Interplanetary Trade & Space Commerce 

I feel like a eye/ear-witness to something like shakespearean plays some hundret years ago. Some day, people will analyze these videos in high school and wonder about isaac being way ahead of his time.

Something I always notice about this channel... it has probably the least toxic following on all of youtube. Seriously, most other comment sections have the unfortunate tendency to quickly turn into cesspools. This one typically remains positive and inquisitive. Great stuff.

Nice to see the sharp increase in 3d animation quality. It's absolutely stunning.

Now that Zaphod Beeblebrox is no longer galactic President I say it's time we start campaigning for Isaac Arthur.

Arthursday is my anime of the season, every season.

i don't know why i'm so interested in hypothetical future interplanetary trade but i love it!!

YES! A Rule #1 of warfare, out of nowhere!

Dammit Isaac, you got me, I AM a robot! I lied on that captcha!

a lunar colony that wants to grow constantly, water would be a huge problem, and generally also for many light elements. In a colony in the asteroid belt, the problem would be inverted. A lot of available water and light elements, scarce heavy elements such as iron, titanium and stuff like that. So, if the moon wants to grow, considering the prohibitive price of transportation from earth, they would be forced to trade with the asteroid colonies, and for the same reason, they would willingly trade with the moon.

Your videos are so amazing i have seen them all, listen to them all the time,as a chemical engineer student a transhumanist and an enthusiastic person about science thank you for making them. Your videos definitely one of the things that makes me love science even more and directing me to learn harder to help humanity to a better future.

Broke the speed of light today Clicked that fast for Isaac Arthur!

This is the best channel on RU-vid. Are there awards for that kind of thing? There should be.

So, if 3D printers become more common, would copyrighted or patented objects, such as smartphones, cost money to print? It sounds like intellectual property via 3D printers could be how we might export data to colonies, right?

Yay! Happy Arthursday!!

Happy Arthursday everyone!

5 minutes in. Sees planned episode: "Colonizing the Sun" What. Also, Rule #1 of warfare : Always pay your troops on time, or they might seek a new employer. Sees the planned episodes for the remains of 2017. More hype. Can't wait for season 4.

I personally think that we should switch to nuclear drives, since it provides more thrust, most variants won't expel radioactive gasses or contaminate substances, it is a serious technology that NASA has researched into, and we could do it right now with current technology.

9:45 Holy shit. That was the moment I could actually see how deep you dig for each episode. I'm an aerospace engineering student and I spend a good part of my free time to think about the future in space. But this was a point I certainly didn't think of before. Thanks for that.

Thursday? Good. Lets get comfy and listen.

As with most subjects on this channel, developing low-cost, high delta v propulsion in the future would be a game-changer.

Perfect Timing ! i just got Home made me some Tea got in my widest pants i have and here we go :) Happy Arthurday everyone !

Arthur, Downward bound: colonizing the earth's oceans.

You might be able to inflate the price of space materials just by saying "It's from space!" then you could drive a niche market for "Space" versions of gold, silicone based rock, and other stuff to make the trip worth it.

I love how you boldly tackle these concepts. It's speculative, but at least it is based on a well thought out, rational and reasonable approach.

colonizing the sun... Isaac has gone and done it. he's gone to the highly improbable!

Thank you Issac, it is plain as day the amount of love you put into your work. I found you maybe a month ago and have binge watched my way through your entire catalog. Though your production value has clearly skyrocketed, the content itself has remained consistently at a high level. I recommend you to everyone I can.

16 days for Neptune? Why that's better than the travel time between Europe and America in colonial times, and clearly there was a great amount of trade. So 16 days is pretty good. I wouldn't mind waiting 16 days honestly, we do that all the time with online orders.

thanks very much for including my music in your vids Arthur. great to see you like them !

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO thurs is my favorite day for yt vids just because of this

It's a point that both Napoleon and Rhianna agree on - An army travels on its stomach, better have my money.

Your videos are always so well thought out, and well presented. Yours is one of the few YT channels I don't think twice about watching a half-hour long video. With networks like Discovery, and even PBS focusing less and less on true science related documentary series, I find videos like yours a great alternative.

