20Alterations%20-%20SF.txt
So, I’m pretty sure they’re going to run into Halo and wind up bringing her back to Earth.
Doubtful, the highest probability is they hear a PA calling for a Sydney Scoville to come to the front desk as Cora (a friend of Xuriel Tantalus) has come to give her a ride home.
with Deus giving a shocked reaction.
She did recently get equipment from Deus and even Max said it was possible/likely that he might have bugged it or put tracking in it or whatever. Who knows if he carries a receiver at all times specifically so he knows if one of the ARC team is in his vicinity.
And she hasn’t ben using it since the Swimming Pool Incident
Maxima told her to keep it even after the airball became functional.
It frees up a hand.
Despite not wanting to look like a rube from a backwards planet,
she should put it on before dropping the forcefield and entering
the common area.
It’s just common sense.
“Is there air? You don’t know!” – Galaxy Quest
Great page, but there’s just one thing bugging me:
That bag is full and weighted to the point of tautness along every major panel of the exterior, and yet Deus left the top open and is hoisting it by the unsecured top flap. That’s just a really great way to get the flap torn off your bag, that is.
If the Deus dude can afford $3,000 suits, the Deus dude can afford $3,000 quintuple-reinforced bags with an anti-radioactivity lining and genuine platinum (or perhaps tungsten) buckles…
Though honestly, that just looks like a high quality bushcrafter’s daypack, which are often crafted with reinforced stitching (two parallel straight stitches and a serger stitch to prevent fraying), and almost always made out of 1000-denier ripstop nylon…plus what looks like leather piping reinfordement over all the seams. Some of those suckers are so well made, you could carry 100 pounds (45kg) of gold bars inside for a full day, and they wouldn’t rip apart. (Your shoulders might feel like ripping off your body, but not the bag.)
Fun fact – a cubic foot of gold will run you just over 1200 lbs.
Steel is itself is(depending on blend), ~490lbs a cubic foot.
Double stitching alone won’t save that bag.
True!
However, this presumes the entire bag is filled with silvery bars of some heavy metal like steel or white gold. Those bars might actually be aluminum! Before the Bayer Process was developed, aluminum was exceptionally difficult to smelt. Or it could be titanium. (Or rhodium, which at #45 on the periodic table, is slightly lighter than silver (#47).)
It just occurred to me that these could be just a double layer of bars on top of a sturdy gift box filled with rare Earth delicacies like the aforementioned chocolates, cotton candy, peppermint candy canes, candy corn…or even the most powerful (yet non-deadly) breath weapon invented by humans: Altoids, able to knock out 17 species across the galaxy, putting them in a helpless minty stupor! (What? They ARE curiously strong!).
If you look at the bottom of the bag, it is absolutely flat, no bend. If you just stack bars in a bag with a flat bottom and corners…that bottom is gonna sag because the bars slide against each other. But the bottom of that bag isn’t saggy in the middle. In fact, it has stress lines pointing to its corners, ergo something very rectangular and full-sized (or even a little oversized, maybe a jewelry box with those extra-projecting foot things at the four bottom corners?) has been stuffed inside.
…If we’re going for anything along the lines of precious gemstones, I’d suggest amber or pearls. Amber is fossilized pine tree resin, and pearls are hardened oysterspit globbed around annoying sand particles. The geochemical processes that creats diamonds, various flavors of corundum (sapphires, rubies, etc), and other gemstones can be found on nearly any rocky type world, but amber and perals are only created through organic means unique (as far as we know) to Earth. Plus, they’re incredibly lightweight compared to metals.
I’d imagine he’s bringng rhodium as DaveB was thinking, which is highly useful to thinly plate silver and white gold to prevent tarnishing and scratches, etc, and which is highly useful in 3-stage catalytic converters (found in automobile engines and other machinery no doubt), but which is difficult to obtain in large quantities. (You’re looking at tens of thousands of rings coated with just the bars we can see, for example.) Combined with amber and pearls, you got yourself shiny bling that’s resistant to wear & tear, and lookin’ gorgeous with rare Earthling biogems.
