Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Possible, but rediculously expensive. You'd probably need Von Neumann machines to pull it off; it'd cost trillions of dollars per person in your setting.

Aside from the fact that von Neuman machines are harder to make and sustain in the setting than in some other futuristic extrapolations, do you really not see the problems here?

Originally Posted by nick012000

factored out for its potential residents, it comes out to a "mere" 6.9 million per person. You can dramatically cut that figure by adding more habitats; each additional habitat adds 10^23 dollars to the cost while adding another 600 quadrillion people. With 11 habitats, the cost goes down to 630,000 per person. Not bad- about the same as a nice house. Granted, you live in a giant arcology with 6.6 quintillion people, but what the heck. That's what exponential growth is for, right? ;)

And this is why it doesn't work.

I sincerely don't want to be offensive, but I really think you should consider the unlikelyhood of building something that costs trillions of dollars per inhabitant.

Even $60,000 per person would probably be more than most own. The average colony is struggling to maintain TL8, not a rich TL10 one. Those are the lucky exceptions.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

This is one of the problems that plagued Leninism, and that also plagues modern American business administration theory: The overestimation of the competence of central decision-making entities acting on official reports, rational analysis, and broad general plans, and the underestimation of the need for local knowledge of local conditions, much of which, as Michael Polanyi put it, is unavoidably tacit.

Bill Stoddard

The slow travel time and consequently slow communication speed also leads directly to a desirable setting feature.

Local representatives, whether Imperial officials or business agents, must of necessity have a great deal of independent authority. This means that decisions will often be up to PCs, not their distant superiors.

[Langy]

Granted, you live in a giant arcology with 6.6 quintillion people, but what the heck. That's what exponential growth is for, right? ;)

It's probably important to point out that there are only a few trillion people in the entire Flat Black universe, if I remember right (and you don't count beings who nobody's ever heard of, much less can actually pay for the privilege of living in your arcology). 6.6 quintillion is a bit more than are available to pay for the project.

[sir_pudding]

nick012000,

This thread is "Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy" not "Is Flat Black Plausible" or "Giant underground bunker campaigns" or whatever. I've responded to your post in a new thread.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Such as what functions?

Primarily commercial intermediation, plus whatever corners of authority the extant power(s) neglect to fill.

This is a service, I think, which would suffer massively from week or month long travel times. Coordination is hard to do when you don't know what is happening. And de facto, any colony between two other colonies will do this to a certain extent, but I can't see a colony that's located further away being competative in this role when it comes to coordinating traffic between colonies which it doesn't happen to be located conveniently on the route between.

Coordinating specific things would of course be done locally. I'm refering to the societal coordination function -- law-making, policy, transactions, etc at the highest levels. These things always have an element of centralization; even back in the post Roman 'dark age' ruler's held their courts.

Anyway, I certainly concede that setting particulars may rule this out as a Suite planet's chief occupation.

[Anders]

Where would porn fit in? In the age of the Internet, it is easy to see that porn has - for all intents and purposes - infinite marginal utility.

:)

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Icelander

At TL10, actual physical manufacturing is a trivial part of the cost of most common consumer products. The IP fees are the big ones.

I thought that it was explicit in FB that pretty much everything but the very cutting edge was made using public domain IP. So not common consumer products, but high end consumer products on high tech worlds, and the very highest end imported luxuries on places that are TL9 or lower.

Or did I misunderstand something important somewhere?

As to Brett's original question: the Empire in general is against war, high tech war in particular, and WMD-using wars with great fervor. This probably restricts certain planetary economic options, or at least implies that WMD facilitating technologies are Watched, if not outright forbidden. Given the Empires limits on manpower and legal authority on planets, I'd suspect they vastly prefer forbidden.

[Langy]

While I find the idea of a planet whose primary industry is the production of pornography, I think that industry might fit well into a more general 'entertainment' industry.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

Where would porn fit in? In the age of the Internet, it is easy to see that porn has - for all intents and purposes - infinite marginal utility.

:)

I suspect that given the creativity and nuance required for pr0n, TL10+ VR computers procedurally generate infinite amounts of user-targeted adaptive 'product' for whomever wants it and insanely cheap rates.

Tangentially, ISTM that pr0n requires a certain amount of prudery to be interesting, and so Mink probably mainly use it for anthropological study of the generating culture/individual. This implies huge databases full of pr0n from a staggering array of cultures - that are more or less considered boring archives of academic crap by the general Mink populace. OTOH, Mink seem to fetishize preventing mass deaths, so maybe they have "disaster prevention pr0n" not too different from modern disaster movies.

Prudish planetary societies probably have ... interesting ... laws aimed at shutting down "the signal." Rohan's reaction to "FaceBook" would be ... interesting.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Brett

Yes. And, strictly speaking, only the ultra-tech pieces that produce tradable goods. Construction, for example, has to be done everywhere.

All right. Having re-read your OP, I'm going to admit off the bat that I'm unfamiliar with Flat Black as a setting, but as a gamemaster, I can make some marginally useful generalities.

Starting with the assumption that you want a number of different sectors, possibly at different developmental levels, to produce a variety of ultra-tech goods on different worlds, here is what I see. If it were me, I'd focus on making the planets themselves diverse in ecology and nature, then figure out how to exploit that.

Carbon biotech, TL 1-5. A high-TL culture could custom-develop strains of plant life capable of naturally producing, in great volumes, items that could be harvested and used in Ultra-Tech hardware — for instance, a tree that grows carbon nanofibers. Once these plants were created, any suitable world could grow and collect them, regardless of local TL. Many mass-produced bulk resources could be produced this way. The items would largely grow themselves, given enough sunlight and water, and a minimal population would be required for the harvesting.

High-temperature applications. You might also consider the benefits of deep-ocean manufacturing. Water at deep-ocean pressure may be beneficial for manufacturing processes that produce a lot of waste heat: nanotech, for instance. Nanofactories could use the water as a vast convective heat sink and produce goods much more rapidly than they could be manufactured on dry land with the same nanites. Warmed water rises out of the manufacturing zone, drawing in cold water from deep currents like a chimney.

Low-gravity manufacturing. Massive components might be more easily manufactured on a low-gravity world. Although technically this could be done in space, a low-grav world has fewer of the complications (such as food and air supply, heat buildup, higher maintenance overhead, and limited room for population growth). Large elements could be assembled here: prefabricated space station parts, the TL12 equivalent of mega-earth moving equipment, and so on.

Is this what you're thinking about? Or are you thinking of much more specific specialties, like "the planet that makes anti-gravity," "the planet that makes nanites," and "the planet that makes ultrawidgets?"