scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2cd9o6.md

## Simverse VI

* Author: u/krakonfour *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2cd9o6/simverse_vi/
* Score: 9

* Created: 2014-08-01T20:41:03

### Post:

As you saw in Simverse V, duplicating sectors is a very time consuming process. The worst part is not that it takes a multiple month-long run to complete a duplication attempt, but that it locks up the used sectors for many times those months. No-one else can use them during that period. 

The economy is a semi-post-scarcity environment. Scarcity is when a civilization has a finite source of products to use. On Earth, we live in an Iron scarcity, even if we have access to billions of metric tons of it: our technology does not allow us to reach further down than the skin of our crust. Agriculture can be considered a scarcity, because even if we can grow things on Earth indefinitely, we are limited by the finite supply of soil nutrients and cultivable area. 

Post-scarcity is when a civilization has access to as many products as it wants, forever. An example in scifi is replicators, that atomically rearrange anything into anything. 

In this setting, duplication plays the role of an imperfect duplicator. Any raw material can be copied endlessly. However, this only shifts the scarcity from something material to something immaterial: time.

Here's an example:

Imagine we leave Earth on a tiny, 100m long craft. It carries a 10x10x10m cube of platinum that weighs 21.5 kilotons, and is equal to the world's production for the last century. It can be valued as approximately 1.15 trillion dollars.

One duplication run lasting a year can leave you with a platinum price drop from 53000/kg to 8800/kg. At that rate, platinum mines everywhere close up shop, and the prices drop even lower, since everyone knows that they can take that same amount of platinum, and end up with a price of 730/kg next year. 

So now we've established that in two years, you can break the resource economy. Does that mean that the economy is over?

No. There's time.

To manufacture a product, you need equipment you cannot duplicate, labor hours you cannot duplicate, expertise, knowledge, blueprints, supply chains and a whole load of TIME. 

To obtain new material, you need very lengthy, costly, space missions. 

You might imagine that locking up a few sectors in space is nothing special, but they cause a huge delay when it comes to duplicating for a second time. 

Space is big, right?

Yes, but not that big. 

In this setting, space has a value, like the oceans do. On their own, they're just empty space. However, they also represent a chance to duplicate millions of tons of raw material. The opportunity to use certain sectors is only available once every year for the ones with the greatest return. 

Here's how it goes:

The Human Resource Council finds a solar system and places an observer in a Lagrange point. It's basically a human in a small ship paid to watch empty space. After stabilizing the neighbourhood with a laser beacon (illuminated sectors are forced to render at a faster pace), the HRC opens up the solar system for bidding. Government Krakon drops a load of cash and buys planet Four. A ship from the government visits planet Four and plants a flag on it. It now owns all the sectors that surround the planet, out to a certain distance, in a band that traces the planet's orbit.

This is easily 38.9*10^21 m3 for an Earth-like planet with an Earth-like Moon. You can imagine that SuperJupiters with extended moons are pricier.

This area is where Krakon citizens are allowed to attempt short, multiple duplication attempts, each with a low chance of yielding a duplicated product. Of course, there are laws. The duplicator has to be registered and regulated. You have to declare your returns. You can't lock up sectors that are otherwise required for travel, or nearby the planet. You can't attempt to duplicate near sectors that contains humans or private property. You can't attempt to duplicate indefinitely; there's something akin to a "Hacking for commercial purposes" fee. 

You can imagine that a calculation-intensive duplication that yields with a 1% chance per sector is not very popular. It is primarily aimed at small enterprises that cannot invest in a space trip that lasts up to a year. The equipment used is most likely government owned; it'd be akin to buying government bonds and hoping for a profit by the time you sell them back.  

You can imagine that there's a huge amount of empty space, even if we sell off all the orbital space to governments. Most of it is contained above and below the orbital plane. They have much greater value than national space, since they are still easy to reach, yet have greater yields (2-3%). The negotiation for this space is an intra-system negotiation updated second-by-second. The objective is to buy the sectors your spaceship is going to cross for the lowest price, while making sure that two spaceships don't overlap their duplication zones.

The real value comes from the deep space sectors. They have high return rates, but lock up for up to a year, are difficult to travel through and can only be accessed through guesswork (sending an observer destroys their yield rate). 

A couple thousand of these gigantic sectors can englobe an entire solar system. They are finite in number, since there is only a relatively thin band between the edge of the solar system and the unrendered deep space. Uncontrolled duplicators can freeze up this space for decades in just a few weeks. 

For most solar systems that have no plans for colonies or settlement, most of their value is in this thin band. Short term investors buy such solar systems and sell off their 'slow zones' to crowded markets. Some years later, they can repeat the sale. Other solar systems, those that are already rich and are not desperate for cash, sell off these sectors piece by piece to the highest bidder. For a solar system like ours, these zones are trillion-dollar investments, since each duplicator is a state-funded barge loaded with billions of tons of raw materials. They are strictly watched and sold out decades in advance. 

So now that we've established that products are valued in the time they take to make, and that complexity and industry are still worth something, how does all this affect society?

