:-? The alternative to the existance of money as an institution is for each individual to do everything for himself: grow his own food, weave his own cloth to sew into his own clothes, cobble his own shoes from leather he tanned from the hide of a calf/cow he butchered after raising it himself....
In short, any economic system that divides the categories of labor among the people so that each citizen isn't doing everything requires an accounting system to track how much of the work you did is worth how much of the work I did and so on. Otherwise there could be no coordination of the individual efforts into a cohesive whole.
The medium of currency is unimportant, only the institution of money as an abstract concept.
Another way of looking at it is man-hours. (Or alien-hours, if you will) Greater efficiency produces better results for the same effort. Remember that the laws of physics are the same for everyone, regardless whether another species may understand them better.
;-) The Van Flanderen model would take longer to explain than I have time for right now.
IIRC, basically, Tom Van Flanderen was once doing research into killer satellites for the military. He created mathematical models to predict the paths that would be taken by the bits of sharpnel from an exploding sattelite orbiting around the Earth. The Idea was to find safe spots in the orbit where another satellite would be safe from the shrapnel produced, while other sattelites would not. If the concept proved workable, the government could then place a series of killer sattelites in orbit, with different orbital distances from the Earth. At any given moment, one of them would be in just the right position to destroy a particular enemy sattelite, without harming ours. Minutes or hours later, it would be in the wrong position to do that, but another of our killers would have moved to a position from which it could safely do that.
While running the calculations for the paths the shrapnel would take, Tom noticed that the very eliptical paths produced resembled the paths taken by comets around our own sun. Out of curiosity, he ran his calculations in reverse, and tracked the positions of the known major comets back through time. He learned that within the accuracy of our best data, they all seem to have once occupied the same position, at about the same distance from the sun as is our asteroid belt, millions of years ago.
This model is in contrast to the conventional model, which holds that comets form in the "oort clouds," orbiting the sun far beyond any known planets. That model sounds good too, except that to my knowledge, we've never been able to photograph the oort clouds around other stars, so they may not be very reflective, and our own oort clouds never seem to occlude our vision of the stars beyond them. In sum, the conventional model requires clouds we've never seen, while the van Flanderen model does not.
Further, Mars shows strong evidence of once having been a moon orbiting a world larger than itself. The Tharsis and Arabia bulges are exactly opposite from each other, just as one would expect from a moon tidally locked in its orbit.
There is also evidence that water once flowed across the Martian surface in a violent fashion, scouring the landscape in a flood of Biblical porportions. This is what we would expect if its mother planet exploded, with debris bombarding Mars (and nearly every other body in the system) very quickly.
The only trouble is that the conventional model of physics doesn't allow for explosiong like that. The hyperdimensional model, however, does.
