Timeline for Why would a space civ trade with a primitive civ?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 24, 2023 at 0:13 | comment | added | Thorne | Yes but scarcity sets the value of anything be it gold or water. One episode of Firefly, the crew move live cattle between planets. If they are trading between star systems, it's assumed it's economical. For us, we can't get off planet and back cheaply so virtually nothing is worth trading with space. | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 15:29 | comment | added | Aos Sidhe | @Tho I was making an analogy; flying a spaceship that can land on a planet and filling it with wood to take elsewhere is roughly like getting a plane ticket to fill your backpack with wood. Maybe we can be generous and say that they get enough to fill a modern-day cargo ship, but still, when dealing with space travel, it's going to be hard to be economically feasible unless A) space travel/interorbit operations are orders of magnitude more affordable than today, or B) the wood is very, very, very valuable. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 22:11 | comment | added | Thorne | @Aos Sidhe Why a backpack? Pretty sure they could use a wagon. With a fancy timber, you can cut it as a veneer and make a lot from it. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 15:48 | comment | added | Aos Sidhe | @Thorne Flying to another hemisphere and buying enough wood to fit in your backpack (a rough analogy) would never be profitable unless the material was in some way unique. Maybe it's incredibly rare, like Agarwood. Or maybe it's the artistry involved, like a bonsai tree: it can be recreated elsewhere but the expertise/authenticity makes it more inherently valuable. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 3:01 | comment | added | Thorne | @Aos Sidhe Sure but not for the trader who owns one ship and doesn't have hundreds of years to wait for the trees to grow. Mass producing the stuff just pushes the price down. | |
| Feb 21, 2023 at 18:03 | comment | added | Aos Sidhe | If the civilization is so advanced that flying to a planet, landing, trading with natives to get what is presumably a relatively small amount of timber (let's be generous and say enough to fill a modern shipping vessel), take off, and fly to wherever they want the timber... wouldn't it certainly be cheaper just to terraform a planet and plant trees? Or create a massive arboretum? | |
| Feb 21, 2023 at 12:06 | comment | added | Philipp | "if the traders are assholes, they could sell illegal drugs." Legal or illegal depends on the norms of the involved cultures. May I suggest to edit this to "recreational drugs" or "addictive substances"? | |
| Feb 21, 2023 at 4:59 | comment | added | N. Virgo | +1 for things like art, musical instruments and pottery. Such items would be valuable because they come from the medieval world. They'd be unique items you couldn't possibly get anywhere else, and worth far more to the traders than any little trinkets they might give in return. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 23:21 | history | edited | Mary | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 20, 2023 at 22:37 | comment | added | Thorne | @MSalters Building timber is cheap for us but fancy timbers are expensive. For a space faring civilization, forests might not be common anymore and what they do have is protected. This is also not counting unusual timbers only found on an alien planet. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 20:30 | comment | added | Zach | "Obvious things are fur, spices, foods, wines, timber, wool, gemstones like amber or opals, pearls, crafted objects such as art, musical instruments or even furniture and pottery." Pretty much this. I read a lot of scifi and this is a pretty common feature in worldbuilding, often the primitive planet is specifically the only place certain spices or minerals are found, but is primitive because those things can't be gathered in bulk for whatever reason or that planet is too far out for industrialization to be feasible. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 18:50 | comment | added | fectin | "Rare metals" could be something like an unusual isotope too. Sure you could make your own Platinum 190, but why do that when you can just buy it 90% pure? | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 16:58 | comment | added | JBH | @Thorne Nah. Rare metals can always be an answer because Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested and the OP didn't so much as tag the question science-based. From an economics point of view, it would be far cheaper to trade beads with natives than to mine asteroids. And everyone's point about costs and gravity wells ignore the value of bulk and risk of injury. Slaves existed for a reason. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 12:21 | comment | added | ojs | On the other hand, sending metals to space (I assume the space faring civilization would do this) is incredibly expensive. A major reason for mining asteroids would be that they are not inside any planet's gravity well. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 10:56 | comment | added | user3153372 | @James_pic We trade metals between countries because shipping costs are cheap. We don't set up asteroid mines because shipping the metals to Earth would be hugely expensive. I'm not sure what technology would ever make moving metals from an alien world cheap without making mining our own star system even cheaper. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 10:21 | comment | added | MSalters | Timber? It's pretty cheap, and shipping it will add a lot to the cost. Spices on the other hand do make sense; those can easily be a million times more expensive. Spacefaring or not, the economics or long-distance trade are fairly standard: prices can vary geographically, which creates a trade opportunity, but this is capped by shipping costs which are usually weight- or volume-dependent. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 10:15 | comment | added | James_pic | @Thorne we are a (primitive) spacefaring society, and nonetheless precious metals are a major source of trade between economically developed and economically undeveloped groups. Maybe these issues don't end up so readily solved by mining asteroids? | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 5:24 | comment | added | Thorne | @JBH Rare metals will never be the answer for a space faring civilization because asteroid mining would be cheaper and more effective. Timber would be worth more. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 5:08 | comment | added | JBH | +1 Rare metals and food were on the top of my list. | |
| Feb 20, 2023 at 4:23 | history | answered | Thorne | CC BY-SA 4.0 |