My seconds shall call upon you in the morning; and some of them are Vulc…er, Ferenghi.
Wait a minute, can I get back to you on that? Brick bats at fifty yards?
I’ve mentioned my theories on how the Federation/Earth economies work in many other Star Trek threads.
But suffice it to say, when you’ve got replicators that can produce anything any human can want, the economic problems that most of us today spend all our time trying to solve, are pretty much moot. Food, consumer goods, entertainment, clothing, and on and on–all available via voice command. So what value is there working as a farmer, or factory worker? What value is there in accumulating possessions, when whenever you want something you can make a new one?
And so most people in the 23rd century have no jobs, in the sense that there are no goods and services that they can produce that would be worth anything to anyone. And since these people can’t produce anything worthwhile, all their needs are provided for free, out of replicators. They spend their time watching TV, playing video games, and hanging out with their buddies. And the cost of providing what we in the early 21st century would consider an opulent lifestyle is so near zero that nobody bothers to account for it. This explains the spartan aesthetic of the 23rd century–who cares about accumulating useless stuff? Only mentally ill people do that.
That said, many people do engage in productive activities. Like Sisko’s dad, who runs a restaurant. But he doesn’t sell meals at this restaurant–his restaurant is a hobby, in the sense that he does it for fun, not to make a living. And how do you get a seat at his restaurant? By invitation only, since there’s not much you can offer Sisko’s dad, since all his physical needs can be met for free. He runs a restaurant for the same reasons that some people constantly have dinner parties for their friends. To show off, to socialize, to have fun, to experience nice things.
And there are farmers (like Picard’s brother) who produce wine, or shrimp, or whatever. But they don’t do it for economic reasons, they do it because it’s fun–like my brother who makes homebrewed beer and gives it away by the sixpack. So maybe someone who likes growing okra gives Sisko’s dad some of his produce, because he likes the idea of being a producer for a nice restaurant. But nobody does any work because they have to, they only work because they want to.
And anybody that thinks life on Earth watching TV all day is boring can hop on a starship and head out into the galaxy for some adventures. So where do the starships come from? There are no taxes or any such nonsense. Starfleet is entirely self-created. People who like starships build starships. People who want to build really good starships want to work with other really good starship builders–so they join a club for starship builders. People who want to explore the galaxy want to do so with other like-minded people, so they join a club for explorers. This club is called “Starfleet”. The ships are built by volunteers, in the sense that nobody becomes a shipbuilder to make a living, since nobody needs to work for a living. They only do so because they like doing it.
Most people on earth think of the guys in Starfleet (if they think of them at all, which they almost never do) as a collection of guys who dress up in funny costumes and fly around getting themselves killed–sort of combination Civil War re-enactors and mountain climbers.
Yes, there are shipyards and academies and such. These are entirely hobby projects. Nobody outside of the academy or the shipyards contribute a thing towards them. The teachers at the academy teach because that’s what they love to do. The builders at the shipyards likewise. Almost no raw materials are needed for the starships–they have replicators, remember? So the main resource needed for starships is design expertise. Starship building is pretty similar to designing computer games–a bunch of guys collaborate to decide exactly how the ship should go together, and a bunch of replicators fabricate the parts, a few guys oversee stapling the parts together, and then the adrenaline junkies jump into the ships and fly them around the galaxy getting into trouble.
I’m not really comfortable with this analogy, because Starfleet does provide so much more than just an outlet for bored folk. They do plenty of scientific research, diplomacy, and defense. Granted, the scientific research is probably not necessary by the time of TNG. Nearly-free energy and resources = you win the game of life. But they don’t just stand around engaging in masturbatory activity, they actually accomplish stuff.
I’d look at Starfleet more like adventurers from fantasy settings. You can get adventurers to do anything for a little money, prestige, or XP. The local hedge wizard needs more components for the spell he’s researching? Send an adventurer to gather them. Need to test that spell? Tell the adventurer to stand still. Farmers losing sheep at night? Don’t stay up, pay an adventurer to pull a night shift to catch that pesky werewolf. Orcs marching to war on your city? Throw a band of adventurers in their way and have another drink.
Civilians usually look on adventurers as more than a bit nutty, since who in their right mind wants to put themselves in that kind of danger on a regular basis? And yet adventurers are exceptionally useful, since even though they might just be adventuring as a hobby, they still get a lot of stuff done that would be too dangerous for homebodies.
The problem with the Starfleet-as-SCA theory is the absence of neckbeards.
Well, that, and you generally don’t hand over international relations to LARPers.
There are replicator salesmen, replicator repairmen, real estate salespeople and those who sell and repair Mr. Fusion reactors.
Could there be patents for things like holodeck equipment, that it is illegal to scan or replicate? Sort of like DVD copy protection. 
With that in mind, perhaps it is a socialist economy of a sort. Just as my state is removing sales tax on food but not Buicks, perhaps luxury products (nights out at a real restaurant, 300 year old restored Corvettes and private holodecks) are illegal to scan or replicate and Starfleet and other government programs are funded by luxury taxes on them.
You don’t need money to replicate food and be warm at night, but cool stuff costs money and to have it one must enter some secondary economy, like a restaurant, making “real” wine or growing organic food.
Lemur I’ve seen you make that point a few times now and I’d have to say I don’t think it’s entirely correct. The universe of Star Trek is not completely post-scarcity because replicators can’t make everything (they’re frequently mentioning that something is non-replicable), plus they still seem to have mining colonies and trade going on which you wouldn’t bother with if you didn’t have to. We also don’t know that much about the energy economy of the time, it’s clearly not completely limitless or free energy because there are reference to fuel supplies and energy limits etc.
