The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction
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There's a big hole in Star Trek canon of how Earth transitioned from ST:TOS to the post-scarcity economy of ST:TNG. I would love to see Star Trek delve explore that era instead of rebooting and rehashing so many prequals.
Here is a transcript from an NPR interview with Paul Krugman about Saadia's book:
https://www.marketplace.org/2016/09/07/world/economist-paul-...
Look at how humans act now. We have more than enough resources for everyone on earth to have sufficient food. And yet some starve. Why? Because of distribution problems, of corruption, etc. We expect people to work if they want to eat. Why? Because we culturally view it a moral failing if someone doesn't work without good reason (and even then we view those who have reason with suspicion). Look at the discussion around automation + UBI. Even if we assume automation can handle all the work that has to be done, people take the stance that it won't/shouldn't work, that it will only destabilize the economy, rather than improving everyone's lives. A replicator is just another form of automation in that regard, and there would be plenty of people who could object to it.
Just because we have the technology doesn't mean it's initially available to everyone. And even when there's enough availability of the tech, some humans will try and regulate it, to protect the existing interests, and other selfish reasons, with various rationales. That would be -interesting-. Moreover, it would, like all good scifi, reflect our current society, by showing the same attitudes and concerns currently at play, but in a different, futuristic context (one that ideally challenges people's perceptions, but without the baggage that causes them to instinctively get defensive).
I think it could make damned good television. Though, I think, it would be a far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'.
CBS is already playing successfully in the dark side of Star Trek. This would be a very attractive pitch if the success of Discovery extends further.
And I'll go as far as to say this is a story that must be told. The stories we tell form the language with which we see our present and future. If all we know are dystopias, well only have ideas to express dystopias and this will be our future.
If, however, we incorporate utopian narratives, we'll be able to express utopias too. We need that.
If it would try to be a realistic show it would scare to many people in the first place. A lot of very inconvenient questions about our near future would have to be asked in such a show. (Robots & AI are our "replicators"…)
On the other hand if it wouldn't go into detail there wouldn't be much of an interesting story left to be told.
So, scary intellectual stuff doesn't sell well. Also I don't think one could make a "simple enough" show for the masses dealing with such a complicated theme like a global social transformation. Especially as the masses are in great fear of such a transformation. (Rightly, because we're not on Star Trek and we don't know the outcome yet. Somebody could get nervous in such a transformation process and out of worry of losing to much push some red button, or similar).
In the Federation of Planets, what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible? Are they allowed to reproduce? This creates rather massive selection pressure. Somebody somewhere is going to have a gene encoding wanting to make maximum possible babies, and it's going to swamp your population in a few rapidly paced generations. The inevitability of this circumstance is total.
Television exploring the overcoming of this, the human condition, could be a profound thing. Perhaps STNG neglects to show us the teeming planets of "welfare dropouts", where reproduction is limited by space, and Federation ships stop by to recruit the few ambitious worthies who yearn for a challenge other than sleeping in the same room as 300 family members?
As a kid, I wondered about this, and my parents explained that the lazy Star Fleet kids go into a transporter beam and never come out, and their parents so happy to be done with backtalk that they aren't even sorry about it. This would be a feasible selection pressure, except for the case of double mutants possessing both fecundity and nurturing instincts, a possibility of which my parents were clearly unaware. (Just kidding. This would be hilarious, though.)
Alternatively, perhaps Starfleet regularly purges the population of lazy bastards? Like, when the population of San Francisco gets too high, if you are more than two generations removed from a successful Star Fleet veteran, you get vaporized? This would explain how Star Fleet Academy is located there without having to pay staff more than Google or even anything at all.
I would be totally binge watch a Trek exploring friction between Google and Star Fleet in the San Fran real estate market. Couldn't possibly be worse than Voyager........
This is contradicted by the real world experience that when you give people education and contraceptives they really don't do this. There are not that many people who really enjoy the process that much - it's called "labour" for a reason.
Star Trek is likely to be the sort of utopia where boys and girls get reversibly vaccinated against pregnancy in childhood, and having unconsidered or large numbers of children is socially frowned upon.
Now, in Iain M Banks' Culture, it's spelled out. There is no space pressure and there are trillions of humans, but it's also sufficiently post-human that characters can get pregnant, abort a pregnancy, change gender, or get high simply by sitting down and willing it to happen, telling the nanobots in their bloodstream to do their thing.
OTOH I wouldn't expect a look at a world with 'replicators' to look much like Star Trek, in the same way Robin Hanson's The Age of Em reads differently from Altered Carbon.
