What, precisely, in the Star Trek universe, leads to Earth becoming the Utopia it is by the TNG days? Is it matter-antimatter power and replicators? A final realization of the horrors of war? Contact with other species? Space travel leading to colonization of other worlds? And when, exactly, does it take place? It’s not clear that those changes are complete by the time of TOS or Enterprise.
Utopia maybe for any species which fits well into a Starfleet uniform, but what about the toiling underclass of mutants living in the pits beneath those sparkling cities? Somebody still needs to process the waste…
Once you recognize the “Star Trek” shows for being blatant Fed propaganda you will understand the true reasons for the resistance…
TOS was produced in the 1960s, when everyone presumed that if we didn’t blow ourselves up in a nuclear war, that eventually peace n’ love would conquer all. Yeah I know, lame. As for a real explanation rather than utopian wish-fullfillment, I can only offer the following:
- The last major terran conflict mentioned in TOS was the Eugenics Wars. And that this crisis somehow served to “mature” human society.
- Contact with the peaceful, logical Vulcans had a tremendous cultural and ideological impact on humanity, especially the Vulcan “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” doctrine, which paved the way for the Federation’s multicultural-tolerence thing.
- A sort of super-welfare state of prosperity and health based on technological advance. I can’t remember if it was a NG episode or a novel I read, but someone once asked Cmdr. Riker how humanity solved it’s problems and Riker replies that they never did solve them so much as outgrew them.
More cynically, you could posit that the Federation is outwardly peaceful but has real problems simmering beneath the surface. The premise of TOS episode “Journey to Babel” was that if the conference failed the breakup of the Federation would probably result. Several Star Trek novels depict that resolving the multiple issues between different planets and species is a never-ending diplomatic balancing act. It doesn’t hurt that the Federation has been surrounded by conquering empires, which give the Federation members a strong incentive to stick together or else. And finally, in DS9 we see a covert organization, Section 31, claiming that the reason the Federation works at all is because they secretly do all the dirty work.
Oh, forgot to add: It’s been implied that the “Penal Colonies” mentioned so off-handly multiple times are NOT very nice places to end up. When there are any number of harsh, marginally habital planets to dump all your criminals, dissidents and troublemakers, maintaining order is a lot easier.
There is no Section 31!
The last was WWIII in the 21st century, the Eugenics Wars were in the 1990s. WWIII was possibly in 2050, I don’t have a copy of “First Contact” to hand to find out for sure 
Meeting the Vulcans straight after this war was the main reason for the utopia that exists. Earth had a chance to grow up again from scratch and the Vulcan’s were there to offer assistance.
Nothing precisely. The issue was never specifically addressed, so any explanation is just a wild-ass guess. I lean toward the alien pixie explanation, myself, but the magic wand ray explanation has adherents, since ST often used magic wand rays* to explain things.
*Some sort of radiation that had never been mentioned before, but which had precisely the qualities needed to save everyone. Geordi was particularly good at finding them.
The Vulcans merely reversed our polarity.
Gene Rodenberry called it Technology Unchained Utopia when executive producing the first few seasons of TNG.
Three major factors figured into his concept (that he wasn’t able to explore too much in TOS).
-
Raw technology. Having the holy trinity of warp drive (allowing ftl travel and comunication), matter/energy conversion (replicators and transporters), and super computing ability. This allowed mankind to focus on improving things rather than just having to eke out a living.
-
Recognising the true horror of war and abondoning those ideals. (Made possible by Technology Unchained.)
-
Contact with alien cultures. Specifically Vulcans. Made possible in the first place by the technology of warp drive.
So, you could say it was basically warp that led to the utopia, because it’s all interelated to figuring out the use of dilithium crystals.
In fact, Gene’s TUU concept came close to ruining Star Trek because he making everything too clean, too perfect. Thankfully, people like Pillar, Behr, and even Bergama changed that. We now see that even with Technology Unchained, problems can still exist. Plus, there will always be those uppity Kilingons.
