I understand Gene Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to depict a post-scarcity world, free of war, hunger, and poverty, where people would be free to follow their dreams and work together for the betterment of the universe. Consequently, the show has never been big on dealing with the (sometimes obvious) consequences of the technology depicted.
One such obvious issue would be obesity and general lethargy, perhaps most famously depicted in Wall-E. I don’t recall any episodes where crewmembers fall into deep depressive states and spend all day eating replicated ice cream, for instance. OK, maybe the replicators track caloric intake and adjust their output accordingly. But of all the forms of entertainment shown in the series, they’re all so wholesome. Fencing, rock climbing, acting, reading… where’s the 23rd century equivalent of binge watching The Bachelor in your underwear?
The one example I can think of is Hollow Pursuits, where the show addresses Reginald Barclay’s addiction to the holodeck in order to escape reality. In that episode, Barclay recreates the Enterprise senior crew, which raises some ethical questions, and it’s intimated that he’s been banging holo-Troi, which raises a LOT of ethical questions. But even this episode is wrapped up nicely and the issue of having sex with holographic versions of your coworkers is never brought up again, even though, I mean, wouldn’t that come up all the time?
Not exactly portrayed in a Star Trek episode, but the end of the documentary Trekkies features some clips from various stand-up comedians who were doing Star Trek-related bits. One imagined the fourteen-year-old Wesley Crusher locked in a holodeck and when Captain Picard suggested that Crusher talk to Counselor Troi, Crusher says she’s in there with him in the form of a holodeck simulation. So whatever problems people have today with porn obsession would be be a thousand-times worse with widespread availability of holodecks.
Having the ability to save whole populations from disaster and not using it. Or not saving even one child from death while it’s still possible.
Being able to cure disease or reverse aging with transporter technology. Imagine the line of people you’d have waiting for those!
Assuming that some people will be motivated to follow creative urges and produce brilliant works of art and science, how do you reward them for it if they can have literally anything they want just by ordering it from the computer? Or are they expected not to crave recognition? If they do, are they to be punished somehow, “re-educated,” or maybe shunned?
By the time we have star trek tech, obesity will have been solved a long time ago. I’m sure by then you could eat 5000 calories a day of fast food and still have abs.
As far as being out of shape, I’m sure they will have medication that can keep your muscles and mitochondria in top shape even if you don’t exercise.
There was something along those lines in a rather forgettable Deep Space Nine episode, where a visitor to the station gets the hots for Kira and offers Quark a lot of money to set him up with a holo-brothel facsimile. Kira and Odo get wind of this scheme, and hack the holosuite so that the customer is greeted by Kira’s body topped off with Quark’s head, an image which cools his jets right quick.
I’d say that a lot of the stuff in the OP is about who we watch. We’re watching the people who want to go out and do things, and were disciplined enough to make it through what is essentially military training (even if Roddenberry insists Starfleet is not a military.) This is also likely a big reason most people aren’t overweight, same as in the military. (Scotty being so good gets to be an exception in his later years.)
I personally don’t think there can be an ethical issue with what you do in your own time with your own fantasies. The problem in Hollow Pursuits was that Barkley was using the holodeck as a coping mechanism, not that he included other people.
I have a problem with the idea that people are allowed to control other people’s fantasies. You just need to make sure and keep your fantasies to yourself.
I agree the stuff about not helping people is a far more substantial moral topic.
The only reason I think that the new tech isn’t more of a topic is that it rarely sticks around and becomes common. The last bit that did seems to be the Holodeck. The transporter is too inconsistent in what it can do to be reliable for anything beyond actual transporting, it seems.
If holodecks are that good, they could create any fantasy partner you wanted, from any source. What’s the chance that your sexual ideal is among your co-workers when you have all of time and space to choose from? If you had the hots for a psychiatrist from a twentieth-century TV show, the holodeck can whip her right up for you.
That’s the big one, IMO. When you can just save a copy of a person in the pattern buffer and beam them back into being at will, you’ve essentially cured death.
