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The long voyage just to reach the stars seems like the biggest challenge on our way

to becoming an interstellar species, but we need to establish regular trade between the stars if we're to stay united becoming an interstellar species, but we need to establish

regular trade between the stars if we're to stay united as an interstellar civilization.

So today we'll be talking about interstellar travel and trade and using vehicles known

as cyclers, we briefly touched on cyclers for interplanetary commerce in our recent episode

on getting to Mars, and I thought

it was high time we revisited the topic of interstellar commerce.

One of the major problems with interstellar commerce is the sheer amount of time and energy

involved in moving anything over such distances.

If you want to cut down the time, you have to expend far more energy and vice versa.

Interstellar Cyclers offers us a way to mitigate that problem, at least on regular

established trade routes.

We tend to assume the hard part of expanding our civilization to other stars will be getting

there in the first place, but when it comes to long-term economics, getting an outposts planted

somewhere is a one-time effort that opens

...