…And yes, the big box would go at the bottom, because any experienced checkout stand bagger will tell you that you fill the bottom with either heavy things or sturdy flat things; if you put a big box at the bottom, it gives you a stable platform that will not tip over or slump when you set it down from bars shifting around. Additionally, if you hold it in your arms, it’s easier to control if you wrap your arms around the box at the bottom and balance the rest against your chest.
So my vote (only DaveB knows for sure, of course, and since we can only see the top of the bag, for all we know this IS what is in there) is for a large box of amber & pearls, and bars of rhodium on top.
Which would be the 5 units of Earthling effort to process it, versus the 1 unit of interstellar civilization effort discussed earlier in the comments. Why would rhodium be valuable? Because it IS useful as a near-inert metal that can be used as a catalyst or a coating. Earth still has some readily accessible rhodium supplies, but I’d imagine a lot of interstellar civilizations have kinda seriously depleted their local resources by now. Why bother paying for putting together an expensive mining & processing vessel when an Earthling just shows up with bars of (mostly) purified metal?
Aluminum: 169lb/cubic foot. Known as ‘the metal from clay’. Found in feldspar (about 41% of the earth’s continental crust by weight, also found on the moon. Can you vacuum smelt it with enough mirrors from regolith?) – translation; super common. May even be trivial to smelt once you have access to space.
Titanium: 280 lb/cubic foot. 9th most abundant element. About 100x more abundant than copper… not exactly rare.
Imagine a radioactive fuel you can turn on or off with a light switch. No control rods, literally you activate it or safe it with a switch. Dysprosium (533lb/cubic foot) – this stuff might be relevant to a space faring civilization. It’s isotope 163 goes from ‘stable’ to ‘half-life measured in days’ if properly ionized. Then again, it might be utter rubbish for power/second or waste products …
Hmm, my initial impression was of a box with two straps holding down a lid, but after reading these comments, it does look like stacked bars. It could be rare elements or it could be less mundane material recovered from the vault. A fictional miracle metal like vibranium or mithril…
He’ll have Vale carry it.
She’s stronger than him.
Probably made of Kevlar with double reinforced seams. You CAN rip that stuff, if you’re strong like a gorilla and catch it on a sharp edge. Otherwise, no.
In panel 5, on the bottom sign, are those English letters?
I can’t quite make them out.
It’s literally a Lorem Ipsum, or a bunch of Latin text (often beginning with the words “Lorem ipsum”) that has zero relevance to what it’s printed on. It’s words just to be words.
You can see the word “Lorem” clearly if you zoom in enough.
Back in college I used to work the Computer Lab, and I had a ‘returning’ student run into an issue with the default slides in Powerpoint. I walk over to help, and she shows me the slide with the Lorum Ipsum on it, asking what it is.
Of course I start, in my best D&D Wizard voice, to read it off…” Lorum, Ipsum, Delor set…” and she gets this wide eyed stare and asks “you can READ that?” At which point it became very hard not to laugh out loud as I explained place holder text to this very nice older lady.
Maybe Holo Halo can read them?
What does the 3 signs say?
1- not responsible for stolen or lost items; but if you need them back, check out the black market!
2- littering is forbidden; consider what is junk to you might cause decades worth of technological breakthru to a noob civilization!!!
3- frequent cow mutilators air miles are not granted after drinking pan-galactic gargle blasters if you have to be cloned back from scratch to come claim them. Surgically removing the aftertaste is not covered by insurance, it costs 300 quatloos to do that.