I thought the Bell riots, a two part episode in DS:9, led to humanity starting to fix society’s problems instead of shutting away the misfits behind ghetto walls.
They were a late addition that helped fill in backstory. Technology Unchained is the primary cause for the Utopia.
Who says it’s a utopia? Early on, it was depicted with some utopian elements (no hunger, no poverty, no interacial strife) and it was hinted that social problmes were a thing of the past. This was, as Lumpy mentioned earlier, due to the naive 60s notion that, given enough technology and physical resources, people will happily discard what is sometimes centuries of emnity to live in peace.
Then, something happened. The writers discovered what most writers find out pretty quickly. That is that utopias are boring. It’s hard to create drama without conflict. That’s when they started introducing the problems simmering beneath the surface.
Interestingly, one of the rules of the Writer’s Bible of TOS was that authors were NOT to portray life on Earth or the government or economic system that was in place. Essentially all that would be known about the Earth of TOS would be that it was democratic, prosperous, free and peaceful, and that somehow humanity pulled its act together – but no details. And even Kirk, famously, points out that the base for all that peace is as thin as just getting up in the morning and telling yourself, “today, I will not kill”.
And one which was necessary to introduce, because otherwise the whole society of Trek would be a sunshine-and-flowers 1960s hippie idealism trip where enlightenment just dropped from heaven and bonked humanity on its collective head. At least now we got a Treknobabble-based 1930s-50s Futurist idealism trip where [Thomas Dolby]SCIENCE!![/Thomas Dolby] brought about enlightenment.
TU would neutralize the scarcity factor of real-world economics. You can now have the entire species belong to the “Haves” and not tear up the planet they live on to achieve it. At least relative to that single planet, after TU the pie looks infinite. There is, at least in the “First World” home planets, no more zero-sum; nor any more running out of food, of energy, of raw materials, of work, of labor, of consumer goods, of housing, of health care, of Lebensraum. Of course, it actually means you have transferred your potential flashpoints to the far border – colonies with limited resources and hardscrabble existences, penal planets for misfits, and planets and asteroids being intensively mined for their dilithium, were all portrayed in TOS. (And yes, working on a galactic scale also provides truly external enemies, to channel outward any fears or aggressive tendencies.)
TUs unlimited resources also tie in to an implied benefit of TU – it sounds at times like in the ST world somehow we scientifically figured out the roots of many major social/behavioral problems and were able to expunge or greatly reduce these, be it medically or educationally.
The extra backstory of the Bell riots, and the mid-21st century WW3 that was introduced into the timeline when TNG began, helped deal with some issues that TU alone could not have. Basically, what would make human society willing to reform or give up millenarian social practices and loyalties to national/religious institutions. You needed something that would break the backs of reactionaries, or cause them to spend themselves out. The premise is that the hardliners become discredited, and then TU comes in and delivers the coup-de-grace – once you do NOT have disenfranchised masses, and stress and depression are easily treatable, and the majority is Living Large just by having been born, that majority will not be interested in fighting some battle from 2 thousand years ago, and nationalist or religious or social-ideology radicals, deprived of their source of followers, become easy-to-neutralize.
Well done, JRD!
One thing to note is that the entire Trek universe of stories is set merely a few hundred years in the future. Not enough time for simple evolution (social or organic) to have any real effect. So, something big had to be around to point to, to say, “Here! Here is where we changed.” (say it in a Picard voice 
)
In Roddenberry’s head, it was TU caused by exploiting the capabilities of dilithium. (Which also helps explain the Prime Directive.)
However, Gene got a little too silly with it. Even TU could not completely erase mellinia of social evolution. So, occasionally and then gradually, we got to see that it isn’t perfect (and never really was) in the Star Trek Universe. We finally got to see this only because Gene let go of the day to day control of the franchise as his old age caught up to him.
Even with its self induced problems, tho, TU is a fascinating explanation of how the near future could be so bright for Humanity.
Ah, but was World War III mentioned in ST:TOS ?
