Future galactic economy
Considering a distant future where mankind has spread and inhabits lots of star systems. Would there be a justification for inter-system trade or exchanges ? FTL travel may be considered, but with at a significant energy cost.
Most materials being available everywhere in most systems, and production capacity being likely to be roughly the same everywhere, interstellar travel seem of no use in this kind of setup. Any suggestion to make this more exciting ?
Edit : As the topic may interest other readers, I complete the question with some of the information I gathered.
This Princeton paper (written by a to-be Nobel prize!) consider interstellar non-FTL travel and the return of interest calculation. Non-FTL implies that time flows differently depending whether or not you stay on a planet or you board the ship. A 10 year travel at 0.99995C will make on-ship time will appear 100 times slower : roughly 5 weeks. Interest rate will follow the same logic...
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Raw materials may be available everywhere, but maybe the best FTL drives are built in the Aldebaran system, the best conventional thrusters are built around Barnard's Star, the asteroid mining equipment industries still concentrate in our solar system, and the best computers are built at Betelgeuse.
Note also that if a new invention is made in one star system, they will likely keep the workings of the invention secret as much as possible, so that, at least for some time, they are the only provider of that invention. This is what happened in the past with porcelain: The means to produce it in Europe were always there, but the method was kept secret by China, so for a long time China had the monopoly on it (which of course also meant porcelain trade between China and Europe, which also wasn't exactly cheap).
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