“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war”. This underlying premise to the entirety of the Warhammer 40’000 universe begs a fundamental question: how are the resources for this never-ending conflict produced and distributed?
Of course, each species and organization has found its unique solution to this challenge: some operate a command economy aimed at maximizing the produced resources, such as the Imperium of Man and its various sub-organizations, others embraced anarcho-capitalism appropriating armaments and goods from others – not necessarily alien to their species – such as the Orks and Drukhari.
However, a fundamental issue arises when we consider that the Warhammer 40’000 settings spans an entire galaxy, necessarily relies heavily on faster-than-light travel and that this FTL travel occurs in the meta-physical: coherently with the readers’ expectations, the literature is constellated with numerous examples detailing how Einstein’s causality principle is violated – several events happening due to causes that are not only not in the past light cone of an effect, but are sometimes actively within the future light-cone.
This paper will propose various weakened forms of causality, and will then examine the economical effects of said relaxations in the physical constraints – such as the evolution, or rather inapplicability, of Euler’s consumption equation and how Markov chains may be used to model the decision-making of economic actors in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Author bio
Simone Chiesi: Currently pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering, I have been an independent scholar of Warhammer 40,000 since 2017, with an interest in the application of known sciences to Games Workshop post-apocalyptic setting.
