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I am trying to do some sci fi related stuff, and I'm having trouble with world building.
What I have so far basically is, a Human faction, in control of a certain region of space, and a lot of angry aliens and tense diplomatic relations, I have a lot of Human and alien stuff already figured out for the most part. One of the things I am looking for is a system of currency, I want something that seems reasonable, but not like gold, platinum or silver, I was thinking a Rare-Earth metal, but I don't know which one would be a good fit, any help would be appreciated.
FYI this is kind of a grim and dark setting, but probably no where near as fethed as 40k is, hope and peace are very much still an option.
I was also looking for how I wanted to do FTL communication, like sending a ship faster than light seems reasonable to me but I was wondering how tf they'd send data.
If anyone has any other suggestions or ideas for me to definitely not steal let me know and I would appreciate it. Thanks for any help in advance.

If you just looking for something for personal use (i.e. not worried about copyright), Peter F. Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy had the answer to both:

For currency, he used helium-3, as it’s a key component in efficient fusion reactor fuel and basically in a sci-fi world if you have enough energy you can make pretty much whatever you want, within reason. So power = money.


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And as far as how you do FTL communication? You couldn’t. They could build ships with a jump drive (a la Battlestar Galactica), but there’s no way to produce an FTL signal. It introduces some cool story options, a bit like age of sail history, in that you’re reliant on a ship turning up to bring news, and that news will be days or weeks (or months or years) out of date.

Depends a lot on your general setting, how FTL communication works or if it works at all (not working would the more interesting setting for me personally). Since it does not work based on current science you have to invent something.

- if there is subspace or hyperspace or other dimensions of any kind, where relativity does not work, send the communication this way like Powerline Communication, subspace wave or such.

- use some technique vaguely based on quantum teleportation. Sender and receiver are matching pairs of devices that can instantly show information of their twin. Communication would only work between a pair and not with other devices.

- use human psychics (or captive alien psychics), who can contact other psychics and noone knows how they do that, not even themselves.

- some obscure palantir-like alien technology salvaged from a derelict colony, but it's not reproducible.

- micro-wormholes. Create one, send your message, let it collapse. Better aim good, though.

You may well need to divide currency, and valuable trade items. Each race is likely to have come up with its own currency in the course of becoming a space-faring race, but if things are tense, it's not like there's going to be an inter-galactic exchange rate going on. That is, not unless you have a widely-respected, third-party faction handling it.

Instead I'd suggest looking at materials that are going to be considered useful, as opposed to just shiny, so that helium-3 suggestion is a great one. Something to bear in mind, though - different factions are going to find different things valuable, but if anything, that's going to make trade even more likely.
To anyone that's ever played Catan, "I've got wood for sheep", and all that.

Comstar was pretty much the answer to both. Their currency was time on the FTL communications network. It functioned through some hyper morse code called a hyper pulse generator.

There's really no reason that couldn't be a network of courier drones bouncing between stations at tolerances humans can't handle. Generally FTL only works outside of gravity wells, so there's a period where you're slow coming and going... but drones wouldn't have to honor that as much, so you'd end up with messages faster than ships.

The further out you get from the galaxy, the less a standard currency matters. On a remote island, the dude with 2 cows is richer than the guy with a million dollars, because cows are real and useful. A million dollars, without the economy connected to it, is just a number. Beyond the Core, you'd better have barter available. Most military vessels overstock vitamin supplements, food converters and common medicines for this very purpose.

Multiple currencies are in play, but the most noteable is called, generically, boomium.
The stuff is a high weight, artificial heavy metal, its a huge, huge nucleus that is apparently quite stable till its hit with radiation to provoke it to fission apart. Once it does, though, the fissionable products it makes also fission with great rapidity, so that a tiny, tiny quantity of boomium (why do you humans keep calling it that?) works very well not only as a source of energy (if controlled) but also as an excellent bomb with an energy output somewhere between fusion and fission weaponry of old earth.
Aliens have plenty of different races with plenty of different uses for the stuff, and its created most crudely by accelerating precursor products in a tokamak. There is a formula to go "up the ladder" by squeezing things that are stable into other things that are stable till boomium is reached, and then, if the mix is relatively free of impurities(1) a stable currency is achieved.

Most races will accept boomium as trade good, nominally with an eye to using it in a reactor of some sort (heat masses of water, whatever) designed to process it out very finely and safely, so its a briefcase sized block of metal that can power even a future city's needs for energy for months. Some lower tech races can neither create nor use boomium, and acquire it only in trade. Some careless races make boomium relatively less carefully and less pure, including in their tokamak-like processes products that have a half life. The result is, if you don't trade the stuff to someone who actually uses it eventually, most boomium will self immolate and take your spaceport out with it.

