How did the Terran Federation economy work?

Chief-CWH wrote:

More Drugs please, Oh I meant snippet please twenty plus days is a long time to be in withdrawal.

Ah, but just think of the joy of being beyond your addiction...free at last!

Don

looksbeforeheleaps wrote:

Randomiser wrote:It worked the same way as the economy in Star Trek, obviously.

Maybe they had worked out how to convince people that human fulfilment is rarely achieved by sittimg around doing nothing all day?

Besides not even AIs and nanites can produce something from nothing, ownership of primary resources is still going to be important.

With AI-directed robotic and nanite mining of the asteroid belt, raw materials should not be a significant limiting factor. Certain specific elements or isotopes may still be relatively rare, especially heavy metals. And if you need transuranics elements for anything, they still need to be produced in breeder reactors and/or particle accelerators.

Energy may also be an issue. Providing enough for everyone to have a standard of living much higher than we have now should be easy enough. However, military applications, space-based heavy industry and high-energy physics research are going require more concentrated energy production that may need resources (antimatter, helium three, whatever) that can't be produced in unlimited quantities.

It is likely that PICA's are a luxury good because of their use of exotic materials.

You seem to miss the point a bit. As a society they probably weren't resource poor, but that wasn't what I was getting at. Aethor seemed to suggest that every Joe down the road could make whatever he liked by setting up a self replicating AI controlled Fab plant in his backyard. Leaving aside for the moment how he persuaded someone to give him one, what his plant could make would be severely limited by the inputs he could give it. Today everything electronic requires 'exotic materials' to make the chips, hard drives and displays, tantalum, hafnium, ruthenium etc, a whole bundle of metalloids and rare earths. It's hard to see it being that different in the future. You can't just mine your garden for these, someone else already owns the ores (mostly someone Chinese at the moment) and, surprise, surprise they are genuinely rare and require a lot of work to extract. That's why OWL can't produce any more PICAs right now, he doesn't have the right resources to hand. Joe's Fab plant is not going to be self-replicating or make anything containing electronics until he somehow obtains lumps of a collection of 'exotic materials' either. The people who don't have them are going to have to figure something to trade with the people who do.

Randomiser wrote:Today everything electronic requires 'exotic materials' to make the chips, hard drives and displays, tantalum, hafnium, ruthenium etc, a whole bundle of metalloids and rare earths.

Not everything that we need for life requires rare elements. A single robot can work a garden or orchard and produce food, which then I don't need to buy.

Also, items can be recycled from other items. An older cell phone, if you have nanites, can be broken down and reused to form a new one, with perhaps just a minimum of new material needed.

Production costs of that stuff is actually only a very small part of the price. In today's real world, look at the price of, say, an iPad, and then look at its real cost to produce.
Then subtract from that real cost all the workers and their management, and subtract all the materials that can be obtained either in nature or recycled from older models.

Energy for all that? If all I need is a very small scale production, like, just for me, I might as well be satisfied with solar and wind, which are free.

Yes, I might pay something for heating in winter in Canada... but still, the amount of work needed will be a tiny fraction of the work done today.

Randomiser wrote:Today everything electronic requires 'exotic materials' to make the chips, hard drives and displays, tantalum, hafnium, ruthenium etc, a whole bundle of metalloids and rare earths.

I think you need to read about what makes something a "rare earth". They're not actually rare! What they are is dispersed. Rare earths are usually not found in rich deposits that make them easy to commercially exploit.

With nanites, collecting up rare earths would be easy.The dirt in your back yard would easilly contain enough rare earths to be able to produce the electronics you use, not to mention the ability to recycle. Remember: the dopings used in silicon are very small quantities. "heavy doping" is on the order of 1 atom in 10,000.

Aethor wrote:Also, items can be recycled from other items. An older cell phone, if you have nanites, can be broken down and reused to form a new one, with perhaps just a minimum of new material needed.

