On the surface of Mirkheim, large quantities of supermetals can be directly mined.
Wayland, a massive moon of a super-Jovoid planet, is rich in easily mineable heavy metals: uranium, thorium, neptunium, plutonium, osmium, platinum etc.
"'...palladium is essential to protonic control systems, which are essential to any military machine.'"
-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 1-188 AT III, p. 39.
My point here is that Poul Anderson shows us the industrial side of an interstellar economy which I think is lacking from most future histories, particularly Asimov's.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with that point you were making. Anderson pays attention to the practical economics of what interstellar civilization with a FTL drive would need. Technology and the economics shows us what will be workable at any particular stage of a civilization.
Happy New Year! Sean
Even with interstellar travel cheap and fast, some things would be scarce and expensive; Anderson makes that point well. Their locations would be strategic chokepoints, as oil was for the 20th century.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly! And Admiral Kheraskov said in THE REBEL WORLDS that a primary reason for the Empire annexing the planets in the region which became Sector Alpha Crucis was to gain control of Satan. And Mirkheim and Wayland* would become similar chokepoints the Empire would be anxious to keep control of. All three were priceless sources for critically needed products and resources.
Happy New Year! Sean
*With Leon Ammon kicking the Imperium in its rear end to get up and guard his investment in Wayland!
NB; strategic importance is not the same thing as simple economic yields, though it can be relaed.
Example: the discovery of immense gold deposits on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal lead ultimately to the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the British Empire's conquest of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
But this wasn't because the British Empire wanted to "own" the gold deposits, in the sense a bank robber wants gold ingots in a sack.
It already controlled the gold in the meaningful economic sense because the investors, technicians and so forth who developed the mines were (mostly) British, and the ones who weren't tended to be pro-British politically. The gold went to, or through, the Bank of England; dividends flowed to British investors; the gold greased the wheels of the British world-machine quite satisfactorily.
The -strategic- problem the gold created for the British was that the (hostile) government of the Transvaal secured immense revenues and became an economic power of regional weight -- the market that others coveted selling to.
Previously it had been broke and weak and could be pushed around when push came to shove -- forced to refrain from annexing the Bechuana territories, for example, in the crisis of the mid-1880's. (What's now Botswana.) The British declared a protectorate over the Bechuana/Tswana, with their enthusiastic agreement (because the alternative was the Boers) and the dispatch of a modest-sized expeditionary force was enough to make President Kruger back down. He had no choice.
The British allowed, rather short-sightedly, a successful Boer revolt in the Transvaal in 1880-81, because it simply wasn't worth the trouble of directly annexing a territory that would apparently always be troublesome and expensive to administer.
The necessary degree of control could be exerted from the outside.
But once the Transvaal government became rich, it could buy immense quantities of modern weapons (and did), it couldn't be squeezed by economic cut-offs (becauae that would now hurt British possessions like the Cape Colony) and its markets and money made it influential -within- those British possessions, raising the prospect of South African federation in a way hostile to Britain -- and Britain absolutely had to control the Cape for the same reason it had to control the Suez Canal.
And worst of all, a rich and powerful Transvaal could make alliances with hostile European Great Powers interested in interfering with vital British Imperial interests like the route to India. Germany, first and foremost.
Hence, the Boer War, the biggest conflict Britain engaged in between 1815 and 1914, with 550,000 troops sent and over 20K men lost.
It wasn't that Britain had to have political sovereignty over the gold; the economic side could be left to take care of itself.
It couldn't let a -hostile power- have control over the gold right next to a strategic necessity like controlling the Cape.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that, basically, was why the Empire annexed the planets in what became Sector Alpha Crucis, to make sure no unfriendly power got control of Satan. Ditto, centuries later, with Wayland.
Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: precisely. Poul knew his stuff.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And we see a lot about the geopolitical as aspects of economics in your own stories!
Happy New Year! Sean
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