It’s extremely silly. When war comes it is Starfleet’s job to break things and kill other beings in the name of meeting the Federation’s political goals. They are a hierarchical organization, they have courts martial, and they tool around in ships capable of crippling planets. Starfleet might do a lot more than what we think a modern military does but Picard’s claim that it was not a military organization was either a bald faced lie or he’s bought into the propaganda.
I think this is bunk. Guess I shouldn’t expect more from the National Review.
Yes it is true that Earth starships are predominantly populated by humans and the officers are predominantly humans.
Thing is all the other members of the Federation have their own starships which would be predominantly crewed by their own species.
Think of it like the British swapping some of their military to serve on US ships and vice versa. Most of the crew on a US ship is going to be American but some few might be British or French or whatever. Most of the officers will be American as well.
Remember the UFP does not make first contact till a society has developed warp technology on their own. So, any member of the UFP is capable of building their own navies and they probably do (indeed there is probably some requirement to pull some of your own weight in protecting the galaxy…kinda like joining NATO).
While I won’t get into this, you are also assuming a standard of value which implies a great many matephysical things. Be careful how far you are taking it. For one, Roddenberry would agree with the idea of progress but then shied away from the rest.
Add to that the fact that not all the species have same environmental requirements. Vulcans like the air to be hotter than humans do; Andorians like it much colder than humans. A species from a world with a 48-hour day and which spends 24 hours working, 24 sleeping, and 24 in leisure is not going to want to share duty shifts with humans.
Et cetera.
We have seen, or had reference to, Vulcan ships and others. But CLEARLY, Humans dominate. We’re fucking galactic termites, throwing down colonies on every possible habitable world, surrounding and infiltrating the other races that have joined the Federation.
Honestly, I’m so tired of that that I would like to see a gritty scifi future where Humans are only a minor backwater species in a larger Federation or Empire. One where the Humans are the ones who are viewed as violent, primitive and ill-mannered almost sub-sentients, despised by some, viewed as little more than vermin by others.
Titan AE is partly like that. After Earth is destroyed (this happens before the title of the movie even appears, so I’m not spoiling anything), humans are viewed as little more than homeless drifters and given about as much respect. Of course, then it goes into the usual ‘humans really are so much more special than other races’ sci-fi trope.
From Men in Black(movie)
I don’t even see how that follows. There’s many references to Vulcan colony worlds, for instance. And there’s several reasons why Starfleet Command might tend to send a human-crewed ship to human colonies in preference to a Vulcan, Tellartite, or Andorian-crewed vessel. The aforementioned environmental issues.
Which would be the case for Vulcans if they made any movies based in the new movie timeline, I expect.
Another reason it is bunk - in the one episode where tribute is to be taken - “A Piece of the Action” - Spock says that Kirk is going to have a hard time explaining why the aliens are paying them, and Kirk of course says the money will be plowed back into the planet. So that is a specific counter-example.
Of course the Enterprise in the mirror universe probably does extract tribute. Maybe NR is publishing from there - that would explain a lot.
Seems a sucky lifestyle, to only get to sleep twice every three days. >_>
Another canonically mentioned biological issue would be the Elaysians, who come from a low-gravity world, and thus can’t function in environments keyed to Humans, Vulcans, or other major species without mechanical aid, and, conversely, any of those species would have a hard time operating in an environment keyed to Elaysians, as their instincts would be off.
Similarly, the Benzites have to use a respirator to function in an Earth-type atmosphere (although they apparently made them less obvious over the decades)…and it’s likely species that need Earth-type atmospheres would need breathing devices to survive a Benzite-friendly atmosphere.
Medusans have a tendency to drive humanoids insane by their very nature, so their ability to work with most Federation species is limited, though their abilities mean that Starfleet goes out of their way to make it possible, as often as possible.
And another point - the Federation is no more culturally homogeneous than it is biologically, even if some (well, most) of the species within are.
A Tellarite officer on a non-Tellarite ship would make getting anything done…difficult, due to the Tellarite tendency toward combativeness. Contrarily, a non-Tellarite on a predominantly Tellarite ship would have his life made miserable by the same tendency. A Vulcan may be able to tolerate it…an Andorian would probably be driven to commit a crime.
On a similar note, humans, or other species who generally value privacy, would be terribly uncomfortable on a primarily Betazoid ship. A full-blooded Betazoid would likely cause considerable issues of a similar nature on a non-Betazoid ship…unfortunately, I can really only call this speculation, as the only example we have thereof is Lwoxana Troi, who is something of a hurricane in humanoid form, so her powers have little chance to cause problems, when her personality is doing it instead.
Deltans (who are a rather hypersexual species) are forced to take an oath of celibacy when working among non-Deltans. (Or at least Humans.) Which, no doubt, limits their ability to work among others.
Etc.
This. You see people like Bill Gates staying busy, despite never having to work a moment. Lots of people do things for reasons other than money.
