> On May 6, 2015, at 5:18 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
>
> Also, there's the old, old canon that the OTU represents the 'Age of Sail' & NOT the post-container cargo ship 20th century.
> (A point that I suspect DGP was NOT aware of)

actually no. The OTU is like the ‘Age of Sail’ only insofar as communications are limited to the speed of physical travel.This has important implications about the structure of governance, finance, and to a greater or lesser extent society, but it doesn’t actually affect the scale of the economy or interstellar trade.

Again, when all interstellar trade is being carried on a relative handful of tiny ships, the Imperium has no reason to exist, nor the tax base to pay for itself. Why join (and pay for) the Imperium if you could do without interstellar trade, which amounts to a vanishingly small portion of the entire economy?

As for the ‘each planetary system has essentially infinite resources’ I beg to differ.

By the time of the OTU (in any era) large swaths of the Imperium has been home to a highly advanced industrial civilization for over ten thousand years. They’ve been reduced to mining their landfills and tailings piles for a long, long time.

--
Bruce Johnson

"Wherever you go, there you are." B. Banzai, PhD