"...the Solarian's own needs were adequately provided for at home; he had no particular reason to haul goods out to the stars. The interstellar colonists had to provide for themselves." (CHAPTER VI, p. 38)
So Earth would not be plunged into derivation and want if interstellar contacts were to be interrupted. And the same would apply to colonies like Nerthus, capable of growing their own food as well as any crops for export.
"A small but brisk trade went on between the stars of any given sector, carried by merchant ships or by such Nomads as weren't heading out into the depthless yonder. A few goods from Sol itself, or other highly civilized systems, found their way out to the frontier, too." (pp. 38-39)
A small trade within each sector, some of it dependent on the wandering Nomads; a few goods from Sol etc. Again, it sounds as if the colonies would be able to survive any disruption to trade, unlike Isaac Asimov's entirely urbanized planet, Trantor, which consumes the produce of twenty agricultural planets per day.
Trevelyan Michah expounds further:
"'Well, what have we today? A dozen or more highly civilized races, scattering themselves over this part of the Galaxy, intercourse limited to spaceships that may need weeks to get from one sun to the next - and nothing else. Not even the strong economic ties which did, after all, bind Europe to its colonies.'" (CHAPTER XII, p. 105)
It is a pity that we see so little of those other races. We see one Reardonite. The Tiunran are mentioned. We see four planet-bound species affected by space travellers. That is all. What a contrast to the Technic History where some of the narratives are histories not of human beings but of Ythrians or Merseians. But, in any case, CHAPTER XII confirms that there are no strong economic ties between Earth and its colonies. Planets can exist for weeks without any extra-systemic contact and presumably would continue to cope self-sufficiently if the intervals between contacts were to be extended.
Why then does Trevelyan go on to say:
"'Cross-purposes are breeding which are someday going to clash - they've already done so in several cases, and it's meant annihilation.'" (ibid.)?
What cross-purposes? Why should the clashes be serious enough to mean annihilation? We need to be shown some examples. Economic competition, imperialism, exploitation etc can certainly cause destructive conflicts but we are specifically told that economics is not a major interstellar factor. Planetary populations with mutually incompatible or incomprehensible psychologies, ideologies etc can each go their own way. There is no reason for them to go to all the trouble of crossing an interstellar distance just to pick a fight with someone else.
Regular blog readers will know that a day, like today, when I have visited Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop is a day when there has been less time for blogging but that has been good for my soul.
15 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am not so optimistic! I can easily imagine humans or non-humans being more than willing to fight with other intelligent species. Esp. if they are biochemically similar enough to desire the same kinds of planets. Or beings fight over the control of rare and valuable metals, as we see in MIRKHEIM. And that kind of conflict can be one of the occasions where intelligent species don't need to be biochemically similar to each other to quarrel and fight!
Ad astra! Sean
Self-sufficiency for an industrialized economy isn't a matter of food, so much, as of various industrial assets.
Unit production -costs- are a function of production -scale-.
Basically, other things being equal, the more you make of X, the lower the price of each individual unit of X.
That's why virtually all of a number of important microchips come from Taiwan, for example.
If every country had to make their own, they'd be much more expensive -- and hence they wouldn't be nearly as widely used. It wouldn't be cost-effective.
Even the US isn't a big enough market for the production of a lot of them.
This is why, incidentally, so many attempts at import-substitution manufacturing after 1945 produced such disastrous results in smaller countries.
You just can't make cars efficiently, to take one example, unless you're producing a -lot- of cars. A small factory's cars would be -expensive- cars.
Note how the cost of electric cars is dropping quickly as production totals increase.
These two facts are directly linked.
A small economy can be industrialized, but only on a -specialized- level.
Lots of people import Swedish ball-bearings, for example; but only because the plants in Sweden are vastly, vastly bigger than -Sweden- needs.
It sells them and imports other things from other places that specialize.
The higher the level of available technology, the stronger this relationship is.