“EDGAR ALLEN POE’S MONSTER MOM PROBLEM”
Poe resurrected from the dead
By dear departed mom’s side it is said
DNA is of the unearthly kind so sublime
A giant black “spider” he can be one anytime
Halloweenis every day he can see some people
If local’s disappear and loath the night
A giant crawling “spider” may set them aflight
Poe is the spirit of the night forever more…
Where is dear old mom he will find he fore swore
There was once an old flash game depicting a futuristic world with a very unique form of currency: Favors. In essence, since material needs and currencies were so wildly different between races, one would exchange deeds. Need a new ship? You’ll have to do something for the seller of an agreed upon value. Can’t think of a favor immediately? No problem, just contact them later and cash in that favor. It’s a bit of a chaotic “currency,” but it’s definitely universal.
actually, gold, silver, and platinum are rare regardless of where you are in the galaxy. the reason we have so much gold on earth ( not that much really) that is not at the core is the proto-earth/moon collision that smeared what was in the mars size planet that hit us. and considering it takes a collision between neutron stars to make it, Lithium could be very negotiable.
I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean lithium there. That’s a light element; only hydrogen and helium are lighter. Everything up to iron is made in normal stars (or the Big Bang) as it is largely energetically favourable to do through fusion. Heavy elements, those with more protons in than iron, are not energetically favourable to create through fusion, so they only come about through crazy processes such as supernovae; those throw out an absolutely amazing torrent of neutrons and neutrinos and kick all normal stellar processes in the head.
They’re not going to take my Planetary Impress Served card either, are they?
In amny universes, they will also be interested in labor, human beings doing assembly in sweatshops or the like, the sweatshops being built here where land and construction are cheap.
If you’ve hit ‘matter replication’ levels of tech, power is the only real currency left, unless you’ve also got some unreplicateable unobtanium, in which case that would be too.
If you don’t have matter replication tech, anything that’s both rare and useful will be valuable.
We like gold in our electronics because its a good conductor and doesn’t oxidize, regardless of tech level I’d imagine most alien races would like it for the same reason.
While something like diamonds are based on cartel pricing, anything with a useful intrinsic quality should still retain value. Conductors, superconductors, insulators. Even common materials that require processing.
You might not fit a fortune’s worth in a backpack, but Steel hits the sweet spot for a lot of needs.
If I was Deus though, I think I’d go for Neodymium. Its extremely useful, fairly common, but a bitch to actually get as a pure element. In this case, you get your money out of the processing side. It’s not that nobody else has it, its just the value added part.
There is a very old (1980’s vintage) boardgame called “Merchants of Venus”. The Human player’s export good? MUSIC VIDEOS.
I’ve actually played that game! (It’s remarkably fun, too.) Some of the various civilizations have primitive furs for their exports, some have computer processor chips, some have biogenetic (DNA) material, some have perfumes from flowers. Some places have space stations where you can upgrade your engines to go faster, or your shields to ignore radiation zones, so on and so forth…and sometimes the best spaceship upgrades can be mixed up to the point of being found orbiting the most low-tech of planetary civilizations…
Just to point this out as it has been coming up a lot in various discussions threads.
Something being rare or scarce does not automatically make it valuable.
Value will vary by species, heck it varies by culture. What is valuable tends to be an agreed upon concept, heck just work for encrypted points and spend the points as they represent time and effort spent contributing to society.
Some substance isn’t going to be considered valuable no matter how rare it is unless its to a collector, scientist studying it, or has some cultural importance; historical relevance, as in represents their ancient gods or their culture has a history of it having value and the basis of their currency because their species liked shiny things (but would never admit this on a galactic scale, or possibly even to themselves).
An abstract currency, faith based economy, and the like are the most reasonable for an advanced culture. Simply using encrypted points like a currency backed by agreed value of one’s time and labor to the collective.
Anything else could come across like primitive beasts arguing over shiny rocks or weird collectors insisting their rare isotopes should be the currency just because they are rare and they are the ones with a monopoly on producing them.
Even on that, some cultures/species could even regard the rarest materials as worthless if they can’t use them for anything of value to them. So it makes more sense to use abstract currency.
To summarize.
Value is based on Demand.
It doesn’t matter how scarce or common something is, if there is no Demand.
Your buyer will determine the value based on the various criteria of their personal or cultural bias.
Another addition,
we need to differentiate between items of value we want to purchase
and
items of value used as currency/backing the currency.