Obviously it’s far far closer to post-scarcity than to what we have, and I agree that on Earth at least most people seem to just have advanced hobbies or vocations instead of jobs, but to make the leap to “no one works, everything is completely free” is one too much I believe.
I don’t believe in the completely voluntary, everyone just plays all day theory either. Med school still looks damned hard, as does Starfleet Academy. Order is maintained somehow-- weaponry may have changed, but law and order needs to be kept. Roddenberry’s vision was naive and there is not enough of the “dark side” of man shown in TOS, but he had a point: once basic needs are met for all, humans should be able to behave more selflessly. Not completely selflessly, but somewhat.
That said, starships do more than log data and seek out new life forms. They are often on missions for medical reasons or for acquiring resources or allies. I speak only for TOS. I have not watched TNG enough to comment on their worldview.
Well, I don’t believe in my theory exactly anyway. It’s one possible way to reconcile the “we don’t use money in the 23rd century” talk. That said, even if everyone’s basic needs (basic needs by 23rd century standards) can be met for essentially free, there are still all sorts of goods and services that can’t be replicated. If you want a vinyard in France, there are only so many of them to go around.
So there will still be money, even in what we would consider a post-scarcity society. But I can easily imagine a society where most people don’t actually work.
As for the hard work of going through school, and the academy, well, people do all kinds of hard things nowadays with no monetary motive. Guys who climb Mount Everest pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privelege of freezing and dying of hypoxia. I wouldn’t climb Mount Everest if you paid me a million dollars, but some people are weird.
If there’s no need for an average person to punch the clock at a job they dislike, just to put food on the table and a roof over their head and clothes on their back, then all sorts of things are possible. I imagine that most people will sit around the house and watch TV and generally do nothing productive. But a sizable fraction will want something to do. And going to school, or becoming an artist, or a musician, or a scientist, or a doctor, or an explorer, or a starfleet officer, becomes a lot easier if you don’t have to worry about making a living.
Let’s put it this way. Who thinks anyone joins Starfleet because the pay is so great? No, people join Starfleet to seek out new life and new civilizations. That is, the people who join Starfleet do so for the adventure, not because they can’t afford braces for the kids. And there are a lot of jobs nowadays that people do because they like the work, not because they get paid big bucks. Like, most guys join bands because they want to impress women, not because they expect to make a fortune. Even in management or executive jobs the compensation is just a way to keep score, the real reward is being in a job where you get to make consequential decisions.
Well, now, that makes more sense. Although, some of the ST movies do show the cleaning crew etc, so presumably those people clean for the love of it, or they couldn’t get into the Academy or some such…
“Want to travel in space, but flunked out of the Academy? Have we got a deal for you!”
The Federation probably went through something like this.
That’s cool.
They did pursue better scanners to detect cloaked ships. And the Klingons and Romulans pursued better cloaking devices to beat those scanners. It was an electronic warfare arms race.
The big thing in Undiscovered Country was the fact that the new cloaking device allowed the cloaked ship to fire without uncloaking. It was so new, the Federation had no ability to break through the cloak, until the crew thought up adding the gas scanning tech to the torpedo.
Yah, if you watch TOS, TNG, and DS9, you do see an active development/counter development process between the various players. This ranges from stealing enemy equipment (TOS), to laying out elaborate ship-borne sensor nets or employing allied cloaked ships (TNG), or just developing new sensor technology (IIRC, the Dominion had a line-of-sight style sensor that could detect cloaked ships in front of them. Only really useful if they were pursuing enemy ships; it didn’t help them to avoid being taken by surprise themselves).
I was with you right up to this point, Lemur, where I think you went badly off the rails:
Throughout all of the TV shows and movies, Starfleet is clearly a uniformed branch of a multispecies government, the United Federation of Planets; it’s not just a hobby group or club. Starfleet’s functions include exploration, defense, law enforcement, colonization, supply, R&D and transport. It answers to a civilian President and Federation Council. It may lawfully apply deadly force when necessary, a key characteristic of the armed forces of sovereign states. Its personnel may be, depending on the circumstances, promoted, demoted, transferred, disciplined, court-martialed, even imprisoned or confined for psychiatric care, all under the authority of the Federation. It does appear to be an all-volunteer force, that’s true, and its members may resign at will, but otherwise Starfleet is not the SCA, Elks or Salvation Army.
But the Klingon-fired torpedo itself was not cloaked, so they knew exactly where any given attack came from. Was “sweep the general area with phasers on minimum power until they hit something” not an option?
They tried it in Star Trek: Nemesis (an entire movie full of recycled Star Trek plotlines). Turns out that Starfleet officers are horrible marksmen.
Can anyone explain why in every Star Trek series, when you change the past you change the future, but in Star Trek 11 it’s apparently an alternate timeline? I’m guessing it’s so fans of modern Trek (TNG, DS9, Voyager) aren’t pissed off that nothing matters anymore. For Star Trek 12, I’d like to see the Enterprise E come back in time, save Spock Prime, ruin the Narada before Nero even knows about “red matter,” and restore the timeline. Bring the 11 crew into the present or whatever, since they want to go that route, but Khan is still out there. The whale probe is still out there. V’Ger is still headed their way. I don’t want to revisit any of that and none of it was changed by changing the events on Earth.
Because the producer and writers wish to continue living.
Yes, there is no smiley.