One aspect of The Expanse that didn't get a lot of attention was that the belters could not sustain 1g of acceleration. Their passenger ships had a cruising speed of 1/3g, because going any faster was like gravity torture to them. From a trade perspective, this would make all of their voyages cost more, because they would have more food and air costs along the way. But the real disparity would be in strategic warfare. One of the factions moves at a third of the speed as the other two factions, and it just never got mentioned.

Quick thought on space piracy: You could attack people near points of interest, or follow them from POI if planetary navies are an issue. You could also steal bulk cargo pods and do electronic piracy. Or you could go the bandit route and just raid POI.

Terra-sols credits, that way you wanted to pay those troops would be much simpler as a digital currency exchange similar to bit coin in security and with all the speed of ship-outpost or ship-ship communication

You sir, are overloading my brain with too much awesomeness

I don’t care that it’s a speech impediment. It sounds like you have an accent from another planet. It’s cool.

Brings new meaning to "Results delayed by 20 minutes" when you're talking about the time lag between Earth and Mars!

I have a formal education in Political Science and Economics, and your work on Interplanetary Commerce is thoughtful. I think a shipload of Gold, delivered on Earth, or any Rare Earths, and He3 would create a 'rush to go' if not a stampede to get our butts into the Solar System and get rich. PS You have inspired me to finish my SciFi tome I started and let wilt many years ago.

Awesome, Arthursday has graced us again, the hype is real.

BUT WHAT ABOUT DRAGONS??? Whoops, wrong channel...

My savior. Laying down on a bed in hospital waiting for death(just nose operation) I was thinking when next episode will arrive... And here it is!

Isaac Arthur : The logical structure of your presentation, the way you press your point line by line and explore all the sides of an issue readily lends itself to an interactive video. I would like to be able to click, say, on the 3rd point, or scenario to go over it again, or in greater depth. Thanks.

I started watching this channel recently and I've caught up on all the episodes and its amazing the quality just keeps getting better. Keep up the great work!

Regarding the shipping information point, there's an old saying in IT: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes speeding down the highway." If you have a network connection, there's going to be a limit to how much data you can send down it. If you have 5TB of data to back up, but your connection can only do 1Mbit/s for uploads, it'll take around two months to upload all that to a remote server. In contrast, a USB hard drive (assuming USB 2.0, which can do 400Mbit/s) could take a copy of all that in about 4 hours. If shipping the drive to its destination takes three days, and another 4 hours are needed to read the data in at the other end, that's still getting the data there in a fifteenth of the time. Now, going to interplanetary scenarios, the long distances impose some pretty harsh limits on network bandwidth. The New Horizons probe took nine months to send back a few gigabytes of data recorded at Pluto. If the colony on Mars wants the latest movies from Earth, it might be quicker to not bother tying up the network connection at all and just send them a few SSDs full of video files every time a ship from Earth departs for Mars. Sure, that might impose a six-month lag between release on Earth and when the colonists get to watch them, but the drives are probably going to contain so many files that it'll take them that long to watch everything they want off it, anyway, when the next batch will be arriving.

I'd love a series on the Earliest Possible Civilizations as a kind of sequel to the civilizations at the end of time. The concept of the lukewarm universe 15 million years after the big bang is insane.

Pokemon, Arthursday... BEST FUCKING DAY IN MY LIFE!

Once we build Von Neumann probes, we might want to largely separate (or at least regulate) the space economy from the terrestrial economy. The most obvious example is energy from even a partial Dyson swarm. With all the material from the asteroid belt, you could construct a Dyson swarm that captures enough energy to boil the Earth's Oceans. You'd want to be careful with that kind of energy. Material trade is a bit different. You might imagine the extra mass would eventually affect the Earth's orbit (which might be desirable for other planets like Mars), but you could also imagine a Von Neumann swarm dismantling the moon and throwing a lot of stuff out of whack. It actually makes a lot of sense to follow the mantra of "If you got it in space, keep it in space." for the most part. Keeping materials in space means keeping it highly mobile. Once we master construction in space, it may become preferable to terrestrial construction for many applications.

“...unless you are a robot. And to be honest you probably are” **frantically does the captcha test** **cutting self to check for wires**

Happy Arthursday! I'm excited for the episode!

I love watching these videos, my mind just expands and considers so many different possibilities and then it seems like you have the same ideas and are talking about them 10 mins later with great explanations. GJ Isaac

People don't even have time to watch the video and yet still like it.