Yes, power to power those replicators. You said the laws of thermodynamics apply, so to create a block of gold would require the energy in the mass of that block of gold. You calculate that using the old familiar E=mc^2, and that is a really huge amount of energy, not even considering the efficiency of said replicators. Every cup of Earl Gray tea that Picard drinks is a very significant draw on the warp drive output.
It would be far, far less than 99% even assuming that their power system had an improbable 99% efficiency. Primarily because you can’t draw all the power from the central star without denying light to the inhabitants. You can only draw power where you park the solar collectors, and unless you decide that they can build solar collectors into their building material without regard for the cost, the collector areas are unusable for any other purpose, and either take up room on the inner surface of the sphere (which has an admittedly staggering surface area if you assume that it is a shell at approximately the orbit of Earth) or you’re placing in perpetual shade the areas under the collectors. Which might be just fine, and provide needed shade for certain industries or species. Niven used an inner ring of shadow squares to provide day and night for his Ringworld, and those could also be solar collectors, and could also provide areas where there is a ‘day’ and ‘night’ cycle for the Sphere dwellers.
Regarding the replicators in Star Trek, I always understood that they reconfigured raw material into the desired form by rearranging matter at the atomic (or maybe subatomic) level rather than created new material out of nothing but energy. So it’s still a lot of energy but full potential energy of the final object.
Damn typo! It should read “…but not the full potential energy of the final object.”
yeah, back then they didn’t really have an IRL reference to go by, but today we’d probably call it a really, really, really REALLY fast, atomic level accuracy, 3D-Printer… one that doesn’t need a “filament” to print an object, but uses a bank of tanks of various atoms that it then grabs one-by-one as needed to make the object being replicated.
I know food replicators for sure do this, because their base building blocks are a very limited set. Its not even as varied as “Pork” or “Beef” its all ‘faked’ with flavor and texture tricks from basic materials. That’s why the persistent jokes about replicated food.
This would make food replicators a lot less energy hungry, but more complex constructions will still need to be made from scratch I think, as that kind of culinary slight of hand wouldn’t work on say, some electronics.
Wouldn’t electronics be even easier? The cleverness and complexity of electronics are the shapes the atoms are used to form rather than a wide range of different types of chemicals that are needed. If they’re 3D printing at the atomic level the difficult bit is the design of the electronic circuits but 99% of the time they probably just need to take an existing design out of their database rather than create a new one from a clean sheet.
Its not about the complexity of the pattern, its about the method.
A food replicator ‘cheats’ by grabbing a bunch of carbohydrates and artificial flavors and gives you a ‘carrot’ that really isn’t. Think like how vegans keep trying to make fake meat alternatives, expect you know these ones actually are convincing.
Since a food replicator is working off a limited set of base materials, carbs and proteins, you can just have a vat full of that stuff somewhere. Your food replicator is a glorified waiter. It’s just bringing you food that already exists and arranging it in a more pleasing manner than ‘nutrient slush’.
Your food replicator gets to escape the expensive end of E=MC^2. It’s a space age 3D printer that uses food instead of plastic.
If you ask a replicator for an iPad though, and it resorts to using Energy to create matter out of thin air, suddenly we have a real power drain. A hand full of jellybeans could run NYC for weeks, on the same token, creating a handful of jellybeans from energy would require that same energy output.
You’d need a fantastic amount of energy to solve any scarcity issues using replicator technology. An The iPhone 6 Plus weighs 172 grams, so to replicate one, you’d need the same amount of energy as around 300 of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima.
I could see some advanced races buying our primitive art, it would be like a rich tourist here buying hand crafted local items. There are also magical items that might be sold to them as lost technology if they don’t understand how it works. I am sure there are other things, but a great deal of the things we value would be of little to no value to an advanced race.
Dabbler exists therefore space has magic.
primitive art can be reproduced by robots and therefore is now valueless in the long run, though things like “Dragon’s Tears” (Tm) (maple syrup) from the “Troy Rising” series by John Ringo would be a definite hit…
>primitive art can be reproduced by robots and therefore is now valueless in the long run,
Uhh, no.
It’s not primitive art anymore if the robot made it.