The implication of the above is that if any industrial nation on earth were somehow suddenly isolated, it would suffer economic catastrophe and be knocked down the scale of progress -- possibly a long way down.
Note that in ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME, the Nantucketers have access to nearly all the -information- of 1998.
But they're lucky to be able to make some steam engines, and most of them eventually become farmers using animal-traction machinery.
And even the mix-and-match spatchcock of technologies they eventually become able to use depends on establishing colonies and tapping the resources of others through trade and immigration.
There just aren't -enough- of them for the specialization and division of labor a 1998 economy needs. Not anywhere -near- enough.
So if the "Peregrine" universe suffers an interruption of interstellar travel, it's logical that the isolated parts (particularly those with smaller populations) would suffer economic regression.
But this is an economic interdependence and Anderson denies that that exists in the Stellar Union. Some other unidentified "cross-purposes" are said to be the problem.
Paul: yeah, but that I think was a mistake on Poul's part.
His grasp of economics was better in his later series.
Note that this isn't just a matter of having the machinery to make X.
It's whether you have the -market- to fully -occupy- the machinery.
Because the production has to be big enough to pay the -capital cost- of the machinery.
Think of it this way: say the cost of Machinery X is, say $1,000,000,000.00
That billion dollars has to include the -opportunity cost- of the capital investment. That's generally calculated on the basis of prevailing interest rates.
So say they're currently 4%.
That means that the -first- cost of the one billion investment is an annual charge of 4% of 1,000,000,000.
Every year.
That's true whether you paid cash for Machinery X or borrowed to finance it, because you're still losing -- at a minimum -- the cost of other opportunities to employ the capital.
Then there's -depreciation- on the equipment. Which is usually about the same.
So even if you're not using energy, labor or raw materials when you're not producing, opportunity cost and depreciation are ticking away -every moment- the machinery stands idle, costing you 8% of the value of the investment.
This is why having spare/unused capacity can set you on the road to bankruptcy. It's also why small communities cannot afford big products like, to name an example, spaceships.
So in that setting, a spaceship would be astronomically expensive; paying for it would drive everyone to a starvation level. (Regardless of who owned it or how it was financed.)
The same factors, btw, operate even in preindustrial economies, albeit not as strongly.
Eg., the fall of the Roman Empire led to massive decreases in productivity, because the giant free-trade zone of the Empire allowed economies of scale and specialization.
At its peak, the Roman Empire had an urbanization rate of 12-15%, and probably twice that percentage of people engaged in non-agricultural work.
So you could grow, say, figs and olives in one place suited to it (Attica, perhaps) and buy your wheat for bread from Egypt or Carthage or the Black Sea.
Other people could make a living copying books and selling them.
Other people worked in plants producing 50,000 units of terra sigilata pottery per week and selling them to others living hundreds of miles away -- even people living in little thatched huts near Hadrian's Wall bought it from factories in Gaul or North Africa.
And so forth and so on.
After the fall of the Empire, the percentage of people -not- engaged in growing their own food fell to below 5%, below 2% in many places. And the return on that labor went down, because now you had to survive on what could be produced within a day's walk of where you lived.
Just for one example, after the 410 when Roman troops withdrew from Britain, production and-or consumption of wheel-thrown or molded glazed pottery just stopped. All that was left was locally made unglazed hand-cast pottery of coarse clay, and not much of that. The total population of Britain dropped to well under 40% of what it had been, and didn't consistently get back to that level until 1600 CE, more than a thousand years later. There wasn't another city the size of Rome in Europe until 1800.
In 200 CE, if you were living in Britain you could buy ornamental stone for a floor from Turkey, figs from North Africa, and pottery from what's now France, and books from Athens.
And I'm not just talking about the very rich. There were hundreds or thousands of people who made a living making and repairing mosaics, for example.
There were whole towns (like Aquae Sulis/Bath) that made a living from -tourism-.
All that went away; then you were either a peasant or one of a tiny minority who lived off peasants -- and even those 'nobles' lived like pigs compared to a modestly affluent Roman.
