$9,000 to ship a car from Switzerland to LA in the US (ground/sea) (found a Quora page where the guy's dad was quoted, this was in 2014.. so..ANYWAY):
So let's say the journey is purely by air.. that's about 9500km, or about a 0.90 cents/Km.
Colonia is 22,000 LY from Sol; which is 208136077096630340 km, or Two hundred and eight quadrillion kilometres.
At 0.90 cents a KM, that puts it in the ballpark figure of about US$187 quadrillion to ship a car from Earth to Colonia.
Now, someone on Reddit had WAY too much time on their hands, so they calculated the estimated value of a single Credit in real world money.
1 Credit = US$2.31
187 quadrillion / 2.31 = 81091978354978354 OR eighty-one quadrillion credits.
That is a 56.71% decrease, without taking inflation into account!
Be VERY grateful!
This was a joke.
Or, looking at it another way if transport costs are actually constant across time and it's just the costs of goods and general inflation that has changed, then we end up where it's actually in the region of 100,000 dollars per credit.
Alternatively, looking at gold as a stable investment, where gold is in the region of 10k credits per tonne compared to ~20 million dollars per tonne, it gives us about 2000 dollars per credit in terms of real-value.
It does make me wonder how Elite's economy can somehow remain afloat when a typical "man with van" can somehow be earning somewhere between $100 trillion and $5 quadrillion in terms of current real-world value every hour (assuming a rather modest 50 Million credits/hour). Or, to put it another way, they could afford to buy 21st century Earth's entire economic output for an entire year by Friday evening, starting from empty bank balance on Monday morning with the upper estimate. The only feasible way it could work is if humanity is completely past the point of scarcity, where every human being can mold entire world's outputs to their will even when working for 1 week every year.
This would probably also explain why humanity is so slow to respond to the Thargoids, only tiny a fraction of the galaxy's population has actually done anything at all about the problem as the average person only works for 5 seconds a century to life a wealthy lifestyle; or, to put it another way, roughly an hour's work can finance a rich lifestyle for almost 1000 people for a entire century. (And that's assuming the lower bound of $100 trillion per hour, not the $5 quadrillion upper bound which would result 1 hour's work being required to support over 40,000 people for a century).
