The Star Treks so far have been set aboard military craft or on an orbiting hotel. Thus, we don’t get to see how the people live. i wonder what interesting consumer products are available for the groundlings based on the technology we see.
I can think of two
Phaser based edge trimmer. Think of how much more efficient trimming is when you disintegrate the unwanted plant material. Beats raking also. Good for melting snow if put on a low setting.
2 Refrigerator control. We’ll have refrigerators that tell you when you need milk long before ST time. However, I can see a refrigerator with a transporter built-in as being very useful. if sensors detect that that leftover meatloaf had been around a month, it can beam it right to the trash (where it no doubt will get vaporized.) No more arguments.
Food synthesizers completely eliminate the need for consumer refrigeration.
But transporters as a transit system would be pretty handy. You work in hong Kong, live in Montana. The “commute” involves walking over to your transporter booth in Helena and walking from the transporter booth in Hong Kong. This assumes that there is a booth in your home and business.
Do phasers have a range limit? I mean, it’s great that your hedges are now exactly four feet high. And your oak tree. And your neighbor’s house…
Don’t need two transporter booths to commute, just one. They could just step onto the pads on board the ship and FWEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee right to the surface.
I would imagine that windshield repair is pretty much a thing of the past with transparent aluminum. Not to mention hurricanes no longer blowing out windows. Are there hurricanes anymore in Kirk’s or Picard’s time?
Tricorders must change a lot of things about trauma centers.
Are transporters military only? What prevents a stalker from beaming himself right into some starlet’s bedroom?
There are ways of blocking a transporter beam. My guess is that it is controlled technology that requires a tremendous amount of power, so using them for something as mundane as commuting wouldn’t likely happen. Ditto the holodecks. If they were available to everybody, the human race would die out.
PS. Larry Niven examined the transporter problem tangentally with his “stepping disks” in Known Space. It did require the redesign of houses.
There was mention of “Weather Nets” in the Q episode with Olivia D’Abo where Picard seemed shocked that a tornado managed to elude them and kill her parents.
Transporters aren’t free. Sisko mentioned using all his credits to visit his father in New Orleans when attending Starfleet Academy in San Francisco.
I also doubt phasers, holodecks, or replicators are *that *pervasive outside of the military, either, but I’m much more fond of DS9 than I am any of the other Treks and it tends to be a lot less utopian and acknowledges that the UFP actually has some sort of economy/monetary system and that the Federation isn’t quite the utopia that TNG made it out to be.
It is well established canon that you can’t beam through shields, unless you’ve got the secret codes. So all those scenarios about beaming bombs or Klingon warriors onto the bridge won’t work.
So to prevent strangers from beaming into your house, just turn on your house shields. And keep your house phaser array set on stun if you don’t want to disintegrate the neighbor’s cat. Don’t forget to reconfigure your house deflector dish to emit a tetrion beam to reverse the polarity of any subspace anomalies that approach the house.
With replicators, consumer goods become worthless since anyone can replicate anything any time. And so no one cares about “stuff” anymore, which explains the spartan aesthetic of the ST universe. The only worthwhile permanent objects are antiques, handmade items, and items of sentimental value. Anyone who collects mountains of stuff would be looked at as oddly as a guy who collects mountains of broadcast TV videotapes, or a guy who obsessively archives old newspapers and TV guides.
In ST:IV when the humpback penis came to Earth, Starfleet’s windows were blown in by the gale forces. Maybe that was before Scotty gave it to 1984…(I don’t remember if they weren’t blown in when they returned…interesting tidbit if that were true)
What about the medical profession? We see so much of military Doctors on the shows, what would a standard school nurse office look like? What about traveling doctors? (EMTs with degrees?)
There will still be people who prefer fresh food over replicated. Ben Sisko’s father comes to mind. There will still be a need for refrigeration.
I believe public transporter stations are more common than private transporter booths. Since the Federation’s economy is not based on monetary units, there is no actual individual “wealth”, so I would assume people such as high-ranking Starfleet officers and diplomats have any real need of their own private transporter booth. Or establishments such as hotels, restaurants, or hospitals probably run transporter booths on the premises for the convenience of their own patrons. You may even have a transporter station where you work. Anybody else would saunter down to the nearest transporter booth on the corner and beam oneself from there. It would not be a matter of cost, of course. One could have his own transporter system if one chose. But it’s probably a matter of preference. People may eschew private transporter booths as redundant and may wish to keep life as simple as possible by not having a gadget in their house that would need at least periodic maintenance. Besides, don’t they have flying cars, anyway, for short-distance hops?
I’ve never read or seen anything indicating personal vehicles in Star Trek, either flying or ground based. The closest thing I can think of is the air tram in The Motion Picture and that was more of a flying metro bus than a car.
Also, as mentioned above, there is obviously some sort of credit system at play on Earth or else Ben Sisko wouldn’t had to’ve used any to transport the scant 1,500 miles between San Francisco and New Orleans. I suppose it could be some sort of Academy specific thing that forced the students to stay on campus but considering the lenient bent of Starfleet, I don’t see it.
There’s a pretty good TOS novel called Prime Directive by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stephens wherein the Enterprise crew is court-martialed and all seven of the principal crew have to adapt to civilian life and I like their take on it – transporter, replicator, and other deus ex machina tech is free to public use but nowhere near as pervasive as fans seem to believe. At one point, Uhura and McCoy are stuck on Luna and have to wait in an hour long line just to use a subspace relay to reach someone on Earth. Spock, I believe.
It was a good book. I read it a couple dozen times during my biggest Trekkie phase.
Transporter technology could be used for all sorts of personal hygiene. Just beam away unwanted hair, dirt, etc. Since it doesn’t need to arrive alive at the other end, cheaper, cruder methods could be used.
Niven also explored it in a small group of stories in the “Jump Shift” universe. (Jump Shift was both a teleportation technology and the company that invented and marketed it.)
Barb and I are writing in a shared universe in which a major premise is that the U.F.P. and Starfleet technology are available at the beginning of the 21st Century (“now” – to avoid problems among a group of authors, by consensus all stories are set in fall 2004 or early 2005). By design, the advanced technology is available only to Starfleet and other Federation facilities – police, for example, still carry service revolvers, but can call for the assistance of phaser-bearing Starfleet Security in crisis situations. (Nasty gimmick, but it matches a nastry streak in human nature and simplifies remembering what’s available to whom when – and is alleviated by, e.g., bringing the critically injured and such to Starfleet medical tech. and other similar humanitarian gestures.)
True, there are food synthesizers/replicators, but it’s been shown there’s still a market* for “real” foods, and ingredients for home cooking. It stands to reason that there’d still be a demand for some kind of “refrigerator.”
On the other hand, Star Trek has obviously mastered the art of cryonic preservation, as shown by all the humanoid popsicles they’ve thawed back to life over the years. I imagine the process could only be faster and easier for something that you only want to fix the freezer burn on, not restore to life.
On another note, those dermal regenerators the Docs use for healing minor injuries seem safe and handy enough to trust for public use—although, as Scott Adams noted, the prank potential is immense, since people could easily sneak up on someone and seal their ass closed.
*(Can you call it a “market” in a functional pure-communist society?)