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Comment by octaveguin | Hacker News Reader

The Expanse also has UBI on earth. With it, most people still lack opportunity and live a rather destitute, powerless life.

Seems like a pretty good perdition of our future, really. UBI recipients with no labor of value to offer won't have power to change their government for long.

It's unfortunate that the authoritarian future of Star Trek probably wouldn't lead to paradise. Or at least, that's how our culture's view of the future has changed.

Both fictions are a product of their time. I still wish we had the optimism of Star Trek now.

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IIRC, UBI in The Expanse is not really UBI, and more like minimum amount of services to keep you viable, and extreme scarcity of training.

There should really be no reason that people can't be trained or educated even if most of the skills are utterly useless in the face of automation.

Also The Expanse isn't facts.

But in some way it may still influence the future.

If the negative aspect of the future portrayed in the Expanse are culturally absorbed, then there is a strong possibility that the people dreaming of and building the future could see that as a road sign to help them avoid that future.

E.g. it makes the point that we would need to work out ways to create better habitats in space and to concentrate on making a workable biosphere where enough food can be cultivated and raised (yes, cows in space) to survive.

I find the tropes presented in fiction misleading or unlikely to reflect reality once further examined.

Misleading road signs about the future may be worse than no signs at all.

In The Expanse, the main reason for complaint from earthers seems to be caused by overpopulation which leads to difficulty in obtaining realestate and the benefits that landownership brings.

If UBI was implemented as in The Expanse (food, shelter, and meds are free), I would expect the population of the earth to plummet. The UBI would allow for more people to pursue learning and educating others. It has been shown that when people feel safe from threat of violence and starvation, and when they are more educated, the desire to breed decreases.

On the flip side, perhaps knowing that you are off the hook for paying for the expense of many children would increase the desire to reproduce?

Was it really shown? Is there a single country that did not replace stress of violence and starvation with economic stress? Do we have at least one larger example of what would happen if the general population was rich?

> Do we have at least one larger example of what would happen if the general population was rich?

We have birth rate comparison between "first world" and "third world" countries plus migration experience studies (basically, even one generation after migration from a poor to a rich country, there is a massive drop in birth rate, and after something like 3 generations the birth rate is equal to the rest of the country).

Additionally, there is a noticeable drop in birth rates when a whole country gets richer.

What country are you talking about? I don't know a single one where the majority does not feel financially stressed with too many children. (usually more than 3, but even 2 is too much for a lot of people, in many countries for the majority, probably including the United States).

The simple explanation for these numbers is that rural children are economically useful, while urban children are a burden.

Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian?

I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing libertarianism as selfish: they go well together, but you can also get one without the other.

I don't know Star Trek very well, but as a utopia I guess they imagine a form of collectivism that largely preserves individual freedom? Of course most of the show centers on Starfleet, an authoritarian organisation like any military, which doesn't tell much about the whole society.

Anything said about libertarianism is necessarily hypothetical, because it has never happened. If it ever did, it would instantly dissolve into something certain to be very unpleasant for almost everyone.

It happened in the United States before the first world war, and continued for a few decades after that. Pretty long time to be called "immediately". While it was unpleasant from our current POV, it was way better than anything else at that time, and didn't end because it dissolved, but because the world wars needed funding.

I see that you are not up on the Sherman Antitrust Act. Go ahead, I'll wait.

The 1890s demonstrated what a Libertarian regime would dissolve into, instantly: Absolute rule by the biggest dog. It has happened myriad times in human history, from all kinds of pre-conditions. We were lucky, 130 years ago, that the armed forces still believed in voting. Not sure they still do...

Hmm. Are you sure you understand libertarianism? I’m also unsure of your claim here about “libertarianism” dissolving into something unpleasant. Unpleasant in what way? Why would it “dissolve”?

I think the star trek universe is highly democratic.

Trek is a mirror of Earth geopolitics from an American perspective in whichever year the show was written.

TOS-TNG: Klingons were Soviet-Russian, Romans were Chinese, the Federation was sexist (but much less so in TNG than in TOS) and pretended gay people didn’t even exist.

DS9: Lesbians and trans people exist, but only as exotic outsiders. Bajor feels inspired by Tibeten Buddhism and the final parts of the Northern Ireland Troubles.

VOY: ???

ENT: Nostalgia gone wrong followed by 9/11

DIS/PIC: Oh no Cold War enemies are a threat again / Oh no A.I.

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