This channel always makes my Thursday so much better. I look forward to every Thursday now

I love the first rules of warfare.

Good job Isaac. You have a rare ability to rationalize or just discuss things completely out of our current paradigme.

Imagine if 'Star Wars XX' was coming out on Proxima B, but on Earth they're watching 'Star Wars XXII.' Lightlag on movies.

Isaac Arthur. Your stuff is exceptional. I am marathon watching every episode. I am grateful for the Upward Bounds series. I appreciate the fact that you translate Km to Miles. Helps me to 'see' clearly. without getting caught up in the morass of conversion. I am a wanna-b Physicist and now include these Tubes in my homeschooled son's education.

Why are you not more popular??!!!

2k views in an hour gj Isaac

A bit earlier today for coffee. 4 pm in Spain. Great concept today.

I dont get why all the NASA animations have 6 wheels even though there are people on the planet as well, 6 is just an absurd excess of parts, there is a reason why ATVs on earth dont have 6 wheels: they dont need to have more than 4 if you have someone on hand to fix a flat.

Highlight of my week! It is here!

Woo hoo Arthursday!

I wonder how much competition there would be to get citizens during any given phase of early colonization around our own solar system. Colonies might have to pay the bill for getting staff there, should the cost of transit be too high at first. If there are places setup for millions to live however, and things get cheap enough, that might change. Who knows! Whenever you mention sending digital copies of yourself places instead of conventional travel, I'm always reminded of the Altered Carbon series. Lots of great ideas in that one!

just sat down to relax and see this. What a treat, best thing on youtube

awesome, as always!

Fantastic Issac, I look forward to every Thursday to lay down in bed and listen to your amazing videos and awe inspiring topics. Well done.

Charles Stross has some interesting proposals for interstellar economics. Essentially you can sell debt and crypto currency across interstellar distances (if you are willing to wait 30 years for a translation to clear then you can even use the speed of light and the triangle equality to verify transactions!)

One of the major ways markets handle wait times for large shipments of commodities is through the sale of futures. It helps smooth price fluctuations out over long periods of time. Now, I'm not certain I want to be trading on a multi-century deal on an interstellar shipment, but there will be traders who will be educated in how to do so and turn a profit. I did one of my three degrees in economics and I'm still grappling with currency issues on interstellar travel. I agree blockchain is not a solution (from Isaac Arthur's previous episode on the topic). I'm not certain how currency transactions happen between solar systems when the speed of light is a boundary. Now if you can bring stable, ship sized wormholes into the equation then maybe. I figure ultimately there will have to be technological breakthroughs in banking as well. One of those black swan events that's been discussed so much on the channel. Great episode! Thank you for sharing with us again, Isaac! :D

Oh, man. That whole section about fast travel between planets with constant acceleration/deceleration takes me back to the first term paper I ever wrote back in jr. high. It was about anti-matter, of course. One of my sources was this old book about anti-matter and it's potential applications. At the start of each new section there was a short story that highlighted the topic of that section. The one story that really stuck in my mind was one about a boy and his mother taking a spaceship to mars, with him learning about how the constant 1g acceleration for the first half of the trip and 1g deceleration for the second half also kept the spaceship feeling like earth gravity. I remember at the time being really impressed by how that killed two birds with one stone. XD Ah, the memories.

I have a couple of ideas for space piracy. Trojan horses; pretend to be a trade ship that needs help or something of that innocent nature. Or, hack the space ship's computer systems and force the passengers to cooperate.

My most anticipated video of the week, love this stuff

Thanks, Isaac!

It's already been a week. And as always thanks for making Thursdays a little bit more interesting.

I'm a commercial operator and i love the idea of space truckers. "Commercial towing vehicle U.S.C.S.S. Nostromo serial 180286" (in a female A.I. voice) BOOM! So cool.

You keep outdoing yourself Isaac! Great job. Another stellar video.

Love your educational vids!!!!!! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

Great video Isaac Arthur

When I was a marketplace manager for a medium sized online retailer one problem I ran in to was communication lag. Ebay linked to our warehouse software to check inventory levels but it only checked every 15 minutes or so. This meant that if somebody bought the last items from our website Ebay would still show us having stock. Maybe once a week this would cause problems customer service problems since people would be able to "buy" stock we didn't have. With space trade and communication lag taking hours or days this sort of thing would really need to be factored in. Returns would also be a huge problem for all but the most expensive of goods.

