The guy who could build a nuclear reactor in a pineapple, but couldn’t repair a hole in the Minnow.
“I’m a scientist, not a carpenter!”
I recall that fishing and fresh water were both plot points at some point during the series. Wasn’t Gilligan fishing when he hooked a mine and pulled it to the shore of the lagoon?
Yes he was. There was also the time they found the crate of radioactive seeds and all got super-ish powers from the vegetables…
If Gilligan were that smart he wouldn’t bring attention to it by sabotaging their efforts so obviously. And Gilligan has no real motivation to keep everyone on the island where he has to share a hut with the Skipper constantly berating him. The Professor, on the other hand, has his own hut, and unlike the domiciles of the other characters we never actually see the inside of this bachelor pad or the secret tunnel to his observation bunker beneath it.
Sure, he carries around a fishing pole and casts out into the surf but do we ever see him catching a fish, or indeed, anyone chowing down on food? As for water, unless this island is much larger than it would seem to be from the lack of appearance on navigational charts, it just won’t have any kind of natural catchment or enough height to spur the afternoon rain one gets in the Hawai’ian and other large volcanic tropical islands. It would be like any other atoll with at best a brackish lagoon with undrinkable water and low precipitation outside of monsoon season. That ‘The Professor’ is able to supply them with necessities with his kludged up improvisational devices silly enough to make even MacGyver do a double-take indicates that he is in on the scheme.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to derail this Star Trek thread with a toss-away reference. Let’s talk about Dr. Lazarus and why his Mak’Tar Stealth Haze isn’t taught as a standard procedure at the Thermian Academy, or how you reconfigure the solar matrix in parallel to reconfigure for endothermic propulsion.
Stranger
More evidence of illegal human experimentation. Someone must answer for crimes committed against these poor victims.
Stranger
I make (not anywhere near brilliant) art every day without any reward. If I could have everything I wanted for free I would actually make a lot more of it, because I wouldn’t need to work to pay the bills. I think art and science would increase if people were liberated from drudgery.
Or, a lot of people would take advantage of the situation to loaf and not produce anything. Should they be tolerated, or penalized for not contributing anything to society?
Why should they contribute if they have no motivation?
If I recall, Counselor Troi was known for doing something like that occasionally…
Star Fleet might have physical fitness requirements as part of membership, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the doctors could tweak metabolism/hunger a bit, too. But that was never explored which I guess is your point.
I think they did cover that a bit, both in TOS and in Enterprise. See “City on the Edge of Forever”, from TOS. There were multiple episodes dealing with alternate history in Enterprise.
Right, the alternative in “City” is worse than what actually happens. So why does Starfleet (or members of it) continue mucking around with time, up to the point of establishing a “Temporal Police” force?
The temporal police are there to stop people mucking about changing time.
Has anyone ever been able to contain Captain Kirk? Especially when Spock also gets involved?
In Enterprise a lot of the mucking about in time was due to the Xindi “Temporal Cold War” and not so much the Starfleet people.
You’d think they’d learn! 
Yes, but they’re changing time by preventing people from mucking around with it!
The hilarious thing is, the nutrimat refused to continue feeding it to her, arguing that it was not of “acceptable nutritional value” 
In “Star Trek: Discovery”, they explain that in the future time travel has been declared illegal. Problem solved!
… Until somebody changes the future.
Just wait and see what happens last week.
Why are you assuming that, given the opportunity to do anything that interested them, most people would find that the only thing that interested them was doing nothing?
I expect there would be a few. But it seems extremely unlikely to me that most people would react like that.
If we took the current population, most of which is continuously exhausted by work and/or worry to the point at which many don’t even recognize their own sleep deprivation and just assume that it’s normal, I would expect that quite a lot of people would do nothing for a while. But for people who aren’t exhausted, moving around feels good. And learning things feels good. And making things feels good. And making other people feel good feels good.
With other peoples’ attention.
And their own knowledge of what they’ve done.
Possibly from the point of view of other people, who will have a copy to do whatever they liked having the original do.
But from the point of view of the original, no, you’re still dead.
And I think even many of the other people, while they might also care about the replacement, would grieve for the one who died. I’m patting the cat who’s purring here now. But I remember the one who died on my shoulder. And if I were presented with her exact copy, physically and mentally, as a six-month kitten or a healthy young adult – I’d love that cat, sure. But I’d still remember, and miss, the one who died on my shoulder.
Why do people do all the work involved in gardening as a hobby? Why do people knit when they don’t need to make their own socks, or embroider when they’re not paid for the results, or cook a fancy dinner for home consumption instead of one that takes less time, or save their money all year so they can climb mountains on their vacation time, or spend their money and time restoring old cars which they only drive in parades, or walk the dog when they don’t need to have one?
Money is nowhere near the only motivator. Even survival is nowhere near the only motivator. (The mountain climber is reducing their chances of survival.)