The point of authentic goods is their origin. I can walk down to Walmart and get a pair of moccasins. But mass produced crap is mass produced crap.
I do own a pair of moccasins actually hand made by the Cree, that were gifted to me.
Which pair of moccasins do you think has more intrinsic value?
A copy is a copy, it takes a creative mind to create something new.
Step 1: Place 7 ft x 12 ft panels of indestructilite in the dodgiee section of a primitive planets’ city
Step 2: Wait for it to be covered in grafitti
Step 3: Remove and sell as art.
Step 4: Repeat.
So pretty much the equivalent of having animals at the zoo play with the paint and then selling it as art in other words.
Art community is a dodgy business, and based less on uniqueness and talent and more on name and who you know these days. Its like its own little world. I have seriously seen stuff on Deviant art that puts most modern gallery artists to shame.
By the way, Everyone…?
I am finding all these discussions of commerce, currency, and the value (or lack thereof) regarding various potential commoddities to be quite stimulating. Thank you all for contributing your thoughts and ideas!
You’re Welcome!… And Thank YOU for participating in said conversations yourself…
Two words: “Human Horn”. That is all.
Yes, aliens apparently have the same market for boner pills that exists on Earth across every single culture ever.
To be fair, before the Bayer Process was developed in the late nineteenth century, Aluminum was more valuable than Gold..
I would say it was more expensive.
More valuable is subjective, they used aluminium tableware just because it was expensive, not because it was better than other materials (screechy noises anyone?)
Just as a reminder, Deus got some pretty good deals last time he went shopping.
Just, you know, so we all know where the bar’s set for his present escapades.
Yeah, can’t get a better deal than a Five-Fingered Discount
What he did, was basically go ‘shopping’ during a riot or natural disaster
Being able to create something with your replicator doesn’t mean creating things with replicators is overly cheap; power, maintaince, raw materials if transmuting elements is impractical or sufficently slow/expensive/needs more specialised hardware, etc.
Rare materials may not be as rare and expansive in their society, but many will likely still have some value; walking into a an alien pawn shop with a backpack full of gold bars might be more like walking into an earthly pawn shop with a backpack full of copper bars, but it’d still be worth money.
Information and entertainment yes, but you can also expect demand for goods that aren’t made with supertech *because* it’s not made with supertech. See demand for natural gems, minerals, plant and animal products VS artifical and synthetic ones iRL, or the premium artisan and handmade goods can demand because people put value on that.
And even if your civilization has more energy than it can use, that doesn’t mean it’s distributed anything like evenly, or cheaply enough to make matter conversion – or transmutation – affordable.
The sun converts 4.3 million tons of matter to energy a second. Say you get 4 million to the end-user, hey, over half a kilo per person per second for everyone on earth! That’s a 100,000 ton supercarrier in two days, for everyone!(assuming manufacturing and everything is free). But if your civilization has, I dunno, a hundred trillion people – if you’re building dyson spheres it’s probably pretty high, and 13,000x earth’s current population when building something with 550 million times the surface area of the earth doesn’t seem unreasonible – that’s 0.043 grams per second, or 3.7 kilograms per day. Still pretty good, but you’ have to save up to replicate anything very big. Add another order of magitude, call it a generation’s growth, and you can replicate yourself a meal a day but your’re probably paying a large chunk of that in taxes because your civilization needs another dyson sphere pretty quickly.
Von Neumann Dyson sphere constructors don’t require taxes.
Just be careful you don’t get stung by the “Paperclip Maximizer” problem…
All this discussion about cheap or free energy has reminded me of a passage in Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife: Beguilement It’s in Chapter 12, and I realize that TSK:B is labeled FANTASY as opposed to SCIENCE FICTION. The debatable difference is a topic for twenty or a thousand other posts.
The way I picture it is this. You go to the store and order a gram of iridium. Maybe you’re making Asimovian robots by hand. Who knows what you need raw material for.