Production costs of that stuff is actually only a very small part of the price. In today's real world, look at the price of, say, an iPad, and then look at its real cost to produce.
Then subtract from that real cost all the workers and their management, and subtract all the materials that can be obtained either in nature or recycled from older models.

Energy for all that? If all I need is a very small scale production, like, just for me, I might as well be satisfied with solar and wind, which are free.

Yes, I might pay something for heating in winter in Canada... but still, the amount of work needed will be a tiny fraction of the work done today.

I would love to beleive that wind and solar will cover us, and with the right construction methods, I think that it will come close, even in a canadian winter (see insulated concrete forms, aka ICF, for example), but I kinda doubt that it will be enough to run all our electronics and so forth...

On the other hand, I always understood the terran federation technology levels to be a lot like the levels seen in the honorverse, although with less strife so less advanced weapon systems, and fewer human colonies. Assuming that's true, they have fusion technology. Running a fusion reactor is probably quite cheap: just add water. Byproducts are not radioactive, and have industrial applications... or you can make lots of party balloons.

As ther RFC state, the Federation was on the brink of technical singularity - the immortality, the autonomous, completely adaptable industry, the human-scale AI. The Gbaba appeared just a bit too soon; one or two century later, and the Gbaba would meet the supercivilization, consisted of immortal beings, with nearly-limitless production capability and the streaming scientific progress. Generally speaking... one or two century later, the Federation would be able to simply put Gbaba into the zoo, and place a lable on cage: "Living Gbaba. Do not feed."

Dilandu wrote:As ther RFC state, the Federation was on the brink of technical singularity - the immortality, the autonomous, completely adaptable industry, the human-scale AI. The Gbaba appeared just a bit too soon; one or two century later, and the Gbaba would meet the supercivilization, consisted of immortal beings, with nearly-limitless production capability and the streaming scientific progress. Generally speaking... one or two century later, the Federation would be able to simply put Gbaba into the zoo, and place a lable on cage: "Living Gbaba. Do not feed."

And Langhorne and Bedard just threw that entire tech base away - oh, apart from the tricks to play archangel for the rubes they created.

Geeze.

Meanwhile, another 800 years or so have gone by. It's an eyeblink on the scale of developing life through FTL civilizations, but still - think of whatever else out there that may be looking up, ending their own planetary wars, venturing into the bright stars... and running into the Gbaba themselves, very much not in a zoo. Sheer luck and speculation about Gbaba exploratory habits are all that are protecting Safehold, and under Langhorne's plan, defending themselves is forever off the table.

I'm content to grant them the extenuating circumstance of being, at the twilight of Terran civilization, not right in the head. I'll even suppose that they did what they sincerely thought was right. But thinking along these lines, it amounts to forgiving them for crimes of a scope only the Gbaba themselves are in the same league for committing.

JeffEngel wrote:

Dilandu wrote:As ther RFC state, the Federation was on the brink of technical singularity - the immortality, the autonomous, completely adaptable industry, the human-scale AI. The Gbaba appeared just a bit too soon; one or two century later, and the Gbaba would meet the supercivilization, consisted of immortal beings, with nearly-limitless production capability and the streaming scientific progress. Generally speaking... one or two century later, the Federation would be able to simply put Gbaba into the zoo, and place a lable on cage: "Living Gbaba. Do not feed."

And Langhorne and Bedard just threw that entire tech base away - oh, apart from the tricks to play archangel for the rubes they created.

Geeze.

Meanwhile, another 800 years or so have gone by. It's an eyeblink on the scale of developing life through FTL civilizations, but still - think of whatever else out there that may be looking up, ending their own planetary wars, venturing into the bright stars... and running into the Gbaba themselves, very much not in a zoo. Sheer luck and speculation about Gbaba exploratory habits are all that are protecting Safehold, and under Langhorne's plan, defending themselves is forever off the table.