We’ve heard it implied several times (mostly in Deep Space 9, but also in some later episodes of Next Generation) that life in the colonies is much less pleasant than life on the core worlds. My theory is that the poor people were shipped away to off-world colonies, and that Earth is basically the Beverly Hills of the Federation. The ruling-class people who remained on Earth then parcelled it up. Many gave themselves nice large farms and vinyards (like the ones that Picard and Janeway grew up on), while the more cosmopolitan ones built nice townhouses in places like New Orleans and San Diego. This explains why Earth in the 23rd Century appears to consist of small, compact cities with large tracts of wilderness around them.
Another thing: Have they ever explained where the Federation gets its energy from? If you think about it, replicators and transporters must use a shitload of energy, and it’s implied that most people have a replicator, and that transporters are the primary means of getting from Point A to Point B. The amount of energy used by Earth alone must be several orders of magnitude larger than our power consumption today. Then multiply that by all of the inhabited planets in the Federation, and all of the starships like the Enterprise. The Federation must consume vast amounts of resources to keep itself running. And where does all of that anti-matter come from? If they have to make it somehow, then that’s another energy-intensive process which is apparently widespread.
There’s an aspect to the replicators that I think speaks volumes about what Federation society is like: they can only make objects that they’ve been programmed to make. This means that the Federation has near-total control over what its citizens can posess :eek:
<Spock voice>You could tell that, Doctor, to the millions who died in your first World War, the millions who died in your second, the billions who died in your third…</Spock voice>. I forget the occasion, but Spock was in a particularly snarky mood that episode. But WWIII is canon in TOS.
According to a non-canonical ST:II adaptation I have, the first genetic superman aka Khaaaaaaan! were supposed to have been born around 1992 and the Genetic Wars were to have taken place around–uh–now (ca. 1996-2000 or so, the Superman growing to adulthood quickly). It must have been all covered up by The Librul Media! :eek:
Actually, my friends and I gave up on ST:TMG about s4 partly because of that superior attitude, that only if we all wuved each other and stopped wars and stuff, people would all live on giant French vineyards with English accents or something.
But what do people need farms and vineyards for, if they can just replicate all the food and wine they want? (Admittedly, there are some 24th century folks who are convinced that “real” food tastes better than the replicated variety, but these are probably the same kinds of people who’d swear up-and-down than a CD sounds better if you go over the edge with a green felt-tipped marker.)
My guess is controlled fusion. Maybe even proton-proton fusion, so they’ll never run out o’ gas.
I assume that all of their energy comes from matter-antimatter reactions. So, they have sh–loads of it.
Where they get the antimatter, though … I dunno.
Phil Farrand of the “Nitpicker’s Guide” noted how puzzling it was that the Bell Riots served as a turning point in social progression, when there was a massive nuclear war twenty years later that nearly wiped out civilization.
He wondered if the surviving humans, hunkered down in fallout shelters, gathered together and saying “All right…the first thing we do after we get things back to normal is make sure everyone has a job!”
There’s my private theory, though…that the discovery of extraterrestrial life tapped into humanity’s collective, subconscious, xenophobia. Humans could work together easily now because, for the first time, we were all “us”…versus “them.” The right-thinking human and federation philosophers could never bring themselves to accept this, and chalked it up to humanity entering a brotherhood of civilized species, or some such pablum.
And…as I remember, there was a reoccuring doctrine/philosophy occasionally spouted by characters in TNG and DS9 that “humans had evolved past hate and rage.” Interestingly enough, in DS9, there were more than a few indications that that was pretty much just Federation propaganda/social manipulation. (Albeit propaganda that arguably may have actually helped wipe out war, poverty, crime, etc.)
DS9 was funny like that…every now and then, they’d have little elements of stories that kind of gave you the message that humanity and the Federation, for all their acomplishments, really weren’t that great at heart. Hell, they weren’t even always that great in practice. Like in the Section 31 stories, or in “The Siege of AR-558,” or the plotline with Eddington and the Maquis.
…Of course, the next week, the characters would all just go back to shooting lizard-men in Griffith Park, or playing “Rat Pack” in the undersized holodeck. Ah, well. 