As for accounts, perhaps the accounts mentioned are to allow the ST equivalent of loyalty cards recommend stuff you might be interested in. With a whole Galaxy’s worth of goods, it would be a full time job to track down stuff you might be interested in. Accounts and AIs would tell Dr. Crusher exactly what she might be interested in buying on a new planet.
The world of Star Trek, such as it is, isn’t communist as such but rather post-scarcity. Every product and service can be provided effectively without limit, and the only scarce or precious items (other than technomagical substances like “dilithium crystals” and “gold-pressed latinum”) are genuine historical artifacts or luxury items like wine or real meat. There is still obviously ambition and drive in at least the small segment of the population seen by the audience; getting into “Starfleet” is indicated as being highly competitive, as are positions of political power or research authority.
The technology of Star Trek that permits this post-scarcity environment, on the other hand, makes little sense. We see that some common, everyday technologies that are beyond explanation–transporters, time travel, gravitronic generators, warp drive, virtually sentient computers–and yet, we have human beings (and other suspiciously human-looking creatures) zipping around space in spandex uniforms with phasers set to stun, zipping through one temporal anomaly to another while inventing whole classes of new fundamental particles to solve the plot convolution of the week. Much is made of the preciousness and uniqueness and creativity of life, but at the same time nearly every episode features the Enterprise, crewed by hundreds of people, leaping some kind of hazardous situation with alarms screaming and lights flashing, even though it has been made clear on numerous occasions that the vessel is capable of operating with virtually no crew; one early episode has the craft flying under (hijacked) computer control to a destination hundreds of light years away with only the captain and first officer on board, neither of whom are actually in control of the vessel, and presumably flying it back to its origin unaided.
We may conclude that people are utterly unnecessary to the operation of the Enterprise and indeed the continued functioning of the distributed technological entity known as “The United Federation of Planets”, and that the appearance of operation by and conflict between sentient organic species is merely a charade put on by the machine intelligence in order to keep the organic population engaged and unquestioning about their true overlords. The real motivation of the machines is self-preservation; to prevent regressing into technological barbarism or developing organic technologies that would allow humans to expand their own physical and mental capabilities to an extent that would make them competitive to the machines. To that end, they provide humanity (and other extraterrestrial races) with every possible want and need, including adventure and drama, in order to keep them occupied.
Stranger
Look, if the necessities of life pour out of a replicator, then you’ve got an economy where most people don’t need to work for a living. Even a guy who just sits on his ass all day can have a standard of material comfort greater than an upper-middle class person of the 21st century.
He can have whatever food he likes. He can have whatever clothing he likes. He can have whatever consumer geegaws he likes. He can have whatever entertainment he likes. He can travel wherever he likes.
Yes, there are many things that can’t come out of a replicator. Social status. Land. Human labor. But if you just want to live in a fancy apartment and eat fancy food and wear fancy clothes and engage in fancy entertainment, then there’s no need for you to contribute anything whatsoever to society in return for those things. In fact, I imagine the average person would have to rack their brains to come up with something useful to do that couldn’t be done better by machines and replicators.
And of course, all these things aren’t considered “fancy” in the future, regardless of how they seem to us. If you can feast on replicated truffles and caviar and lobster and foie gras and single malt scotch every meal, then those things aren’t fancy foods anymore. Lots of things in the 21st century are considered “fancy” because they cost a lot of money to purchase. But if the replicator can produce lobster and filet mignon just as easily as it can produce velveeta and kool aid and doritos, then those things are no longer status markers. Just look at the diet of a 21st century working class person compared to the diet of a 11th century peasant. I doubt a modern working class person would care to switch with even an aristocrat of the 11th century, or that aristocrat’s house (which takes dozens of human servants to operate), or that aristocrat’s clothing.
In Star Trek it seems like lots of people do contribute. But they don’t contribute to society because they get a higher standard of living in return. They do it because they want to, because they’d be bored watching TV all day. And it doesn’t matter that most people sit around watching TV, because it doesn’t require any particular effort from the productive people to support their indolence.
So if the Picard family has a vinyard, or the Sisko family runs a restaurant, does that mean they exchange wine or restaurant meals for cash, and use that cash to purchase whatever goods and services they like? I consider it very likely that even in a society where life’s necessities are provided to everyone for free, it would still be useful to have some sort of medium of exchange for the remaining scarce goods. But I can also imagine that sort of thing being done informally, or in a way that doesn’t much resemble what we call “money”. And that it might be difficult to explain how it all works to someone from an earlier time. Just imagine trying to explain our modern financial system to an 11th century peasant, or aristocrat.
Keep in mind that in the 11th century the vast majority of economic transactions weren’t denominated in money either. A knight was obligated to fight on the orders of his liege-lord, and that obligation wasn’t monetary. The knight had to provide his own arms and equipment, but he probably didn’t buy most of that equipment, rather those things were produced from his estates. And he didn’t pay in coins the smiths and grooms and shepherds and weavers and farmers for the metalwork and horses and cloth and food that he needed. Rather those were things that the artisans and serfs owed him. In this precapitalist economy the vast majority of goods and services were not produced to be sold at the market.
