More than two decades ago, in January, 1982, Greg Costikyan published an essay called The 11 Billion Dollar Bottle of Wine: The Possibilities of Interstellar Trade.
Costikyan considered sub-light travel, which we know is possible. He noted that costs depend on the time to travel to another star and back and on the price of the energy used to accelerate and decelerate the rocket.
Costikyan presumed that energy cost equaled $0.05 per kilowatt-hour and that investors sought a 3% rate of return (which equals the rate of growth of the United States, on average, between 1830 and 1980). Given those presumptions, and leaving aside the cost of building and crewing the rocket, he calculated that the cost of traveling to Alpha Centauri and back, including the cost of waiting, comes to about $11 billion per kilogram. Hence, his title.
In astronomical terms, Alpha Centauri is close. It is fewer than 5 light years away. A more likely destination is ten or a hundred times farther away. That distance dramatically increases cost.
But at a rate of growth of 3% per year, in half a millenium, the cost of transporting a bottle of wine five light years might be no more than a year's pay. This would make trade a luxury, but not impossibly expensive. Put another way, a Rembrandt painting costs far more than an average person's annual pay; it might be worth transporting such a painting a great distance.
Any object that can be mined, grown, or manufactured within the solar system will likely be more cheaply produced in the solar system. As Costikyan says,
... given the high costs of transportation, selling the manufacturing technology makes more sense than trading in the goods themselves.
Similarly, copies of anything will be less expensive than the cost of transporting them physically. Even now, digital images can be made and transmitted cheaply by radio. Only unique and unusual items, like great paintings, will be worth transporting over interstellar distances.
Moreover, while we now think of cars and telephones as `manufactured' objects, in the future, anything grown will be the same.
Costikyan is thinking of a duration similar to that between the present and Columbus' voyage to a land Europeans came to call the `New World'.
However, a `rapidly' reproducing Von Neumann machine could produce devices for collecting `alternative sources of energy' as a side effect of reproducing itself. If implemented, this could bring down costs and bring the kind of future Costikyan imagines closer.
Costikyan also imagines vessels moving faster than the speed of light. At present, that appears impossible, but it makes for a grand literary conceit. Most science fiction writers presume it. As Costikyan says,
The basic principles ... remain the same. The lower the cost of transportation of goods, the more trade will go on.
But even with the most optimistic presumptions, it is hard to see it as less expensive than early international air freight. Moreover, the cost of mining, manufacturing, and growing locally, and the cost of transporting information, will likely be low.
All in all, it is almost impossible to conceive of large scale interstellar travel.
And this does not consider the implications of David Brin's depressing paper, The 'Great Silence': The Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Life or Ward and Brownlee's book 1 on `Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe'.
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