We'll answer that in Simverse VII, the final post.


### Comments:

> **u/Nepene** [+3]  (14 hours later)
> 
> Poor overworked simulator. Repeatedly abused for the sake of profit.

>> **u/krakonfour** [+3]  (15 hours later)
>> 
>> It's become a universal gambling machine. Put coins in, smash the keys and watch coins appear.

> **u/Chronophilia** [+1]  *sci-fi ≠ futurology* (a day later)
> 
> You should make a post that has all the Simverse links so far. I'm sure you've already posted the information that I need to answer this question, but I can't find it, so I'll just ask the question:
> 
> Is it remotely feasible to swap/duplicate an entire astronomical body? For example, a star or planet?

>> **u/krakonfour** [+2]  (a day later)
>> 
>> Once I post Simverse VII, I'll make a 'krakonfour's worldbuilding' page with links to all the posts about my Simverse and Iron Giants settings.
>> 
>> The answer to your question is no. The simulator has a verification tool that checks whether the simulator is making mistakes or not. Humans bypass the verification using hacks. This allows them to redefine reality and allow them to teleport or duplicate sectors.
>> 
>> However, after the hack is completed, things still have to look 'normal'. A few extra blocks of platinum in deep deep space doesn't look too out of place. A 50m spaceship disappearing isn't that dramatic. However, trying to move a celestial body always will trigger the verification tool. This causes a freeze, during which the simulator does not respond to hacks, followed by a reset, where the simulator re-plays everything as if the hack never happened.

> **u/ArmokGoB** [+1]  (a day later)
> 
> If this is THIS hard, wouldn't it make more sense to just mine normally for almost everything? I mean, you have infinite planets and no travel time or need to worry about lifting it out of the gravity well, so even with 0 duplication it'd be near post scarcity quite easily.
> 
> This kind of duplication mainly makes sense when it saves *labor* or time, which is rather rare given the other constraint of structural simplicity. There are a *few* niches, but mostly just rare elements or isotopes you have to process astronomical amounts of ore to get a tiny bit of. Maybe if crystals or metamaterials can be managed that's another use.
> 
> More intresting I think is mining assisted by swaps; you might be able to have several ships around the system, swaping chunks of rock out of the crust or even deeper untill a sufficetly rich ore is found, then swaping the ore cube near enoguh to a star to melt it, then another swap straight to the inside of a huge centrifuge. Or if you can swap out chunks of the core of a geologicaly active planet that saves a step.

>> **u/krakonfour** [+2]  (2 days later)
>> 
>> However difficult the duplication process might be, it is insignificant compared to mining in space... or mining at all.
>> 
>> You basically need 1 fast computer, one man willing to be separated from civilization for a year and a block of practically any simple material. 
>> 
>> You are also misjudging the freedom of travel in this setting. While you can freely swap across galaxies, it is only possible to travel to a 'new' location by forcing it to render, then placing an unmoving observer in it. 
>> 
>> To explore new sectors, you have to make them interact with their surroundings to a reasonable degree. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to shine a laser in front of you. This easily gives you 1-100 million km of rendered cubes. However, this method necessarily restricts your pseudovelocity to less than lightspeed. Also, keeping an observer motionless (so as to not disrupt the local cubes and render the coordinates sent back home useless) is a big hassle when dealing with orbital mechanics. There are ways to deal with this, but the point remains.
>> 
>> Exploring new territory takes *years*.
>> 
>> As I mentioned in one of these comments, directly affecting celestial bodies is risky. Most likely, it is done in untouched solar systems, and only to gather the initial resources for a duplication operation. *Processing* the duplicated material if done in a conventional manner. I'll describe a particularly explosive method to extract minerals in my next post ;)

>>> **u/ArmokGoB** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>> 
>>> I might be misjudging the scale, thinking in cubes 50 to 100 meters on a side. Planets are *big*, and removing a 50x50x50 cube of molten mostly-iron from the core and puting it in orbit seems easier than moving a 50x50x50 cube of steel from a factory on the ground into the oort cloud, duplicating it, and moving the copies back.

>>>> **u/krakonfour** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> Distance has nothing to do with the difficulty of swapping. The sole difficulty comes from the time-limit for swap calculations imposed by rendering cycles, and if that has been overcome, there still is the risk of triggering the verification tool, causing a reset. 
>>>> 
>>>> A planet is much better rendered that deep space. If you are the sole inhabitant of a solar system, you might have a chance to swap out pieces of the planet's core. Very quickly though, you'll find that all swap attempted that affect planetary cubes results in an immediate reset. 
>>>> 
>>>> Deep space hacks always have a much greater chance of succeeding than planetary hacks.

>>>>> **u/ArmokGoB** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Then how do ships get into space in the first place?

>>>>>> **u/krakonfour** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Most are built in space and stay in space. For the rest, there's shuttles using conventional propulsion. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> But with megatons of nanocarbon a duplication away, there's nothing stopping orbital elevators from popping up everywhere.

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