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Re:Kepler telescope glimpses population of free-floating pla... by shkkmo on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @03:14PM (#27753035)
Interstellar trade of physical goods is quite impractical without FTL. If there is interstellar travel for non-colonization purposes it seems like the primary goal would be to enable low-latency communication to compensate for semantic/cultural drift that could interfere with the efficacy of the high latency communcations.
Re:Kepler telescope glimpses population of free-floating pla... by mikro2nd on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @04:25AM (#27758718)
It seems to me that interstellar trade -- with or without FTL -- is quite unlikely. I wrote some thoughts on this about a year ago, (https://one.mikro2nd.net/2021/07/interstellar/) but tl;dr: If your society is capable of marshalling the resources/energy necessary for interstellar travel in the first place, you have most likely, of necessity, solved the problem of getting more resources. War seems slightly more likely because "ideology".

Ultimately I think my notion is quite similar to yours: that the primary exchanges would be culture (art, music, fashions, language, rites,...) so the things for which we want "communication".