This sounds like a fun problem and I wonder if anyone’s tackled it. Has anyone thought out Austrian Economics in a relativistic environment? It’s obviously not applicable right now. But interesting effects would occur for interstellar communities with spacecraft that travel near light speed. (Note that I’m ignoring the more exotic, theoretical features of general relativity like time travel and wormholes.)
Some of the more obvious consequences:
Unlike currently, where changes in a commodity price are communicated on market exchanges within seconds, price changes may take years to communicate to distant locales. This is probably similar to our situation on Earth before the telephone existed. There is an unavoidable discoordination that cannot be solved by the market. (Of course, socialist planners would do an even worse job). With a big enough community, the chimerical idea of “society” or attempts at monetary policy would be blatantly ridiculous. In an enormous community, usually small economic fluctuations present a risk of randomly converging and inflicting disaster on specific small locales, prompting people to set up industrial autarkies, subsidies, tarriffs, and restrictions on migration.
It is possible to effectively transport people or things into the future - by having them travel away at near light speed and then turn around and come back, or by having them sit near a blackhole. It’s as if these things were in stasis for the duration. “Capital flight” might involve a flight through time to wait out unfavorable conditions. Some people, seeking better conditions or technology, will willingly travel into the future. Others, not wanting to miss experiences with their friends, or afraid of encountering a catastrophic future, will avoid such travel.
It is physically meaningless to say which of two spacelike (i.e. distant) events occur first. I don’t see how this fact would have that much effect on economics, but it might effect juristics and IP law.
There are a lot of rather mundane effects to note, such as the ability to discard unwanted waste onto neutron stars or black holes. With black holes, immense amounts of energy can be extracted through gravitational slingshots.
The discoordination caused by the “light barrier” would probably be dealt with by keeping communities as tightly packed together as possible by, for example, expanding on the sea floor or underground rather than moving off to far-off stars. Extensions to mortality might also lower time preferences enough such that several years of waiting for replies might not be as unreasonable. This is also, of course, assuming FTL travel is not possible.
But I think the most realistic scenario is we just build giant computers and upload our minds to them, living in VR paradises.
Unfortunately, you need to be a subscriber to access the latter. Also, my own thoughts:
You might reach the limits of global price coordination on such a large, relativistic scale, with much more concentration paid by traders to local changes, given the time gap for information from different parts of the galaxy. Futures trading might become an intergenerational activity, assuming we don’t manage to make our lives longer.
Interestingly enough, since spacelike changes cannot have causal relation, so it would be the best way to prove you hadn’t copied someone else’s idea, by demonstrating the value of the spacetime interval to be less than zero(or greater than zero if you calculate invariant intervals of Minkowski metrics the weird way).
Finally, I know you didn’t want to deal with GR, but to indulge myself; I guess long term loan contracts might have to take into account the effects of gravitational time dilation. Given the fact we can approximate a Schwarzchild metric for most of the low gravity regions of the universe including our solar system, I think we could get away with just plugging and chugging simple formulas to work out the differences most of the time.
AHH!!! No, it is not “plug and chug”- its substitute /end rant
Also, if there is no FTL, then it would end up creating mainly self-sufficent colonies- there would be no other way, and to me, it would be like restarting the world every new colony, but you get the old technology. Of course, you could also prep the land, as there was one book, I can’t recall who wrote it (Asimov?) that had robots prep the land by extracting various minerals from the oceans.
If FTL could occur- or just a variation with either entanglement or tachyons, (mind you these just allow for info transfer near-instantly), and assuming one could gain useful information from these, or interact with tachyons and generate them, one would at least create the pricing structure and just have astronomically, assuming current technology, transportation costs.
But seeing as I have not really looked at current theoretical physics since 8th grade in any detail, my info and reasoning may have been disproven, its not like my brother’s 5th grade science book and the 5 states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma and Bose-Einstein Condenstate)
