While today, scientific information is freely exchanged
actually it's not. scientific information costs money; most discoveries are printed in journals (forming a major part of most scientists' curricula vitae), but subscriptions to those journals aren't cheap. it's just that working scientists are typically well-funded enough to stay in their respective loops.
I do have to agree that the major killer of all our economy, information, contact ideas is the time/distance problem.
Like millertime pointed out, that is a mjor problem. When it take 20 years to receive word that your money transfer was received, well 20 years is a long time to wait for anything. Especially when you consider that major investment reurns might take many years, or centuries to materialize, who would want to invest in something that has no garunteed returns for 100 years.
that's my point exactly. under our current monetary system, monetary units have not standarized or concrete value. they aren't inherently tied to a commidity (as was the case under the gold standard), or to a service or obligation of a service. monetary value nowadays is established partly by policy and partly by perception. in other words, money only has value in our society because every agrees that it has value.
what sort of perceptions would Sol-based moguls have of an economy separated by years? but beyond that, how would they be able to assist or fund a new colony? if the alpha centauri colonial government determines it needs to build a new habitation dome and determines it'll cost $84.5 billion (the dollar sign is an arbitrary symbol here), they send a message back to Earth. 4.6 years later, investors on Earth arrange a contract and send it off to their Alpha Centauri branch with a provisional transfer of funds. another 4.6 years later, when the approval's come through (and you thought mortgages take a long time), costs of labor and materials have changed, and now it's gonna cost $92.7 billion.
establishing exchange rates and fixing currencies has been a challenge to global economists for a long time, and there have been several systems. the funny thing about economists is that they're half creators and half describers. as an academic discipline, economics seeks to describe and predict the behavior of the market (and all the exchanges of goods, money, services and information therein). not all economists agree on why things work the way they do. economists are also sought as experts for businesses and governments, and as such they help establish policies that further affect the market. because their views can differ, their policies can differ, further facilitating the unpredictablility to market behavior.
modern finance and monetary systemization is very complex, and i prefer to think things through simply. monetary exchange
can take place in today's world because it's possible to go to another place and spend its money there. i can go to Europe, exchange American dollars for euros, and spend them there. the only reason i'd want to buy Alpha Centuri units would be if i wanted to spend them there. and the only way i could buy them would be either with Sol units sold to someone who wants to come to Sol and spend them, or with some commodity, service or knowledge.
i suppose i can imagine an economy of sorts, though. if
representatives were given discretionary power over a pre-set spending amount, or brought it with them electronically, they might be able to carry out many of today's more complex business interactions. keep in mind, modern wall stree style business is very little trading beans for iron ore. it's much more about moving money around, and very quickly at that. but in this case, i think it'd be better to imagine the colony ship itself as a sort of business. especially if we were to envision the Von Neumann style ship, its leadership could be a sort of business executive board. part of why they need so much money is because they don't die. they've paid their way into an expensive interstellar upper class, able to afford costly, regular anti-senescence treatments (sort of like the Son'a in Star Trek: Insurrection). they also have a cosmopolitan culture, trading music and art and cultural products amongst themselves with equal, or even greater, value than technological knowledge.
these people left Sol because of the exorbitant taxes on anti-senescence treatments (remember Sol's overpopulation woes?), but they don't exactly wish to settle down in some backwater colony where they'll be tied up with the struggles of fronteir life. ideally they'd like to occupy some role in civilization that allows them to pat themselves on the back while still allowing them to enjoy only the best of what human productivity has to offer. so they build their colony ships. these ships are giant contracts, in their minds. they offer billions of people the opportunity for a new and better life in another star system, and in return these people are indebted to them in ways that allow them to support their lifestyles (contractual obligations to provide certain necessary material resources, services and cultural products). that obviously leaves a lot of detail to be filled in, but does that picture make some sense?
(bear in mind, i'm thinking like a writer here).
There's always the possibility of FTL communications
the most common term in SciFi for such devices AFAIK is 'ansible' (coined by Ursula Le Guin and most commonly recognized from
Ender's Game). the only identified methods to communicate FTL are the same ones that'd make it possible for large objects to travel FTL: warp bubbles and wormholes. when you say that these rely on 'negative energy' what it really means is that it relies on exotic matter, since energy and matter are one in the same. such exotic matter might be repelled by gravity or have negative or even imaginary mass (at least when described by current mathematics). freaky, huh? my layperson's intuition tells me that if such matter exists, it doesn't exist in our 3+1 dimensions.
also, if Alcubierre bubbles tickle your fancy, you might want to check out
Krasnikov tubes.