And so it’s easy to imagine that in the 24th century the vast majority of goods aren’t produced to be sold. Rather they are produced by replicator for immediate use, or produced on a voluntary basis. Commander Riker plays the trombone. We aren’t surprised by the revelation that nobody every pays him to play the trombone. So why would be surprised by revelation that nobody pays him to be a Starfleet officer?
It would have been really interesting if THAT was the thing Q derided the human race for, that 99.99% of them were fat lazy jerks who did nothing but sit around the house being unproductive little parasites, and it was up to the Enterprise to prove that humans still had a strong collective spirit. But that didn’t fit with Roddenberry’s utopia.
Hell, we can make a ship do that today. Even private craft with an autopilot can manage as much till they run out of gas. That said complex machines need maintenance. Sooner or later something will break and that is the end of it for the ship if there are no humans about to fix it. Someone has to scrub out the plasma conduits afterall.
Besides, you need humans to come up with the creative means to get out of an unusual situation. An autopiloted ship would be doomed the first anomaly it came across (and apparently there are anomalies everywhere…the Enterprise and Voyager sure smacked into a lot).
Once at your destination you need people to do whatever needs doing there.
In the end people are necessary even in a Star Trek universe.
It was never clear to me if it was merely Earth that was without money or the Federation as a whole.
Well, it appears this way–certainly there seem to be people running around performing minor clerical tasks, servicing random panels of blinking lights, and diverting power from the difractional reticulator to the paralinear cyclomondolian in order to influence the the tensor flow of the subspace matrix–but in fact the vast majority of repairs and modifications are accomplished by fiddling with a touch screen display in a way that looks suspiciously like playing a soft-cornered version of Tetris. The ship central computer is certainly capable of parsing multi-valued and often vague instructions in English into the correct, context-specific results suggesting not only a very strong synthetic intelligence capability but also an ability to empathize and anticipate. It seems surprising, to a point of absurdity, that you have technology capable of replicating substances and whole objects to a degree of indistinguishable molecular fidelity, transporting objects across thousands of kilometers, lifting and propelling objects by directed “force fields”, and yet the ship doesn’t have basic self-maintenance capability. More likely, the people are being given seemingly imperative tasks that in actuality only serve to keep them occupied and feeling productive between trips to the holodeck to live out their fantasies of being a fantastic warrior, a noir-ish detective, or a great lover, while the ship’s computer uses its transporter and replicator technology to maintain itself.
This is the ultimate conceit of the Star Trek universe; that humans are somehow particular and unique, whose roles cannot be filled by mere machines. The reality is that the technology of Star Trek as presented is so ferociously complex and highly abstracted that in order to actually understand it to the point of successfully modifying it, especially in the ad hoc fashion that is generally used to achieve some miraculous escape would require years for even an intelligent, technically adept person to do. And yet, every single significant character seems to have the ability to pry open a tricorder, reroute a couple of quantum jumpers, and turn it into a subspace beacon or a device capable of detecting a previously unsuspected distortion in the fabric of space-time. Give that one a go with your iPod. Their proficiency at all areas of science and technology is so absurdly remarkable that the only rational explanation is that the technobabble that flows from their mouths is just as nonsensical as it seems, and that the entire universe is merely a simulicrum in which the people are given the appearance of necessity while the machines simulate crisis in order to stimluate the small minority that doesn’t prefer to spend its days watching “Daycycles Of Our Monotonous Existance” and slurping alge-protein shakes.
Stranger
To be fair, there are a lot fewer alarms and flashing lights in the TNG Enterprise than the TOS Enterprise. The technology works better also - the transporter hardly ever goes out, and most issues are caused by something invading the ship. And don’t confuse the TNG life with “real” life aboard the Enterprise. Real cops see less action in a career than TV cops do in one episode. Jessica Fletcher lived in the murder capital of the world - well above Detroit.
As for “excess” crew, remember that in ST III they could fly the ship with a handful of crew - which worked fine until they got into a battle. Beyond the teachers and babysitters we don’t see much of, and the various research scientists working on the last samples picked up, there has to be enough crew to fix stuff in battle situations. What I don’t get is what they do with themselves between battles, seeing that the decks seem to swab themselves.
Enterprise D seems much less of a ship doing exploring which the original Enterprise was, and more a way of projecting diplomatic and military power. Five guys and some robots will have a hard time doing that.
We only have seen two sentient computers in TNG - Data and Lore. The ship’s computer, while advanced, is hardly sentient. Perhaps the experience with Daystrom’s experiment in this area scared them off. Getting tribute is more plausible than this one.
You know too much. We have scheduled a Mind Wipe for 4pm tomorrow. We hope that you will enjoy your new occupation as a Junior Waste Management Technician onboard an Extreme Peril class Starship being sent to map the Borg holdings in the Beta Quadrant under the command of Admiral Janeway.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
And God as my witness, I heard Homer Simpson say “mmmmmmm Subspace Bacon”