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.

I mean, either you've still got big boys fireworks, which means little more than grown up slashdotters queueing for a go in Branson's sub-orbital pickle jar. Or you've got a handwave drive and it's business as usual for Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk, other than the truck drivers having to negotiate the picket lines of angry physicists outside the depot.

Assuming interplanetary trade or shipping isn't a ludicrous idea in the first place.

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

Best not do that.

Comments

[dedbutdrmng.livejournal.com]

"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.livejournal.com]

Mark Kurlansky, right?

[diffrentcolours]

Wasn't that the basis of Ace Trucking Co.?

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[zotz]

People are living in denial. And, in any case, as an SF writer it's his moral duty to be unrealistically upbeat about these things. It's goddamn unAmerican, the way he's behaving. He's letting the side down completely.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Right.

If there's no point in carting several thousand containers of scruttock flanges from one alleged planetary system to the next, then there'll be no pie-munching space trucker hunched over a copy of the Proxima Centauri Sun.

Even with a minimal-faff handwave drive, you're not going to bother stopping on planets that aren't pretty Earth-like, which (one fondly assumes) will have the sort of raw materials lying about to enable a shining young society to quickly create six-lane motorways, strip malls, drive through laser-gun shops and all the other signs of progress.

I suppose, were one really feeling charitable, one might consider a situation where you'd some Falklands-like useless tip of a place that was kept going out of pure bloody-mindedness. Even then, that falls into the trap of thinking of planets like countries, which is stupid and annoying.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Well, that does raise an interesting point. Rockall, for example, is no use to anyone. But it's ours (and I believe we send some chaps to camp on it every year to keep it ours) because having it be ours gives us fishing rights.

The Falklands are (I'm guessing here) worth hanging on to for some comparably indirect reason, probably something military & strategic. Ditto Gibraltar. Ditto all those Pacific islands during WWII.

Which is not to say that planets are like countries, but that the reasons for holding onto occupiable territory are potentially rather complicated second-order things. The details of fish law, or the range of the available bombers, may turn out to be the important variables, not the planets themselves.

Expecting there to be a simple reason may be a great mistake. If there is a reason, it will be a complicated one, one that only works in a complicated context that we have yet to imagine.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, the paragraph I deleted from my previous comment went on about a handwave drive enabling some Falklands-like malarkey.

However, yes.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

So, to continue with the same peramubulation, if we had a handwave drive, but one which left interstellar travel as a moderately expensive business, what we're still lacking is any reason to be out there at all.

I don't know whether to think that if we found habitable land we'd just fill it up with people because that's what we do. There'd be bound to be some Puritans or Moonies who would jump at the chance.

[silentq.livejournal.com]

I saw an article on Cargotecture (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/276293_architecture04.html) recently, turning shipping containers into offices and living spaces.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[hirez.livejournal.com]

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.

[jhaelan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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. (http://www.helixsf.com/archives/Apr07/fiction/Q4_pelland_mercytanks.htm) (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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Then there will be pipe-smoking, jolly good chaps with spanners and foreign-looking rum coves.

Which would be bad because the sods would work out where I was getting it all from...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're quite safe. It has yesterday's laminated dreams, not today's, so it has no pull on them. So to speak.

[spride.livejournal.com]

There's a great essay by John Barnes on building convincing future universes, that go into the economics of spacefaring and so on.

[rummages on bookshelf, finds]

it's How To Build A Future collected in Apostrophes & Apocalypses (http://www.amazon.com/Apostrophes-Apocalypses-Collection-Acclaimed-Writers/dp/0312850697/ref=sr_1_1/105-3240038-3252423?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183681628&sr=8-1).

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

"Assuming interplanetary trade or shipping isn't a ludicrous idea in the first place."

Interplanetary trade miles: is your zoidjam locally produced? on which planet are you offsetting your carbon/hyperspace fuel emmisions then?

[oryctolagus.livejournal.com]

Found a modern Sea Shanty about working with containers...

Contains the lines...

Cargo comes in TEU's
Rolling up, rolling down
A bloody great box, boys, filled with booze
To go rolling down the river.

Chorus

Rolling up, rolling down
We'll all get drunk in Bristol town
24 hours to turn around
To go rolling down the river.

Possibly needs an interplanetary re-write.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Precious few containers in Bristol town though, and Avonmouth or Portbury wouldn't scan so well. Not that I wouldn't love to see marinas torn out and replaced by good honest container ports.

All the romance is gone, I fear.