(1) Relatively free is a term different races use differently. God save us all.
...
Traders call boomium "clean" (there is some that is metastable and apparently utterly pure, that has never blown up, and is the "gold standard" as humans refer to it for trade) to "dirty" (boomium with a slight hint of radioactivity and a likelyhood of exploding in a few months to "hot" (boomium you better turn into power tonight. If you want to live.) Traders of the various races will attempt to misattribute their booium quality or offer discounts, depending.

Humans showed up with a paper style currency, or as most of the aliens call it, utterly worthless artificial value denomination, apparently in an attempt to supplant the boomium economy with some form of currency manipulation. Humans often say things like "this is unsafe" or "we don't have orbital energy processing facilities for this high yield nuclear weapon, lets do cash for bosa plants, instead. You know, paper we made up that we claim is worth something?"
Human currency forms out in the sector are great if you buy or sell through humans, but most not human races and most not human poltical entities are still largely on the boomium, simply because faking currencies (or hacking banks) is so common in some of the cultures out here, that the human economy has been pillaged repeatedly of its value just with electronic information warfare.


For FTL, use slow warp flowers. Meaning the sort of opening "the ship can go through this now" wormholes you see in science fiction, but as you enter them, space and time constants distort a bit so you subjectively seem to slow down to a crawl. Going into and out of warp forces a ship to sit, relative to the wormhole, for about a day and a half to up to a week, while the hole slowly engorges the ship. Similar on the other side. All attempts at sending things like radio traffic through a wormhole seem to get lost in the random noise, and the wormhole spits its data out near, but not predictably near, the target star. So many wormhole trips need to be made with two or three jumps, to get successively close enough to enter the gravity well on normal engine power.

The result being, communications between two stars is usually a day to three week delay, for any given message. Rich concerns with a priority message will send several couriers simultaneously, in hopes one jump is closer than all their competitors.

Note that boomium inside a wormhole tends to just explode if its dirty at all. So cool boomium in a reserve is critical for multistellar concerns as a way of sending value to other stars quickly -- and without dying.

A major challenge to the boomium currency system is found in a few unscrupled agencies use of doping materials to hide radioactivity, essentially created by mixing boomium with a more absorber nuclei similar to lead to make the whole thing look less hot. Since boomium itself tends to kill you when it booms, mixing a tiny bit of lead into it is part of the usual process of making it and storing it, but some races will go so far as to put more exotic anti-radiation compounds into their mix that hide impurities from being detected in the early parts of the b's lifespan. Its apparently cheaper to make tailored sacrifice molecules than it is to make pure, cold, boomium, and it can be hard to tell the two apart. Since boomium is nothign more than energy wound into matter, the moment it can be made cheaper? It will be. The same minds that hacked the human banks and stock markets so many times out here are the same minds that make shady boomium and sell it fast.

Meaning you need to be pretty on the ball before you trust a shipment to the wormhole, cause if someone pulled a fast one, you won't see that ship again. Or if some money grubbing passenger has a tiny vial of boomium that they got at a favorable discount from the alien gambling casino ... better be SURE its really cold, and not just high lead / hot boom.

Hint boomium is probably not what you want to name the stuff, if you use it. Just was my first idea.

My standard RPG suggestion could be adapted, though it’s intended for modern day or Victorian settings (no. Not steampunk. Victorian).

Basically, London has a lot of tunnels. Not just the Underground. Faaaaaaaaaahsands of them. And I don’t believe they’ve ever been charted in their entirety.

Some are smugglers tunnels, some are abandoned Underground stations and cuttings etc.

The concept? What if Man did not create those tunnels, but instead made extensive use of already existing ones.

With that proviso? What did make them? And when, not to mention why? What happened to those creatures or the civilisation(s). Might there be some remnant, or perhaps archaeological evidence? What if there is writing discovered? Can it be translated?

I’m confident that trope can be adapted well beyond my original concept. All about questioning the known, and exploring what the real truth might be.

I want something that seems reasonable, but not like gold, platinum or silver, I was thinking a Rare-Earth metal, but I don't know which one would be a good fit, any help would be appreciated.

The reasonable currency for a sci-fi setting is just... government issued currency. There isn't any reason to lock rare-earth manufacturing supplies into existing in a bunker somewhere (and out of manufacturing) to prop up the economic system.

If diplomacy with aliens is angry and tense, they're not going to give two potatoes about what the humans use as currency, because that would only let them buy human goods in human control in human space.

Trade goods will matter (either by barter or by theft, piracy, etc), but that scene in the Star Wars prequel pretty much sums up currency exchange outside friendly borders:
'Republic credits are no good here'
'Credits will do fine'
'No, they won't.' Irritated staring ensues.

For currency, if you're against having something that's digital or some kind of "unforgeable" metal/plastic/paper system, then you need to think about what else is precious. I like the idea in The Expanse that commodities such as water and air are more valuable than gold in the belt, because they are essential to live and have to be imported from the inner worlds.

