Posts tagged economy
Price's Law is a hypothesis that in an organization, or across an industry, roughly half the productive output is being generated by a number of people equal to the square root of those participati...
The Demonstration You're a rich, successful CEO/capitalist working in the electronics business. Your R&D division is exceptional and routinely fabs state of the art processors at bleeding edg...
What would be the economic trade offs of building fusion powered rockets vs building laser relays across the solar system? What assumptions would you need for each one of these to be the superior o...
Glossing over the technological implications of interstellar travel, what sort of human labor might still be required in a future where we are capable of setting up nigh-fully automated endeavors o...
I have read (and answered) the question: "If true artificially intelligent robots could be built, would they be allowed human rights?". But let's explore the topic from the other direction. Let's...
I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology...
A super-reactor was created by SRE, Inc (Super Reactor Energy), and it can provide as much clean energy as needed. There's no way to copy it or make another. It operates without problem or fuel - t...
In 2039, our company was the first to bring a safe and reliable solution to upload someone's mind to the cloud. Although it was 10 years ago, you probably remember the news, don't you? We guarantee...
Okay, here's a classic situation: The countryside is plagued by a dragon, who demands tribute from the local city on the basis of them being in his territory. Now, the dragon here doesn't actuall...
In the 1960s we were disappointed to find that the moon is a pile of dust and rubble with no easily accessible valuable materials. Well, we kind of knew it before that, but we weren't sure. Anyway,...
Say humanity have the luxury to start anew. Colonizing a planet where speed of colonization is not an issue. Let's assume planet conditions and gravity pull similar to Earth. Technology relatively ...
The cold fusion generator is ready, loaded with tons of heavy water. The scientists stand by ready to measure the energy output of the amazing new technology. They turn it on, and as expected, ge...
What resources would be most valuable to enhancing space travel, establishing new colonies, be cause for invasion, etc?
I see that asteroid mining had already been extensively discussed in the context of today's technology (Ex. Is Asteroid Harvesting economic?) and the answer is a definitive "No" - it's not economic...
In several RPG campaigns, I've seen player characters try to either make investments or borrow significant amounts of money. This made me wonder: which sorts of worlds should have interest rates th...
The artificial womb has become a reality, freeing many women from the 9 month burden of carrying a child. Unfortunately, it was not the liberating game changer that feminists hoped it would be. The...
Imagine a situation kind of like Zootopia with many different creatures all living in one environment, some significantly larger than others. These species aren't necessarily furries like in Zooto...
Any story about an independent, self-owned tramp spaceship crew tends to implicitly or explicitly raise the question of how the crew got a spaceship, how it afforded it, and why it doesn't just sel...
My hypothetical gas giant has five major moons. Three of those moons are icy bodies with abundant water ice and volatiles. Any of these could provide fuel for translunar spacecraft, or for spacecra...
I have seen a similar-ish question on here, but it doesn't quite match my inquiry. Suppose you have an interstellar civilization (the means of travel between stars being stable two-way wormholes o...
Another question got me interested in this. How would finances work when there would frequently be long delays for confirmations of transactions? Let's say there are Jump Gates/Artificial Wormholes...
What can a country do to become self sufficient in isolation and can it improve its technology as fast as countries such as the USA, Japan, or Russia?
Given a world with similar size and atmospheric composition to Earth that has a commodity export, be it grain or oil etc, that has trade with other planets, what would be best way to orbit massive ...
Assume a universe depressingly like ours, in which special relativity holds. No hyperspace, no warp drive, no wormholes, and even the limited get-out clauses offered by real world physics either do...
Imagine that we one day invent an ansible, capable of near-instantaneous FTL communication, but we can not transport physical matter any faster than light. Imagine also that we have gotten to the ...
As a linguist aboard a terraforming mission, you arrive at a new planet. The planet, orbiting a G2V star, has copious amounts of wildlife and some sentient lifeforms. However, you, interpreting an ...
Airships are a hallmark of countless steampunk and dieselpunk constructed universes. Of course, in our world, they were around for a short while. I want to know what effects geographical circumstan...
Obviously, you can't just send a bunch of out-of-work Kentucky coal miners up there to give it a go. You need some sort of specialized equipment. What I want to know is: what equipment will it be? ...
I had this idea the other day just for the heck of debating about if it would be feasible to build a bridge that crosses North Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Spain. I mean from St-John's (Newfoundl...
I created the above illustration to help convey my meaning, here is what everything means so that you can read it effectively: E = Earth V = Venus M = Mars The dots in the lower left hand cor...
A lot of worldbuilders that I know and have spoken too, insist that unbacked currencies and items with constantly changing values would be what the economy is based on. I, however, am skeptical of ...
Imagine a race of humanoids who only eat meat, and are unable to digest vegetables. Is it possible for these humanoid to be able too create/gather enough food(meat) to the point that job specializ...
The United States (as well as many other countries) is covered in a vast network of tubes: These tubes vary greatly in diameter. Some could hardly fit a baseball, while others are large enough ...
The Situation A colony of 100 teleporters (between the ages of 20-40) have been hidden away living like monks for 1000's of years to prevent their detection. With the death of their old leader, a...
My story is set in the future where space travel is cheap and humanity has colonized Mars and some parts of the asteroid belt. Asteroid colonies can grow their own staple food, but crops that requi...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable, slightly damp ball of rock that would be very difficult to do things like grow crops on. However, it's also very far away. Far enough that, presumably, it would probab...
Let's take a world that is based heavily on Elon Musk's specific ideas of Mars colonization, to whit: Launch technology from Earth evolves to be to <$100/lb cost to launch ratio, due to reusab...
If a Galaxy-wide Civilization like Star Wars were to build a Jupiter brain or Matrioksha brain, would it probably cost more to build then the Death Star? In Star Wars the Darth Star was over a tri...
For reference: I am thinking of a story where travel between worlds exists, but people have to "start over" on each world. So they can't just take their current computers to a new world. The monit...
Flash news: Dr. Handwave have discovered a way to store energy, without loss, and for unlimited time. The battery has the following characteristics: Electric: Can be charged by any electric sou...
250 years in the future, humanity has colonized Mars and the Moon, and built thousands of orbiting outposts and hundreds of O'Neill cylinders in the zone between Venus and Jupiter. The key enabler ...
This is a world with underwater merfolks and other humanoids. They have opposable thumbs, so they can use tools humans can use. Lets assume there's different subspecies and races of these merfolks,...
Far Future. Almost every household has a 'fabber'. You put raw materials in it (can be almost anything) and it does what you program it to do. It transmutes the raw materials into what is needed. T...
This is a problem of my imaginary country Zeroth Reich. I imagined that this country is populated with literal eco-fascists. Both the people and the government care about Mother Nature a lot and de...
After reading this question by Nick M (now closed) and exchanging some comments with him, I have some ideas related to the scenario. I realized that the comprehensive design covers several distinc...
What are possible economic systems for use within a space-based industrial settlement? The different approaches are to be weighed by the competitve advantages they offer to their respective commun...
Background In an environment with little visibility/short line of sight, in a roughly medieval setting, people who wish to represent their business and guilds etc., choose do so using sounds/music...
Background Moonshot entrepreneur Elon Branson funds a migration to space. Instead of spending billions of developing safe space technology, he instead finds volunteers and shoots them in to spac...
One of the big problems by manned space exploration and colonization, that it's insanely expensive. Building a colony on other celestial bodies - since it's impractical to bring back the acquired r...
Earth is setting up mining colonies on Tau Ceti e. But how can they justify the enormous cost of sending people there? ...Because during the initial exploratory missions, it was discovered that in ...