HAPPY ARTHUSDAY!

I just love your channel and admire you for your intelligence and perseverance. Thanks so much.

Fascinating as usual, Isaac, you are a legend. A diamond amongst shit.

Thanks Isaac

No space piracy? And I already bought space suit with eye patch... You mentioned that there are no travel choke points for pirates to hide in - of course they are. Planets themselves, there will always be a finite number of destinations in a system for commerce. I think you underestimate human's ingenuity when it comes to obtaining free stuff :-)

At about 28:50 I understand that early sailing times before Longitude was solved freight routes were go to the right Latitude & keep on it. For pirates that meant that although the ocean is big, they had an idea of the target's route. Later on they tried to take the diagonal. The biggest disaster of that which I can think of was the Scilly naval disaster of 1707. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_1707

Issac Arthur... I'm 9 minutes into this series and I'm in love. I'm so curious about your research methodology.

Excellent video as always, I look forward to it every Wednesday. Thanks gg

May future inherent aesthetics in all built structures and manufactured products far exceed those of our present society and even the glories of past civilizations before us.

HOW DIDN'T I KNOW THIS CHANNEL EXISTED!!!! INSTANTLY SUBBED!!!!!

Can’t wait for the December 14th episode:)

I have to love the music at the beginning of the video, It went really well with the imagery, awesome Video, Isaac,...Thanks again.

I speculate that information trade will be incredible. I assume that digital arts and artworks will be cheaper and scientific info more expensive. it will encourage investing in information development. This means quality of music and artworks will be greatly looked into by producers. Similarly, scientific developments will have to be extremely accurate. The difficulty in this will increase the value of the information. I also assume that specific demands will encourage this. For example, scientists on Mars need to test the durability of a single Dyson swarm cubicle. The plans are digitally sent to the Venus colony scientists who are known for their heat durable technology. The Cubicle is quickly made and cheaply set into orbit around the sun. This is however expensive for Venus since their raw materials are primarily from a station on the asteroid belt meaning this project might set Venus's progress rate back by a few days. This efficiency delay can be used as a standard for determining the cost of the information given back. Art on the other hand is much easier and is channeled in bulk, yet is entirely dependant on the request by individuals. Communication technology will be extremely important here.

When you blast Sabaton and the notification arrives

Happy Arthursday and 10th

This place has more thrill than Netflix does

aww yeah, gonna get my science on. Thanks, Isaac, you're a treasure to us all.

Best vid yet

This was great! Im really excited about the colonizing the sun episode too

Amazing videos! I enjoy all of them very much, there is many great ideas! Btw. with fusion rockets and this 1G acceleration paradigm.. if we will be able to build fusion rockets, by far the biggest problem will be with cooling. If I calculate it right, if you want 1G acceleration of 100 ton (payload) space ship with 300 tons of total mass, the engine has to have power output around 2,000 GW. If only 1% of this is heat transferred to the ship hull, it will be hard to dissipate. (This was calculated for specific impulse 1% c. If you have less, you will have to add very impractical quantities of fuel, if you go higher (up to 10% c, which is theoretical maximum for fusion), you need even more engine power output.

Imagine this: -American Far Solar Company, an American company similar to the VOC but trades interplanetary stuff -White Galaxy Line - basically the White Star Line but it's spaceships (Royal Mail Starship Titanic's maiden voyage on April 10, 2112) -Delta Warp - basically Delta Airlines but they are using warp drives and stuff for quicker and safer transportation, since conventional rocket travel became impractical, just as ship travel became impractical and got replaced by air travel -Wall Orbit Stock Exchange - Wall Street but it's in a certain Earth orbit known as Wall Orbit, where a space station home to the stock exchange HQ of the solar system orbits the Earth while people maintain it and livestream the feed to companies on different planets -Ford Rovers - basically the Ford car company but it makes different rovers specialized in driving on the planet you are on. For example, your rover on Mars might have offroad wheels while your rover on Europa might have skis. -Scutum - basically the Shell company but sells oil, gas, methane, hydrogen, and kerosene synthesized/collected from other planets such as Titan, Jupiter, etc. [Please like and reply and make suggestions so I can edit this further and I hope Isaac Arthur reads this!]

Fascinating!