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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 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 outpost planted

somewhere is a one-time effort that opens up the resources of a whole new star system, and

there really is no cost too high in terms of mass and energy to acquire that.

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