Cost of Movement

A few years ago, I really enjoyed the games Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2. Both games are turn based strategy games where you build and direct units to smash the opponents units. One integral part of the gameplay was considering the movement of your units. Different units can travel different terrain and the terrain will affect how far a unit can go. Vehicles can't cross mountains, forests cut movement in half, and tires can't travel well off road compared to treads.

I think about how this is a great reflection in real life. Just moving a thing over a distance will take time, effort, energy, and money. In a sense, it is all about money. This is why shipping is more expensive the further is has to go. Moving an object will mean it has to be loaded on a truck, ship, or plane which burns up fuel to move. And one status symbol of the rich is how easy or fast they can move around.

The more money a man has, the easier it is for him to traverse the world. Simply by walking, a man can cover more than 26 miles in a day. By traveling on foot, the limitations faced is the human body. Walking will cause fatigue over time. Muscles will ache and a man will need some shelter if traveling multiple days on foot. Of course, he could always hitchhike but that method is dependent on someone else having a vehicle.

By traveling in a car, 26 miles can be covered in 26 minutes on the freeway. Of course, a man will need to spend the money on a car and spend money on gas. The car also need maintenance over long periods of time. If a man spend 12 hours driving on the highway, he could cover more than 700 miles. Of course, cars have their limitations. They travel the best on roads but not so well on water. A car will take you wherever the roads will take you in the Americas, but it is not an option if you wanted to go to Europe.

For the average man, the only way to get to Europe would to be to take a plane. Planes can cost millions of dollars so most men will never own one. So commercial airlines will take people wherever airports are. The cost over the ocean will cost a few hundred to a thousand dollars. The cost of the plane ticket will go towards jet fuel, maintenance, overhead, and the salaries of the airline workers.

In this sense, the average American can travel around the entire Earth in a day. It isn't a really big status symbol if you can fly. The status symbol comes in if you have your own aircraft like a private jet. The limitations of airlines is that flights are set on certain schedules, airline security can be a pain, and take off takes a long time because hundreds of people have to be coordinated and serviced all at the same time. In having a private jet, a rich man can take of whenever he is ready and can travel wherever an airport will allow him. The cost of having this freedom of movement is a few million dollars.

When men become very rich, their movement options become vastly expanded. He could get a yacht and spend time hundreds of miles away from the coast of California. If he wanted to, he could buy a submarine in order to see how far he could explore under the ocean.

The furthest place men have gone was into space and on the moon. This required the money from the tax payers of the entire country of America. Doing this required a large rocket, the infrastructure to launch the rocket, and a mission control team to oversee operations. The Apollo 11 program costed $355 million in 1969. Adjusted for inflation, the cost would be roughly $2.18 billion as of 2011. There are several billionaires that could potentially go to the moon if they wished.

To go further than space, I could only think that technology would have to be developed to travel between dimensions or time. I couldn't imagine how much money that would cost.