Bootstrapping a Civilization
Bootstrapping a Civilization
Influence Exploitation Launch Seeding
The Seeding
In 2396 CE, the generation ship Arvad, carrying over ten thousand refugees from the old homeworld of Earth, arrived at its final and unplanned destination in the Adalia system. Its residents were well-prepared for a colonization effort, with plentiful supplies – but supplies intended for use at the Arvad’s original destination, a habitable Earth-analog exoplanet. Everything was meant to operate in almost one gee of gravity on a rocky or watery planetary surface, with readily available resources that could be collected in the open air under gentle skies of room-temperature, breathable atmosphere.
Instead, upon arriving in Adalia, those aboard the Arvad found that all of the major planets here were uninhabitable and that colonizing the system’s extensive asteroid belt was their only hope. Thus began a period of hardscrabble survival and reconstitution, later called The Seeding, under the strict and highly collectivized governance of the Prime Council. During those difficult decades, the Arvad was shipbroken, and the parts recycled to create new, smaller ships. Intrepid explorers traveled the Belt to gather materials not found on Adalia Prime. The Arvad’s sad cargo of tractors and wind turbines was converted and repurposed to build the first three colonies on Adalia Prime, and the first native Adalians were born there. Many simulations were conducted, modeling these brave new conditions and practicing for the next phase of humanity’s expansion into Adalia. By the end of those long years, with a large stockpile of parts and supplies readied, a new currency prepared to support the reintroduction of a market economy, and a thriving population on Adalia Prime restless and eager to broaden its horizons through private colonization of other asteroids, the Prime Council finally determined to open the Belt for Exploitation.
Prime Council Marketplaces
The parts and supplies stockpiled by the Prime Council are known as seeded products. They are intended to assist in bootstrapping the Adalian economy; in keeping with the new free market introduced at Exploitation, those products have been put up for sale in two dozen Marketplace buildings on Adalia Prime (AP,) owned by the Prime Council. Colonists wishing to use those products will need to purchase them from those Marketplaces using SWAY, the currency of Adalia. SWAY paid for seeded products will go to the Prime Council to fund its operations and promote continued colonization.
The Prime Council Marketplaces are present in all three of the AP colonies, and will allow for almost all of the hundreds of available products in Adalia to be freely traded, even if they are not among the seeded products. Colonists are welcome to use those Marketplaces to buy and sell their products – or to build their own Marketplaces instead. The Prime Council will not charge fees to use its Marketplaces until it is confident that a robust set of alternatives exists.
Not all products are tradeable at every colony. The following is a list of which Marketplaces are available at which colonies:
What’s for Sale
The seeded products can be divided into two categories: amount-limited and time-limited.
Amount-limited products consist of seeded non-C-type raw materials. These are products that can be directly mined from S-, M-, or I-type asteroids or combinations thereof. AP itself is a C-type asteroid, and so none of the raw materials that can be mined there have been seeded; colonists will need to obtain those by mining them or buying them from others.
The amount-limited products have each been put up for sale across a range of prices, which increase like the rungs on a ladder from the lowest seeded price up to almost 100x that price. Each of the 20 rungs on the ladder is a factor of 100.1, or about 26%, greater than the previous. The total amount seeded of each of the amount-limited products is proportional to its estimated demand, and will remain on the Marketplaces until sold. These products will become more expensive as the lower rungs sell out, increasingly incentivizing their import from other asteroids. It is expected that some colonists may hoard or resell the amount-limited products; the Prime Council discourages but cannot prevent this behavior, and would caution that this could be very risky, both for the individual trader and for the colony as a whole. In the event that an amount-limited product sells out completely without being used productively in the economy, the Prime Council does hold some goods in reserve that may be used to re-seed that product.
The full list of amount-limited products, as well as their lowest and highest seeded prices:
Time-limited products, on the other hand, consist of seeded consumable supplies, as well as the needed materials and components to build ships and buildings. Amount-limited products are at the bottom of the production chains, while time-limited products are at the top, highly processed.
