Moondust Daydreams

 

From B. D. Grover's "Devil's Dictionary," 2nd Edition: A "conspiracy theory" is a truth that is widely discredited and officially denied. Once exposed, it is widely acknowledged as self-evident and officially discussed in the passive voice.

 Imagine you are a Spanish conquistador in the 1500s.

You are sent to the so-called New World to initiate trade with the natives, who aren't really there, because it's a "new world," right?  Anyway, they this stuff called tobacco and something called chocolate, which will likely find a huge market in the Old World.

You've got sacks full of gold pieces of eight, with which to buy these amazing new products.  But the natives don't want gold.  Turns out they have piles of the stuff, and while it makes some pretty art, it's not all that useful to these "new" folks.  How do you find a convenient currency that both sides find valuable, and with which you can buy all those nifty "new" products?

If you're a conquistador, the solution is easy.  You hack and slay the locals and just take the goodies, and while you're at you, you squat on their land and take over the place.

Now let's say two wildly different cultures, say Earthlings and Orionids, want to trade with each other.  Both sides have goodies the other wants, but other than hauling ships full of commodities back and forth, there's no mutually agreeable currency that both sides can use...They have no use for our paper when they trade with the Pleidians, and the Pleidians are allergic to paper.  Conversely, whatever the Orionids and Pleidians use for currency, we have no interest in it.  Besides, one Orionid Flurb is worth one trillion US dollars, due to hypergalactic inflation.

So how do we trade if there's nothing they have that we want, and nothing we have that they want?

Except energy.

Turns out everyone uses electricity in some form or another, generated by some means or another.  So the Orionids suggest we create a currency out of electrical Watts, since they have a measurement very similar to that.  They suggest we call it Blips, since that means "wealth" in Orionian.

So industrious little humans (the Orionids are HUGE, you see) set about writing code that turns raw electricity into Blips, based on a certain amount of physical work (Watts) that each unit will perform.  Earhlings, being used to physical currencies, decide to call these units Blip coins, even though they don't have any physical structure.  As it happens, not have physical structure makes them idea for moving around the galaxy, too, because there is no mass to accelerate or decelerate.   Just little packets of Watts zipping hither and yon.

At first, the Earthlings are dubious.  How can little packets of Watts have any value?  You can't hold one or put it in your pocket.  In fact, you can't even see a Blip unless it's registered by another bit of code they all decided to call wallets, because that's how they used to store paper.

Quickly, the Earthlings realized that these Blipcoins made trading with the off-planet colonies simple and easy.  Instead of converting amounts into and out of Moonbux or Marsbux, they just zapped Blipcoins to each other across the interplanetary exonet.  Suddenly, business boomed and cargo ships could add more cargo in the space that was once consumed by paper.  And just like the old paper, when things got really rotten, you could burn the Blipcoins for lighting and heat

The moral of this story is: have you checked the price of Blipcoins lately?

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