I'm binge-watching Voyager and DSN and the truth is that we are treated to quite a bit of made-up science, like subspace physics and the like. Everytime an away team has to be trapped at the far end of a mission to advance the story, someone jumps up to explain why they can't be beamed up in "technical" terms (then someone is ordered to "remodulate"). Everytime a technologically superior enemy corners the Voyager, one hit brings the shields down to 0 because they've been "rotating their weapons frequency" (then someone reports they're "compensating"). Almost every episode of Voyager at least has some made-up-on-the-spot techno-babble like that. It's been a while since I watched TNG but I think it wasn't different there, either.
It's not like the series skirts away from made-up science is what I'm saying, at least when it comes to "physics". They could just as well make up some "sociology" or "history" if they wanted.
Like much of the Star Trek universe, it seems that the writers threw in a neat idea and never gave it much thought.
My own theory is that the goods that are still scarce are utterly trivial, like Beanie Babies or Pogs circa 2018. Everything that you might reasonably want or need is completely free within the Federation; a handful of eccentrics might covet a rare painting or an antique, but the vast majority of people would see their preoccupation as absurd. A lay person might admire a rare painting, but they would see no reason to steal it.
I also think that Federation culture plays a significant role. It's clear that greed of any kind is seen as primitive and antisocial by the overwhelming majority of Federation citizens. We could draw parallels with the Amish or Mennonites - you can't have status goods in a society where displays of wealth actively lower your social status. The Federation is not just a post-scarcity economy, but a post-scarcity culture.
We could think of the time investment in things like holosuite programs as being loosely equivalent to the philanthropic activities of the very wealthy circa 2018, conferring no material benefit but a substantial degree of social capital. Designing a hit holosuite program might not earn you any money, but it would get you an invite to the Federation equivalent of TED. Joseph Sisko charges nothing for meals at his creole restaurant, but earns the respect of his neighbours.
This is a fascinating article speculating on the mechanics of the Federation economy:
https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...
The usual answer when this question is raised is either "they inherited the land" or "a committee decided the the Picards were the best for tending the vineyard".
Not 100% convincing to me but there is no better answer AFAIK.
> And what do people do with their life? Is there a 5 hour work week?
That one is easy, though. Let me quote Jean-Luc Picard: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Such an endeavor takes time.
Regarding food and drinks, there are numerous quips across TNG that replicated edible things aren't quite up to spec to the homemade, natural ones, and often altered to provide optimal nutrients† or prevent deleterious effects (notably alcohol).
† I suppose that's how Troy's getting away with her massive chocolate dessert consumption
His Merchant Princes series is all about how a dimensional travelers exploit lack of economic knowledge in parallel worlds with less developed economies.
And Halting State and Rule 34, two near future novels, both touch on economics and related themes quite a bit.
Actually, Singularity Sky also has a lot of good - and stealthy - economics material.
>> Okay, so what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science fiction. The answer is an emphatic no. I have nothing but respect for well written hard science fiction, and I wanted everything in the book to be plausible enough that it doesn’t get in the way. But the rigorous how-to with the math shown? It’s not that story. This is working man’s science fiction. It’s like in Alien, we meet the crew of the Nostromo doing their jobs in this very blue collar environment. They’re truckers, right? Why is there a room in the Nostromo where water leaks down off of chains suspended from the ceiling? Because it looks cool and makes the world feel a little messy. It gives you the feel of the world. Ridley Scott doesn’t explain why that room exists, and when most people watch the film, it never even occurs to them to ask. What kind of drive does the Nostromo use? I bet no one walked out of the film asking that question. I wanted to tell a story about humans living and working in a well populated solar system. I wanted to convey a feeling for what that would be like, and then tell a story about the people who live there.
To be fair, that's just magical alien technology. Humans don't even know how it works.
> It's also particularly poorly written.
The writing is not great but not horrible either. The plot is far ahead of the writing style though.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/02/the-ems-of-altered-car...
> Set many centuries in future, our descendants have colonized many star systems. Technological change then is very slow; someone revived after sleeping for centuries is familiar with almost all the tech they see, and they remain state-of-the-art at their job. While everyone is given a stack as a baby, almost all jobs are done by ordinary humans, most of whom are rather poor and still in their original body, the only body they’ll ever have. Few have any interest in living in virtual reality, which is shown as cheap, comfortable, and realistic; they’d rather die. There’s also little interest in noticeably-non-human android bodies, which could plausibly be pretty cheap.
The original PKD novel is much stranger and explicitly mentions a World War Three which has made a large number of animal species extinct. It's much more focused on the questions of mechanical substitutes for emotional relationships and the affect on the self.
I love this movie because it's positive about humans and future - which is unlike pretty much anything made in the last two decades. (Hell, it even goes meta on that point.)
All the way to the bank.
SF and fantasy give authors much greater leeway to challenge cherished beliefs. Because it's all so preposterous.
I don't believe that Blade Runner is about recession more than the AI and humanity. Where good fiction uses ideas to supplement world-building, bad one would build the world to illustrate an idea.