There are enough of the time-limited products for everyone, without any need for competition. They have been seeded in very high amounts and additional stock will be made available if a given Marketplace does happen to run out. They are each for sale at a single fixed price, in contrast to the amount-limited products with their increasing scale of prices. The Prime Council wants all colonists to have a fair chance at obtaining these products, so they can construct buildings and ships for the good of Adalia.
As the name suggests, once the Prime Council has observed native production on AP of most or all of the time-limited products, it will remove any remaining seeded products in this category from sale on its Marketplaces, allowing the markets to evolve organically. As with amount-limited products, it is expected that some colonists may choose to hoard time-limited products, and again, the Prime Council warns against this risky behavior.
Ship hulls are a special case; they have not been seeded even though they are components needed to build ships. Instead, the hull components needed to build ship hulls have been seeded; colonists wishing to build a ship will need to first construct the hull before integrating the final ship, at least until other colonists begin offering ship hulls for sale on their Marketplaces.
The full list of time-limited products, as well as their single prices:
Time is Money
To give some insight into how the Prime Council arrived at prices for the seeded products before the new free market economy was even open for business, an old Earth adage was followed: “time is money.” A unit of each product was assumed to require some representative amount of time to create, and that amount of time was assumed to be directly proportional to a fair price in SWAY per unit for that product. A single constant of proportionality was assumed to apply across all products; that value was compared to the old Earth concept of “minimum wage,” although many processes in Adalia are mostly automated, so that was only an approximate analog.
The remaining challenge, then, was to determine time-costs for each product.
As a starting point, while the raw materials were being mined for the Amount-Limited products using the very first Extractors, the miners kept careful records of how much ore was extracted and how long it took. Deposits of different sizes were faster or slower to extract, but the miners observed that all raw materials seemed to require the same time per tonne, averaged over all deposits. Raw materials available on Adalia Prime were simply assigned that time cost, but materials mined elsewhere had an additional, significant time-cost added in addition to their simple time-cost to mine, reflecting the substantial observed time-costs of transport back to AP.
As the first experimental Refineries were being constructed and the first trial processes run, time-costs for more refined products were computed, being the sum of all the needed input materials plus the amount of time the process took to run, per unit of the refined output product. And as the first Bioreactors, Factories, and Shipyards were put into operation, similar computations were performed for their output crops, manufactured goods, and assemblies. By the time constructing native ships and colony buildings had become largely a solved problem, a table of time-costs for all products was available to the Prime Council’s researchers. And once a “minimum wage” ensuring that most colonists could afford a beginning livelihood was decided upon, around 3.5 SWAY per Adalian hour, a table of SWAY prices was computed, available here [link to full seeding CSV]
The Prime Council’s researchers repeatedly cautioned that these prices would almost certainly prove to be wrong, in some cases significantly so, once the free market economy was launched. Old Earth had entire fields of study dedicated to economic research and modeling, and while the Arvad libraries contained those records, the researchers were painfully aware of their own lack of expertise on the subject. The Prime Council acknowledged these caveats, but nevertheless decided that these best-guess prices would serve as a suitable starting point for the incipient Adalian economy at the dawn of Exploitation. In the words of one Council member, “a soybean will never be planted in exactly the right spot, but the farmer plants it as best she can.” And so concluded The Seeding.
TL;DR
The Prime Council Marketplace buildings on Adalia Prime contain several products that have been seeded, or put up for sale, by the Prime Council to help get the Adalian economy started. They can be bought with SWAY.
Some of the seeded products, the raw materials that can’t be mined on Adalia Prime, are “amount-limited”, with a large but limited supply, and will increase in price as they are bought up, but will be available forever, at least until they sell out.
Other of the seeded products, the materials and modules needed to create buildings and ships, as well as some consumable supplies, are “time-limited”, meaning they will be removed entirely after a while, but are available in effectively infinite amounts as long as they are around, and at a single price, so they won’t get more expensive as they are bought.
The Prime Council Marketplaces in the biggest and most expensive colony city, Arkos, have all the seeded products, while those in the smaller colonies of Ya’axche and Saline have only some of them.
The list of amount-limited products: See chart above
The list of time-limited products: See chart above