Saturday, September 5, 2015

Would Alien Currency be Energy?

Alien civilizations need some way to manage the products of their economy. They are in a stable situation, with only gradual changes due to resource availability, happening over century or millennia time scales. This post explores what might be a reasonable method for determining how to allocate their production, and to decide what is produced.

On Earth, the consumer market is used to dictate what will be produced. If people on Earth buy a lot of toothpaste and the inventory declines, more toothpaste is manufactured. In an alien civilization that has had a stable population for centuries, a market would be superfluous. The same amount of toothpaste is manufactured this year as last year, and the year before that, and so on. Most consumer goods would be under the same rule: just keep doing what you did before. This would be a centrally planned economy, but not like the centrally planned economies we have seen on Earth. The central planning comes from the fact that nothing changes, so there is almost nothing to plan. Just keep doing what you did before.

The same rule would apply to industrial products, such as the chemicals used in recycling. The same amount of recycling is needed each year, and so the supplies would be the same. Central planning, in the weakest sort of way.

What would change from day to day or month to month in an alien civilization? That would be the things which are not necessities, but which depend on what is happening in the particular city. Perhaps one year they decide to have a festival celebrating wine, or whatever beverage they prefer. Then a market or something else is needed so that the people who have decided to participate in the festival will have what they need for it. Perhaps the next month there is a surge of interest in pets, of whatever unique and interesting varieties that have dreamed up. Manufacturing would have to respond to this, and there would have to be some market mechanism that translates current citizen-consumer demand to the computer controllers of manufacturing, plus all the ancillary supplies that might be needed for it. Alien manufacturing might be completely non-understandable or at least unexpected by an earthling, but there still has to be some social mechanism by which changes in consumer desires are transmitted.

Another thing has to happen as well. Some allocation of disposable income among different citizens is needed. Perhaps it would be all equal, or perhaps it depends greatly on some aspects of their lives, such as if they are doing voluntary work at the time, or perhaps if they are involved in some socially important project, or perhaps if they are the winners of competitions for the best music, art, or any other category of things that aliens in that city do to compete. Perhaps it will be based on age. The bottom line is that there is some allocation strategy, and it probably is one that was figured out over millennia, so it is stable and meets with popular approval.

No matter what allocation strategy there is, it has to be based on some unit of measure. We used dollars and pesos and pounds and rubles and yuan, but it would be expected than an alien civilization would be unified in such things after the first few thousand years, if not sooner. So can we figure out what makes sense for them to use in a very stable situation? The allocation should be done in such a way so that the total amount corresponds to the value of the total cost of manufacturing disposable goods and services. How would the total cost of these things be measured? Energy is the common denominator of everything in the alien society. Each item is made of materials, mostly recycled, and there is an energy cost to the recycling of each type of material. There would be an adjustment to the recycling cost of each material based on the loss rate in recycling and the cost of extracting replacement quantities. The processing of the materials into objects would also have an energy cost. When a robot is used in the manufacturing, there is an energy cost coming from the use of the robot, from direct consumption of energy to energy for maintenance, and so this would be translated. The use of intellos would also have an equivalent energy cost. Delivery has an energy cost. Thus, it makes sense for their currency to be denominated in something that translates into energy.

So, perhaps instead of having currencies with pictures of Washington or Bolivar on them, they have pictures of their equivalent of Joule and Faraday. Of course, they would not have paper currency, except perhaps in illustrations, but the idea is the same. Energy is the common denominator of all that is used or consumed in an alien society, and costs would wind up being proportional to the amount of energy used.

If we assume this is true, that we have struck it right on how they allow citizens to vary their demands for non-necessities, it should be possible to figure out some interesting aspects of alien life. For example, if we want to know how much travel there might be between alien cities, we can try to figure out what would be the cost of such travel, and compare it to the total energy consumption that we can determine, at least as an upper bound. And a much more germane question for this blog, we could figure out how much star travel might cost, in some order-of-magnitude sense, and see if there is an exorbitant cost to it. If there is, this could be the Great Filter that everyone thinking about why aliens do not visit us is searching for. They don’t come because it is too expensive, and the benefits of coming here are in no way sufficient to justify the alien civilization mounting such a venture. On the other hand, it may be space travel is cheap, and then we have to keep searching elsewhere for the answer to the riddle of the absence of alien visitors.

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