Container drivers/Space Cowboy

[hirez]

I'm most of the way through an interesting history of the shipping container and its effects on trade, prices, globalisation and all that malarkey. Inspired by this, it seems to me that there's a deal of SF where the universe is assumed to run on a pre-Napoleonic basis, and that's likely a bit rubbish

Comments

[dedbutdrmng]

"Hm. I think I've just re-invented Ken McLeod's 'Engines of light' books.

Best not do that."

That made me laugh like a drain.

I read "interesting history of the shipping container " and thought 'God that must be dull'. Then realised a recently finished a book on the Cod industry that was fascinating and I loved and that I should just shut up.

The Cod book probably wasn't as useful for SF though.

[spride]

Mark Kurlansky, right?

[jarkman]

Or Space Truckers:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120199/

I guess the usual deal (see much of Cherryh or Elizabeth Moon) is to make inter-system travel economically possible but slow & difficult, so it's Just Like Sailing Ships. Then you can have pirates and adventurous travelling merchants and Hornblower In Spaaaace.

In other words, it takes a carefully-calibrated handwave drive to get the economics right. Handwave too quickly, and Alpha Centauri is just past Reading and there's no romance in it.

The question in my mind is (I'm just meandering now), what would be worth carrying over such distances ? It won't be raw materials or collectables or any kind of ragular industrial product, it'll be things that you really can't make in more than a couple of places in known space. Stuff so high-tech it takes GDP-sized investment to manufacture it at all.

Maybe chip fabs will continue to get more expensive, and interstellar trade will be powered by Intel and AMD ?

[zotz]

Charlie Stross wrote an article recently about interstellar travel and the energy costs you'd need to do it on a human timescale.

[jarkman]

Yes, I saw it. It's worthy stuff, though I didn't understand why it came as a suprise to anyone to be told that manned space travel was wildly uneconomic without some as-yet-unimagined new technologies.

I mean, look what it cost just to get a camper van to the Moon! And the price of kerosene has not been going down since then.

[silentq]

I saw an article on Cargotecture recently, turning shipping containers into offices and living spaces.

[hirez]

That's excellent.

It wasn't that long ago that one used to see the superstructure of wooden railway wagons in the corners of fields. Now that they've either rotted away or been thieved by preservationists, they've not been replaced with containers. Odd.

[jhaelan]

Isn't Google turning them into self-contained data centres? Did have a link..

[hirez]

They are/were, as were/are Sun. Generators come in the same form-factor now, too.

Looking at the photos from here (http://limasite85.us/index.html) it seems like the US military were packaging radar gear in something very similarly-sized by the late sixties.

[nalsa]

Ah, the only thing that will need to be transported are people. Nobody will go anywhere there isn't abundant natural resources in the first place because the econonomists will throw a hissy fit otherwise, like those miserable bastards trying to skewer Galileo (for which I have an unusual soft spot, given my usual stance on public/private partnerships).

Anyway, to transport people, we're looking at Generation Boats or sleeper cells. Boats can take as long as they like, in that case.

[hirez]

But... There's even less point transporting people if it's going to take (mumble) years. What are they going to do when they get there, other than stand around and have culture-shock?

As covered by the splendid Jennifer Pelland here. (Well worth the read.)

Tourism might work, but that requires the handwave drive. There's no point going somewhere for a holiday if it costs the GNP of your home planet to get you there and the only people you can show the slides to are the great-great grandchildren of the people from next door.

[jarkman]

Thing is, when it used to take a really long time and a lot of dosh to go anywhere, people did. They went all over the place in tiny sailing ships. They often didn't come back.

Which I think means that (if we had relativistic ships at all) we might well see manned exploration, just Because.

[outerego]

Have you got a few days to go through Stross's offical blog entry on space travel and subsequent comments. It will kill all sherbert feeling for anything to do space travel, no matter how you cut it (i.e. reading the braindead comments _versus Stross_ will want you to leave the subject matter as unredeemable: they will sap your very will to write again, unless you like scifi ninjas)

[zotz]

If you think those comments are bad, you should probably read the ones on Slashdot. Or do I mean that if you think those are bad, you shouldn't read the ones on Slashdot?

Hmm. I'll get back to you on that.

[hirez]

I viewed the thing early on, and then again when the Heinleiners kicked off. I'm obviously in agreement with young Charlie, if only because the other side are a howling mob of boggle-eyed loons.

[jarkman]

I think the trouble is, they (the boggle-eyed loon fraternity) have not fully internalised the fact that science fiction is about making stuff up. Charlie has wounded their beautiful, beautiful dreams.

They need more perspective. Compulsory readings of The Power Projector, say.