High-population economics

Chuck Gannon writes:

>FIRST: why the devil are so many people living in such absolutely
>useless systems, anyway?  The subsector generation system IS easy
>to use--ease being one of its great appeals and a major aid to
>the initial  popularity of Traveller--but it ignores a number of
>basic economic realities.  The most basic of which is; places
>which already have air you can breathe, water you can drink, and
>food you can eat are going to get the overwhelming amount of com-
>mercial investment and population.  Those environments which of-
>fer resources that can be `converted' to meet these needs without
>undue hassle will be a strong second.  However, any community
>which needs to invest heavily just to provide for its ongoing
>basic environmental needs either has to be indispensable to some-
>body's (national, personal, corporate) interest, sitting on top
>of the interstellar equivalent of the South African diamond
>mines, or is just plain masochistic.  Full life support is ex-
>pensive and makes all in the environment hostage to the smallest
>of errors or mishaps.

This is all very true. One of the things I hope to see in TNE
is a more sensible world generation system. It wouldn't have to
be more complex than what we already have.

>SECOND: Given what I feel to be the errors of the UPP distribution and
>what it says (or rather, fails to say) about the logistics and fiscal
>realities of colonization and survivability in alien environments, there
>is the follow-on problem of travel and commerce within the Imperium. How
>DID all those hi-pop industrial worlds EVER feed themselves? Answer; they
>COULDN't, not and be economic powerhouses. Anybody remember SOYLENT GREEN?
>(Sorry; I forget >Sheckley's original title.) [Make Room, Make Room -- James]
>Just feeding those masses would cripple industrial endeavors.

I don't quite follow this argument. With fusion power it should be possible
to feed almost any amount of people. Hydroponics and carniculture plants is
a hackneyed stable of science fiction. Of course, I haven't done any numeric
analyses of what it takes to feed 5 billion people from hydroponics vats. (I
don't have the necessary knowledge). Perhaps it is impossible.

>                                               Logically, there would
>have to be an exchange basis--finished goods exported for massive food
>imports. Bulk haulers as big as battleships; modular containers each the
>size of the QE2 strung together on the belly of a jump carrier--just to
>send nutritive additives to the Hi-pop world this week (the bulk matter of
>the food could be produced locally without a great deal.

The trouble is that it is just as inconceivable that a high-population
world should _not_ be self-sufficient. I have no idea of how many kg.
of material is needed to serve half one person's yearly needs (that would
be the most economic use of the ships involved: Produce a surplus of half
the necesscities of life and import the other half), but each kg. would,
in the case of our 5 billion pop. world, require nearly 1 million tons of
starship to import it (somewhat less if all your trade partners are within
jump-1. On the other hand, any partner that is two jumps away will quadruple
the tonnage needed for the stuff you get from there). Take a simple matter
like personal transportation. Let's assume that one 5-person family in ten
has one grav vehicle. That makes 100 million grav vehicles. Say they have an
effective life of 5 years (not unreasonable, I think). That means a yearly
import of 20 million grav vehicles. The open-topped air/raft in _Imperial_
_Encyclopedia_ has a displacement of 2 T. That's 40 million T/year. One
ton of starship can import 6 T cargo per year (Assumption: Average cargo
space on pure cargo ships is 50%. You can get that up a bit by assuming
jump-1 ships only, but can you really assume that? I think not). So just
to cover that need you need 7 million tons of ship. Now add refrigerators,
toasters and hairdryers, and before you know it the number of ships you
need is litterally astronomical.

However, while I was writing the above, it occured to me that we are all
going about this the wrong way. Instead of arguing about what can be
explained (away) and what cannot, we should start with the result we want
to wind up with and work backwards from there.

Case in points: I don't like high-population worlds in general because of
their much too great contribution to naval budgets, and I dislike high-pop.
worlds with lousy physical characteristics because I can't really believe
in them. All right. How do I get rid of them? The economies of these worlds
really WERE highly specialized and interdependent (and never mind how that
was possible; as I've said before, if you can believe in a flat galaxy, you
can believe anything ;-). With the Hard Times most high-pop. worlds outside
the Safes failed catastrophically. Most high-pop. worlds inside the Safes
took warning and gradually switched to a more independent economy. The
change in population was accomplished by population control and emigration
instead of starvation, but the population declined one way or the other.
Thus there are less high-pop. and many more medium pop. planets in the New
Era.


      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
- ------------
        "A  subsector  official  pompously states that the
        subsector  armed  forces  have  four Kinunir class
        ships in service,  each with enough troop strength
        to put down any military operations that threathen
        the peace of the Imperium."

                        ---Adventure 1, The Kinunir