Star Trek is basically the poster child for the science fiction meta-trope of creating a technology for the sake of narrative convenience and then failing to consider the vast implications it would have in society. In reality, there is little reason for Starfleet or having starships with thousands of people serving on them; it is clear that the intelligence of the ship’s computer is more than capable of running the ship, and the curious lack of automation is some kind of neurotic obtuseness than humans (and others) have in accepting automatons, as suggested by the early reactions of various crew members to Mr. Data (who has nonetheless attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander, indicating that he is more fit than average at doing his job). In fact, there is absolutely no reason anyone in Star Trek should ever die or be denied any physical pleasure, and pretty much no way they can’t use the combination of projected ‘holographic’ technology and machine intelligence to cheat their way success in any game or challenge.
The then unavoidable conclusion is that members of Starfleet are not the Federations best and brightest citizens but rather malcontents, imbeciles, degenerates, and the chronically ADHD-afflicted who are unwilling or incapable of being treated by the advanced medical technologies, sent off into interstellar space to ‘explore’, keeping them well away from the civilized Eloi of the normal citizenry. This has the added advantage of making them the buffer between civilization and the existential horrors that seem to plague the galaxy, unless you subscribe to the (obviously ridiculous) theory that these are simulated threats created to occupy these rogues and prevent them from realizing how they are being manipulated. This also explains why ‘Q’ has a human form; he is simply the minder tasked with keeping these simple people occupied with their adventures, checking in occasionally to evaluate them and make sure they’re looking outward instead of back toward Earth.
The ‘ethics’ of Starfleet are doubtful at best; as much as they wax on and on about the “Prime Directive”, the discussion inevitably serves as an excuse for why they should intervene every single time, and of course every admiral in Starfleet is either incompetent or engaged in a web of conspiracy which ends up drawing the attention and action of the crew. Captain Janeway was clearly catching on (at least, more than most) and so they banished her and her crew to the “Delta Quadrant”, a place so far away they hadn’t bothered exploring it even though they could reach it just by checking with Wesley Crusher on his latest insights in warp field theory.
Speaking of Janeway: What about her using the capacity for time travel to salve her own guilty conscience? Hijacking a starship to “correct” the timeline because one or two members of her crew died in a career they freely chose as responsible adults? Who knows what horrors she unleashed in establishing a “new” timeline? Why didn’t she go back farther and keep Voyager out of the Delta Quadrant altogether?
For that matter, why don’t the “Temporal Police” do the world a favor by eliminating people like Stalin and Hitler before they come to power? Is it because the “alternative timelines” can be even worse?
The whole concept of “managing” the timeline is asinine.
The Orville has an episode where Bortus gets hooked on alien porn on the holodeck. That causes a problem when his mate tries to kill him. Low-rated episode though.
Gilligan’s bumbling ineptitude would seem to be the cause of their continued languishes on the “desert isle”, but then, why was he continually put into a lynchpin position of every scheme for escape, dooming their efforts from the outset? Could it be that ‘Professor’ Roy Hinkley had his own agenda requiring the crew and passengers of the S.S. Minnow to remain on this curiously well-provisioned island in isolation, to be periodically visited by cosmonauts, rock bands, spies, et cetera, none of whom report back their existence or position?
“Those poor people…” indeed; rats in a maze, searching for that piece of cheese and getting zapped over and over. It was a cruel abrogation of the ethical rules for psychological experimentation to say the least.
If you eliminate Gilligan, the rest of the castaways would have died by Week 5. As often as he screwed up, he also saved the rest from disaster. The glue the Professor made to repair the Minnow, for example.
They should all be dead, anyway. There is no evidence any of them–even Skipper–has knowledge of fishing or island survival and seven people would certainly consume all of the shellfish that could be collected quickly. There do appear to be copious coconut trees on the island but no reservoir for fresh water and no soils that appear suitable to cultivate whatever vegetables they might have had on board. There is no way these people could survive for more than a few weeks without exhausting every resource on the island.
Why assume that it’s the Professor who’s in charge of the experiment? Isn’t it more plausible that the mastermind who’s running the show and keeping them all on the island for the experiment is the one who keeps “accidentally” ruining their plans to escape? “Little buddy” my ass.