Does the clerk fire up the Super-duper Cosmic Matter Re-integrator? No. He opens a drawer in a bin and takes out whatever quantity of whatever metal you want. Metal that was retrieved from wherever it was found – planet’s mantle, planet’s core, asteroid – just using more modern methods. Earth has a super who pulled a swimming pool sized chunk of molten gold from Earth’s core. Who is to say there are no alien supers who specialize in all the other elements?
“Trying to create anything by matter-conversion/transmutation is like pushing on the short end of a long lever. It’s always easier to do it by hand.”
DaveB, just also wanted to say I personally love your onomatopoeia that aren’t actual attempts at spelling out the sounds being heard by the characters. Aka, what I like to fondly call your your non-omatopoeia. Memorable classics include Embiggen, Ka-Bun, & FABRIC of the Very Universe TORN ASUNDER.
(Also, FZzzZM …is what it would sound like if this wasn’t hard vacuum …instant classic, if lengthy.)
+1
Oh this will be funny. I bet Deus might let get Halo a suveneer that turns out to be more valuable than anyone realized. I can totally picture Deus would bring Halo home just to score points with Maxima.
Dave, I’ve been holding my tablet in one hand for 30minutes and it’s kind of tired.
Sydney has been holding the forcefield orb for hours.
Once she’s in a breathable atmosphere, please have her verbalize
the sensations she experiences once the orb is released.
Experiences of people clinging to the sides/wings/struts of small aircraft accidentally caught outside when it took off and hanging on for extended periods where the slightest lapse equals instant death suggest the musculature simply locks solid… to the point where the people CAN’T let go and have to be delicately pried off after landing. Turns out that the lactic acid that makes your muscles ache actually has a really compelling reason to be part of our evolutionary arsenal…
We’ve never really seen all of her hand, especially her fingers, in any shot; my money’s on a bit of scotch tape or clear (yes it exists, I have some!) duct tape taping her fingers in place around it.
They did exactly that to Sydney for the trip to The Council’s aquatic death artifact vault.
Aluminum was once more valuable than gold. Before the discovery of electricity to refine aluminum, the process to do it chemically was stupidly hard and expensive. One of Napoleon’s prize possessions was an aluminum silverware set.
Should everyone get to the point of being in the same place at the same time..
Cora: Deus..
Deus: Cora..
Cora: ..been awhile..
Deus: ..seven years, four months.. five days, I think
Cora: Nice to see you remember, at least. But couldn’t remember to call?
Deus: We both know that’s not my style
Cora: Yeah..
Wide eyed Sydney looking back and forth through all of this
I’d like to put forward the possibility of a post-desperation potlach economy – We’re so overwhelmingly good at production on a whim, we rank status amongst ourselves by how much we can afford to simply fling at courteous visitors! “Here, do take these down-to-the-molecule exact replicas of your most famously fast ground vehicles. You do have a place to put 700 of these “Hennessy Venom F5’s”, yes? Guaranteed to be compatible with your local fuel standards…”
I have to agree with your reasoning here. If energy is as readily available as it would be in a Dyson environment, then obtaining virtually any form of matter is simply a question of expending it to get that energy to get it. However, creativity is one thing that cannot be manufactured. Even if one has many creative minds on hand, there are always others who will go on paths that those will not. Ergo, the stories, plans, and even ways of using tech in unexpected ways would be of value, regardless of their source. I expect Deus has a copy of the Iliad and the Oddessey in there.
Of course, some odd forms of drivel might also be of perceived value in a “so bad it’s good” sort of way. So maybe Deus has the full set of “Twilight” and “50 Shades of Grey” in there as well.
“I’m almost ashamed to admit we’ve established a relationship by getting them hooked on reruns of Jerry Springer.”
“Almost? I’m not. That stuff is gold. Literally!”
Just happens to power up his portal to go shopping at the time she needs help and sounds like he doesn’t do it often or this is the first time? He has his sources, he might be there to pick her up. Test a new toy, get some easy cred with your enemies/clients(what are they to him?), go shopping for rare stuff… so many wins.
Fun thought – modern (real world) alchemy lets you create gold, usually using mercury, but platinum and bismuth have also been used … if those techniques are made profitable in the future then the value of gold will likewise shift (could mercury as a reactor coolant lead in that direction?)