As for FTL communication, there are a few options:

One is simple: you can't. You have to encode your message on something like paper, data crystal, or tell someone, and get them to carry it on a FTL ship like in the old days before radio. That opens up some interesting narrative ideas. I used the idea for an RPG/wargame years ago which made coordinating operations across star systems complicated - you could take weeks to find out the outcome of an order or a diplomatic mission. Worse, your courier might not even survive the journey!

Another possibility is that if, say, you're using FTL travel via something like a jump gate, maybe you can string a load of relays along the jump route to pass messages along. Maybe the messages travel faster than ships travel in "jump space" or maybe they don't.

Finally, you go with the "ansible "option. Perhaps it uses telepathy or a "tachyon beam", or maybe you have two devices that are quantum-entangled somehow and you can communicate between the two instantly once you've transported the devices to their location of use. That also leads to some interesting narrative issues, e.g individual fleets having to route messages through a central location, or a limit on how many such devices are available.

Ancient alien civilization that collapsed and left only ruins and artifacts.

This is a SF trope because it's a reality trope. After the fall of the roman empire and the beginning of the dark ages Europeans lives in thatched huts and mud while literally in the shadows of the ruins of rome, near the remaining aqueducts, etc. They lived in utter filth and plague next to the ruins of a civilization that had extensive aqueducts and water, bath houses, sanitation, underground sewers, etc.They were mostly illiterate while in view of buildings from rome where literacy was common.

So yeah, the idea of a relatively primitive, ignorant culture living near the ruins of a greater civilization isn't implausible.

It is quite likely that in the event of interstellar trade between multiple independent economies that currency, or rather Fiat currency, as we know it today would not function. A fiat currency is only useful in places where it is legal government tender OR by individuals who can reasonably turn it into a currency.

So the only currency that would be accepted on a galactic scale, without some sort of large scale political or economic entity that issues a commonly accepted currency, would be stuff like precious metals. It may not be flashy or anything like you are hoping, but if you want a non-Fiat currency than Gold, Platinum, or other rare precious metals are probably your only option for any type of currency.

Rare-Earth metals wouldn't really work well as a form of currency for a few reasons. Yes, they are quite rare and have a lot of inherent value, but their value comes from their use as raw materials in manufacturing products. Gold, Silver, etc... value comes almost purely from their aesthetic properties in addition to their rarity. A coin made out of Yttrium would not be very valuable as a coin, but rather its value would come from using it to make industrial equipment so it wouldn't remain as a coin for very long. Gold, silver, and platinum to a lesser extent, have fewer tangible uses. Jewelry mainly, but the most useful use for stuff like Gold or Silver is as a store of value. It is a means to store wealth in compact form without having to drag around other stuff that has value because of its more tangible properties.

So really if you can't have a Fiat currency system, but don't also want to devolve completely back to a currency free barter system, your only real choice for currency is gold, silver, platinum, and most likely a mixture of all 3.

Now in the hypothetical scenario of interplanetary trade between multiple species, barter trade would probably be the more likely means of trading even if both sides involved had their own forms of fiat currency or would also accept gold, silver, etc... as coinage. This is because the main goal of interstellar trade would be the exchange of goods, not just cash. Dollars are going to be worthless on Omicron Persei XIII just as much as their Blorp-Blorps would be worthless here. But maybe if they have an excess of aluminum ore and we have tasty chocolate we could come to an agreement to trade aluminum for chocolate.

This is actually how international trade on Earth was conducted for most of history. You didn't leave Europe with just gold and silver to buy spices, you brought tangible goods with you. Though gold and silver were certainly accepted as payment almost everywhere, it was far more economical to exchange goods for goods. This is actually why the Opium Wars happened. The British didn't want to pay silver for Chinese tea because the loss of silver was ruining Britain's economy. Instead they wanted to exchange goods to get their silver back and also still get Tea. It just so happened that Opium was the only thing that the Chinese wanted more than silver, and the Chinese government objected to the side effects.

One way to handle currency is to issue corporate shares as script. All currency in circulation will total 50% of the current value of the corporation that raises them. The other 50% is held as direct shares, so no amount of cash can buy a seat on the corporate board and there is a hard limit on both cash value and cash liability.

This way with a number of large companies providing the value of the currencies concerned you have the bedrock of a large scale currency system for an interconnected disparate society.

Now some currencies will be a based on a gonglomerate of several corporations or parts thereof in a region of space. This script is transferable (with a fee) for the central script of any of the member corporations. This means semi isolated parts of the galactic economy maintain a stable currency even without direct access to the core markets and the local conglomeration is shielded from the shock of loss of share value of any one member corporation.

