Time travel & real interest rates

If we could travel in time, what would real interest rates look like? wonders Tyler Cowen:

As you approach the speed of light you move into the future relative to more stationary observers.  So can you not leave a penny in a savings account, take a very rapid spaceflight, and come back to earth "many years later" as a billionaire?  Hardly any time has passed for you.  In essence we are abolishing time preference, or at least allowing people to lower their time preference by spending money on fuel.  I believe that in such worlds the real interest rate cannot exceed the costs at which more fuel can "propel you into the future through time dilation."

I'm not sure about this. I suspect time preference would still exist, because the costs of travelling into the future will be much greater than the fuel costs.
Imagine you were to put £1 in a bank at a 2% real interest rate (not that you can right now) and travel forward 1000 years. You could look forward to picking up £400 million then. But think of the costs involved. Tons of technology would be wholly unfamiliar to you, whilst many of the things you love - food, football, pubs - will have changed enormously. You'll be as disoriented as Catweazle was in the 20th century. Except much more so, as he could magically understand the language. But you'll not be able to, any more than the author of Beowulf would understand modern English. If the past is a foreign country, the future is even more foreign.
You'll therefore face enormous adjustment costs.
What's more,  although your 3108 self will feel rich compared to your 2108 self, you'll not be especially well-off compared to other 3108 beings. If real interest rates equal real growth rates, as they should, everyone will be colosally wealthy in 3108.  Prices of positional goods - big homes with nice views, art and the like - will be as out of your reach then as now.
And then there's risk to consider. If you try to get your £400m in 3108, you might well find that the bank has gone bust or that your dormant bank account has been seized.
I reckon these problems would stop many people travelling forward just to become billionaires.  Time travel, then, wouldn't put much downward pressure on real interest rates - well, not as much as the Fed does. 

Comments

[John Angliss]

I'd prefer to go back to 1960 with a few thousand pounds - they'd buy much more then.

[Keith]

Chances are that you will find yourself in a terrible world of 10 billion people living short Hobbesian lives beyond a heavily defended 'oasis' of wealth controlled by a totalitarian junta of Chinese corporations. Not nice.

Anyway, why would a lot of fuel be needed to achieve significant relativistic time effects? The most likely way as we understand it now will be via a 'tame' black hole, using gravitational acceleration: you might not need to travel anywhere. No fuel-based system known could accelerate sufficiently to achieve the required effect. I hope never to see it, anyway.

[Scott Hughes]

Don't forget about the apes who would likely control the future. ;)

[Peter Risdon]

Time travel, huh? Is there something your 2108 self isn't telling us?

[ajay]

Red Dwarf suggested the alternative no-growth scenario: hundreds of thousands of years into the future, the only people with any money at all are the space traveller Dave Lister (who owns most of the world, because he left some money in his interest-bearing bank account before he departed) and the North-Western Electricity Board (because Lister left the light on in his bathroom).

[jollyroger]

HOW DO YOU DO…
TIME TRAVEL

21st century boring you?
Want a way to walk with dinosaurs that isn’t sitting really close to the TV to watch an unrealistic 3D diplodocus eat leaves?
You need a holiday in time, or dinoworld

Tick, tick, tick… tick

1.5 million years since fire was lit, 35,000 years after the birth of art, 16,000 years from the first mappings of stars and 600 years since the blueprints of the helicopter were drawn. We sit here thinking, “Y’know the 21st century could have been a bit more, well, silvery.” Aside from those metal toasters that’ll burn a farmyard animal into your bread and those credit cards with one of the corners cut off a bit. The 21st century has had:

No proper Robots. My house isn’t doing stuff for me when I go to work so when I get back it’s like a new house and the kitchens in the bathroom. Cars and skateboards don’t hover. We can’t holiday in space and the so called information super highway is still not bypassing my brain with an LCD screen in my eye and USB ports in my tippy toes.

AHHhhhh, yet as a time traveller you can go to the future where these things should have occurred with a few other things that you probably didn’t think about; like a chocolate bar called waffpinuts. A wafer, pineapple and nuts bar wrapped in Kevlar.

Then, go back in time to tell all those people on Tomorrows World that hoodwinked our innocent child eyes, “Hey hey, perm-head, that ain't going to happen you pre-foetus futurist fuck.”
And they’d have to believe your aggressive preaching cos you’d bring an almanac from 2008 with all the sports results and next weeks Eastenders from UK-GOLD, so there.

...continues at lifestyleguides.blogspot.com

[Geoffrey Thomas]

The great scientific thinker and hereo of the scientific world Alert Einsteien did say at extreme velocity clocks slow down but only from thatpointn of view.

Time has already done so as we observe the our and minuite hands of clocks frozen in time at any goven moment. But somthing tells us the frozen in time our and minuite hands are still moving though time just as they are obsereved as stoped at any given moment of time to us.

I have a block spot (http://) time travel and parallel universe theorie (.blogspot.com) that explains how clocks illustrate how we observe the environment's time at the maximum speed of light stoped from our point of view, but from the environment's point of view of us we're speeded up in time

And it looks at how the envoroment see us as slowed down in time we see the environment speeded up.

It seems from eac others point of view time is stoped and moving at the same time.

Looking forward to hearing your comments

Geoffrey Thomas

[Marlon]

In their recent researches, physicists and professors agreed that light's speed may make time travel possible. Some of them even think they can exploit slow light energy and turn the future into the past. I have heard that it is theoretically possible to distort the space time we live in. They are into the work of building a time travel device. Hopefully they would come out with a positive result.

[Viagra Price]

Hi great blog yet as a time traveller you can go to the future where these things should have occurred with a few other things that you probably didn’t think about; like a chocolate bar called waffpinuts. A wafer, pineapple and nuts bar wrapped in Kevlar. without words!!!
thanks for the article

[Invierta en proyectos]

Like your article very much!!!
Keep it up.