The value of gold and other rare metals drops when you start mining it from asteroids. Which we’ll be doing long before turning anything into gold become profitable.
Star Trek’s replicators, magic boxes that churn out unlimited quantities of stuff for free are bogus. But in the context of this setting, it seems fairly obvious that Earth has a commodity that would have a lot of value on the open market. Super-DNA.
Another thing that a low tech civilization could offer a high tech one.
Culture.
Think about what humans will do or suffer through to get a chance to experience a foreign culture. Now imagine a high tech civilization that has never experienced the concept of Shakespeare.
They’ll pay through the nose to see stuff involving Shakespeare.
Are you sure?!
i think the issue with trading with aliens is that they are clearly space faring, MOST things we think are “rare” are not, and even the things that are (like certain isotopes) are absurdly easy to find in abundance floaty rocks in space. No matter how useful something like platinum is, its just TOO common to have “high” value in a spaceport, at least a backpack full of it. Same for basically any radioactive material as well.
The only REAL thing of value that you could carry in that backpack would be biological samples. I dont necessarily mean ours, but in general life would develop somewhat differently on each planet, creating “unique” medicines/poisons/etc …ofc some of those things would be deadly to one species and a new life to others. But yeah, figure out which is which and market/sell appropriately and you could be rolling in space loot.
Fertilized animal eggs? Or seeds? Seriously, there’s a pretty big leap from “molecular printing” to “creating life from nothing”
Yeah, it is not that hard for 21st century civilization to trade with a post scarcity Type 1 Civilization. There is still plenty of room to trade thanks to something called Comparative Advantage. Like for example a Civilization 1 Civilization glad to trade a 1K Qubit smart phone for 1 Quardrillion Btu of Energy (The US consumes 19 Quadrillion a year). The US government would probably be glad to power up their energy cells on our primative power system to get a hold of a 1K Quibit smart phone, and the Type 1 Civilization could probably use that energy to make a million 1K Qubit smart phones (though the 2K is have a better camera according to Space Steve Jobs).
The real problem here is what can you offer a Type 1 Post-Scarcity Civilization (or member of that civilization) that fits in a single extra large back pack? Also you don’t need matter/energy conversion to reach Post Scarcity. If you have enough energy you can mine your local asteroids, oort cloud, and planets for a long time before it runs out materials. And with rentable, localize, ultra 3-D printers coupled with drones, you don’t need Star Trek replicators to achieve the same effect. Just order your product, and a drone delivers it to you 10 minutes later. There is nothing you can’t offer the individual that they can’t get on their own for free. And there is nothing you can offer the civilization that would not require vast quantities of it to make it worth the bother of trading with you.
Frankly what I would do on my first trip is probably just information gather and pan handle. Deus would probably make more “space” panhandling in the 5 minutes than his whole corporate empire would make a year. He could find out that a single “space” dollar is worth 1 quadrillion BTU in charged energy crystals. He could also find that the half eaten “space” McDouble that he was given is so full of medicines and micro tech that one bite would cure all his diseases and makes him 5 years younger.
Personally I think that would be funny and showcase Deus’s cold calculating that he has no problem about being a beggar to get ahead.
I think it would be an interesting twist if the stuff Deus brought isn’t worth anything, only for an opportunity to present itself when the squids follow Sydney there. If Vale or his other allies drive them off, the station would owe them a lot…
And I wonder what type of performers they have there. I’m positive that Vale could put on an amazing performance if she’s up for showing off even a few of her skills she’s shown so far. Dance of the otherworldly vapor? Shut up and take my money!
Star trek has already answered what a advanced species would trade: gold pressed latinum. here is its background curtesy of memory alpha.
https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Latinum
now I hope he is not there to purchase any weird, leathery eggs.
hand crafts actually. while all those matter replicators are just fine for some things real hand made things would be real hard to come by.
you see it today in the world.
well know we know how Syd’s getting home.
Turns out aliens only watch our porn for the music.
+1