My point exactly. Scarcity is always going to be a problem, it will just shift around. Nobody in the developed world complains about a lack of socks, for example, yet even sixty years ago, it was unfeasible to provide soldiers with them. Do we live in a sock-scarcity society, or a post-sock-scarcity society?Ryan Thunder wrote: That's an unmanageable level of consumption. Union citizens have it hammered into their heads from a young age that overconsumption and stuff like having too many kids results in scarcity and that scarcity means the end of civilization as they know it.
Actually no, we couldn't feed everyone because of currently insurmountable logistical and distribution problems. Make these go away, and you will find out you still need energy and resources and industrial power and fuel and time to move it around and distribute it. It would take an utterly absurd level of technology to completely overcome these obstacles for all products everywhere.Ryan Thunder wrote: Only because there's a profit to be made selling it. We could feed almost everybody, yet we chose a system that denies it to people because they didn't amass enough currency. I said "fuck that noise" and went with a technocracy (which is actually feasible with this game's technology).
Even foregoing the fact that people are motivated better by rewards than threats, it's hard to imagine a situation where you will need "a little maintenance here and there" to maintain a complex society. What happens when a Bragulan battlefleet blasts your von neumann probes and facilities to shit?Ryan Thunder wrote: You won't need to pay people to do it though. You can motivate them by threatening to end the gravy train if they don't occasionally go in and do a little maintenance when its required (if at all).
These printers or replicator won't realistically be able to make everything everywhere, and you'll still need to transport the finished product and distribute it. The probes will need energy - for many products, way more energy than you can possibly acquire from simple stuff like solar panels. They will need the ability to self-repair, diagnose logistical problems and correct them, etc.Siege wrote:You're right, but within the context of the game it's quite possible to create a society that is for all intents and purposes post-scarcity. Let's say one that has only a handful million citizens yet access to dozens of solar systems which are all being mined by swarms of Von Neumann probes, which feed the resources directly into some kind of matter-energy furnaces linked to fancy 3d-printers (or replicator, or what-have-you). Society would still be limited in that obviously not everyone can own their own planet, but on the personal level I don't really see why anyone would have to actually care about money when everything's self-replicating and self-sustaining.
For the end customer it may be essentially a post-scarcity society in the sense that he won't have to worry about getting fed, clothed and entertained, but that just means scarcity will move into a higher level: for example, everyone would be able to affort your basic iSpacePhone (indeed, it's almost the situation today: you just sign a contract and you get a basic phone for free), but some people may want more functionality, or a particular stylization. So he calls up an AI managing a Von Neumann swarm in Zeta Reticuli and tells it it wants a custom phone, but the AI has to make phones, batteries, intelligent fabrics, military computers, other AIs...and so tells him to go screw himself, it has no spare capability. Call back in two years when my Von Neumann swarm expanded sufficiently to provide you with what you want.
Anyway, my basic point is: even a self-replicating self-managing and self-sustaining economy will still have a certain capacity at a given time, and thus will run into scarcity problems: if not for one good, then for another.
Especially when Bragulans come and wreck your Von Neumann iSpacePhone production facilities