I'm content to grant them the extenuating circumstance of being, at the twilight of Terran civilization, not right in the head. I'll even suppose that they did what they sincerely thought was right. But thinking along these lines, it amounts to forgiving them for crimes of a scope only the Gbaba themselves are in the same league for committing.

To be fair, the Federation plan was to put that tech base away, too, at least for five hundred years or so. It's not as if Federation technology would have continued straight on to singularity.

But I agree that throwing it away permanently counts as a crime comparable to the Gbaba. In fact, we have had several past discussions comparing the Langhorne plan for freezing technology with the Gbaba who appear to be in technological stasis.

looksbeforeheleaps wrote:

Randomiser wrote:It worked the same way as the economy in Star Trek, obviously.

Maybe they had worked out how to convince people that human fulfilment is rarely achieved by sittimg around doing nothing all day?

Besides not even AIs and nanites can produce something from nothing, ownership of primary resources is still going to be important.

With AI-directed robotic and nanite mining of the asteroid belt, raw materials should not be a significant limiting factor. Certain specific elements or isotopes may still be relatively rare, especially heavy metals. And if you need transuranics elements for anything, they still need to be produced in breeder reactors and/or particle accelerators.

Energy may also be an issue. Providing enough for everyone to have a standard of living much higher than we have now should be easy enough. However, military applications, space-based heavy industry and high-energy physics research are going require more concentrated energy production that may need resources (antimatter, helium three, whatever) that can't be produced in unlimited quantities.

It is likely that PICA's are a luxury good because of their use of exotic materials.

Also once you have nano level tech like this you wind up having near perfect recycling capability. Anything used can be reused over and over again. Old landfills would be harvested to both clean up the environment and to recover all the vast amounts of resources just laying there. Once something is in the economy unless its lost to deep space it never leaves the system and is just constantly regenerated into something else over and over so resource costs would be almost non existent. If you can get energy efficiently enough to be free or close to it and have that level of nano manufacturing about the only hard item of any value would be land to build a dwelling on. With colonization and presumably super high rises even that would be a pretty minor issue.

Interesting speculation, though.

We know the PICA's were limited to 10 days of continuous activation; but in all other aspects seem to be just as capable (intellectually) as any real person. And even more capable physically.

We know that the Federation had nanotech and AI's.

One would *think* that based on that, with whole solar systems worth of raw materials, they could have just created "battle PICA's" (without the 10 day limit) and created fleets that should have dwarfed the enemy, especially considering AI's doing R&D in literally "electronic time".

Plus the fact that the enemy didn't seem to have any desire to innovate like humans do.

But for some reason they didn't. Since it was a question of species survival, not just winning or losing, it's hard to see *why* they didn't.

Maybe some day we'll see a conversation about that; perhaps if any of the "Archangels" are actually in cryo and survive to have that conversation.

OrlandoNative wrote:Interesting speculation, though.

We know the PICA's were limited to 10 days of continuous activation; but in all other aspects seem to be just as capable (intellectually) as any real person. And even more capable physically.

We know that the Federation had nanotech and AI's.

One would *think* that based on that, with whole solar systems worth of raw materials, they could have just created "battle PICA's" (without the 10 day limit) and created fleets that should have dwarfed the enemy, especially considering AI's doing R&D in literally "electronic time".

Plus the fact that the enemy didn't seem to have any desire to innovate like humans do.

But for some reason they didn't. Since it was a question of species survival, not just winning or losing, it's hard to see *why* they didn't.

Maybe some day we'll see a conversation about that; perhaps if any of the "Archangels" are actually in cryo and survive to have that conversation.

I asked this question; generally, RFC stated that the Federation simply haven't got enough time. Gbaba appeared and crushed the Federation before the key technology could be perfected, and "human constrains" (like the prejustice of autonomous PICA) could be eliminated. They simply haven't got enough time; a century later, and the situation would reach the turning point, on wich the humanity would ascend on the transhuman stage, became immortal and rapidly developing.