Not to mention you had to take a spear along if you went to pee behind a bush.
OK. If that is acknowledged as a mistake, then some clarity emerges.
Stirling: a few comments about your comments
Industrial self sufficiency:
I think to a *limited* extent clever choice of technology can allow a smaller society to do something, that would take a larger industrial base with another technology choice.
See this
https://atomicinsights.com/pressurized-heavy-water-using-available-resources/
especially the bit about using a design that avoids needing a *large* pressure vessel. Canada didn't have the industrial base to build them or the need for enough nuclear reactors to justify building the facility to make such a pressure vessel.
I would like the world to have *lots* of Integral Fast Reactors each with a few decades supply of depleted uranium to breed into fuel for the reactor. That way if there is eg: a super-volcano eruption, or other grand catastrophe, any relatively unaffected area at least has plentiful electricity to jump start industrial rebuilding.
Island in the Sea of Time:
What you said makes sense of an early decision of the Nantucketers. They made a lot compressed air powered tools rather than making a steam engine run one of the existing generators for electricity to run all the small electric hand tools that would be in any small town in the developed world.
I now see that the problem with later policy is that making replacement tools as they break would be impractical.
I do think they would be smart to put most new industry on the mainland anywhere there is practical water power. Initially with direct mechanical transmission of the power. Later they might be able to mine the copper & tap the rubber trees to make small electric grids practical.
Fall of Roman Empire:
Some people dislike the term "Dark Age" for the period just after that. Your comments about the standard of living show that the term is entirely justified, at least for western Europe.
I cannot better the comments made by Stirling and then Jim. I am content to simply read and ponder them.
Ad astra! Sean
Jim: some dislike the term "Dark Age" because of, in essence, a lunatic degree of antinomianism.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And Poul Anderson would agree! The introduction he wrote for HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA makes it plain he had no illusions about the Dark Age following the fall of Rome.
Ad astra! Sean
"So even if you're not using energy, labor or raw materials when you're not producing, opportunity cost and depreciation are ticking away -every moment- the machinery stands idle, costing you 8% of the value of the investment."
And that is a *major* drawback of part time energy sources like solar or wind. If you try to run some industrial facility on them you will be running your industry only part of the time.
Jim: unless you find some way to even them out.
Eg., grid-scale electricity storage is becoming more and more common.
And, of course, the wind is always blowing -somewhere-.
Slightly longer-term, when SpaceX's Starship is launching routinely, costs for orbital solar power (beamed down to receptors on the surface via microwave) will, apparently, fall to the point of being a very attractive method... and that's continuous.
All these are an additional cost; OTOH, you don't have a fuel cost.
IIRC, solar and wind, with storage, are now cheaper in most places and still falling rapidly, whereas fuel-burning generators are a mature technology and have little prospect of substantial improvement.
I would not invest in a fossil-fuel plant, simply because I don't see much future for that tech in 1st-world settings.
We seem to have conflicting information on the costs of energy storage. My understanding is that claims of solar or wind being cheap have to neglect that cost.
Look at https://www.electricitymaps.com/
and click on the link at the top for the map.
It shows how much CO2 is emitted per kWh of electricity generated for regions where they get data.
Color coded from green for very low through shades of brown to black for very high.
You can click on a region to get how much electricity came from what source over the last hour or day.
Spoiler alert:
The regions that are consistently green use a mix of hydro, geothermal & nuclear for most of their electricity.
The regions that try to use a lot of solar or wind vary from fairly green to quite brown, because when the wind isn't blowing & the sun isn't shining they burn natural gas to provide the electricity they need.
The storage of wind & solar energy is not *yet* cheap enough, except perhaps where there are good sites for pumped hydro
Kaor, to Jim and Mr. Stirling!
It seems to me that long term, a mix of nuclear power and spaced based orbital solar power might be the best way of replacing fossil fuels for energy.
Ad astra! Sean
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