Monetary oversight is given over to state monitored AI that handles the currency ethically and honestly and without influence by the corporations linked to the currency. Honesty in large scale space corporations may well be a rare thing, but integrity of the currency is in everyones best interest. However the contributor corporations themselves determine distribution of currency and its timing, the AI solely controls that actual volume and the value in currency exchange. The impartiality of the AI control system grants value to the currency which the contributor corporations can then legally exploit far better than if the system was unregulated and outside of public confidence. The control AI also protects the contributor corporations from external influences thus further cementing corporate stock value. This system is inherently advantageous so the pressure will not be so much to corrupt the control AI but to squeeze out smaller corporations from the privilege of being a registered contributor to the financial system.

One "trade medium" could be alien insights and perspectives. In ringworld it was stated that there are always different ways to see things, and having an alien perspective can be a huge help in dealing with the unknown.

So maybe alien viewpoints on problems you have could be useful, and a truly alien POV is one thing no one can create for themselves.

 Matt Swain wrote:
One "trade medium" could be alien insights and perspectives. In ringworld it was stated that there are always different ways to see things, and having an alien perspective can be a huge help in dealing with the unknown.

So maybe alien viewpoints on problems you have could be useful, and a truly alien POV is one thing no one can create for themselves.

The issue with that sort of trade medium is that it's usefulness, and therefore value, is very subjective and is actually a Schrodinger's Cat situation. You don't know if the information is useful or not till you receive the information, but by then you've already "used" it and thus need to pay up for receiving it. Maybe you get some actually good advice and a novel solution. Maybe you just get a useless observation.

You might ask an Alien to help you with your food supply shortage and the Alien gives some useless advice like "Plant more crops" or "Cull your population". Their alien perspective could be just as much of a hindrance as it could help.

For an interesting and entertaining example of interstellar trade, read John Ringo's Troy Rising trilogy (Live Free or Die, Citadel, The Hot Gate). One of the plot points in the first one is a human entrepreneur using something relatively inexpensive from Earth that turns out to be immensely popular among an alien race and he becomes rich almost instantly.

Many sci-fi settings have some kind of natural ressource that's required for interstellar travel and that becomes a currency because everyone needs it. Basically space oil.

I was also looking for how I wanted to do FTL communication, like sending a ship faster than light seems reasonable to me but I was wondering how tf they'd send data.

Someone earlier suggested quantum teleportation, but I'd point out that it isn't that limited. Using quantum entanglements, you can achieve two way communication between any two points with a single paired node. Add a second paired node and you have communication between three points with one as the center. Add a computer system to manage the nodes, and you have a super sci-fi switch board. I.E. the quantum machines in this case are just scifi cables connecting two points. In practical terms this would make relay hubs a practical feature of any interstellar communication network using quantum teleportation. Such hubs would inevitably become huge financial and cosmopolitan centers, as they'd be vital for interstellar trade and communication.

Would make an ideal setting for any story that wants to deal heavily in trade and politics.

You could also consider the means of transit for space trade as it would have an influence on other things. Is it done by manned craft? Probably the best way to handle long distance transport. Shorter distances though, you could shoot cargo containers out of a rail gun or something and an onboard computer could then use retro thrusters to slow the container down and deposit it into a lagrange point or other stable orbit for pickup by shorter range shuttles (this method was used for solar cargo transport in Gundam Wing). This could also justify space piracy, as raiding these points could be a practical living for the down and out depending on how hard core you want to get with space ships. If craft are manned, space piracy makes a lot less sense. Ships would be too quick, long distances are too vast, and you'd see the heat of a space pirate ship from long before it became a real threat or you'd speed past it if it tried to lay in wait. I.E. space piracy doesn't actually make much sense.

Of course, this is if you were leaning harder than softer.

Also consider practical space port design. If you were aiming for harder scifi travel than softer, most ships will spend the majority of their time either accelerating or decelerating. A ship that doesn't accelerate is mostly an annoyance but not very dangerous. A ship that doesn't decelerate? That's a giant bullet waiting to hit something. I.E., space stations with internal ports are unlikely to be ideal like some TV makes them seem. A more practical and safer method would be external docking and the use of small shuttles for passenger transport, or tugs to push a cargo ship into a port after its finished its deceleration. You don't want ships travel directly from space station A to space station B, as it's a collision disaster waiting to happen. This is in fact how many modern ports on the high seas currently operate. Large cargo ships are guided into their berths by tugs rather than under their own power. It's safer that way, and here on ye old Earth a tanker that doesn't stop is a localized annoyance that costs money. It's not a giant bullet waiting to smash into and obliterate a very expensive space station.

 Tiennos wrote:
Many sci-fi settings have some kind of natural ressource that's required for interstellar travel and that becomes a currency because everyone needs it. Basically space oil.

Also space magic as a short hand for explaining all kinds of high scifi rigamarole.

When in doubt, space magic!