Did Roddenberry have anything to do with the animated series?
Good question. I don’t know that it’s ever been dealt with in detail, but there are some interesting quotes here:
So many of the original writers worked on the animated series under Dorothy’s direction, does it really matter? Those two short seasons beat the hell out of TOS’s third!
Sounds close to what James Corey proposed in “Caliban’s War” a novel set mostly in space, but Earth has a post-scarcity society. If you don’t want to work at all you get “basic” which covers your food, clothing, housing, communications in a non-luxurious sort of way. If you want to work you need advanced education. And in order to prove you WILL work once you have that advanced education, you have to spend a year or two amassing “work credit” doing menial jobs like waiting tables, etc. Once you have amassed enough work credits, then you can study advanced topics … at no charge … and go on to do interesting work. A very ingenious approach to handling menial labor in a post-scarcity society, I think.
One of Roddenberry’s edicts about the (TNG-era) Federation was apparently that people didn’t mourn or fear death—it was accepted as a “natural part of life.” This was used to quash a script submission (By future writer Ron Moore, no less!) about a newly orphaned little boy on the Enterprise who was found to be spending all his time on the Holodeck with a simulated version of his dead mother. The script was later reworked into “The Bonding,” with the efforts of lead writer Michael Piller—perhaps it’s just as telling about Roddenberry’s mindset about his Perfect 24th Century Humans that he wouldn’t even go for a story about them treating holo-grieving as an unhealthy problem once they’d found someone doing it!
Even worse is the crew’s attitude in the first season episode, “The Neutral Zone,” in which several 20th century humans are found frozen on a Cryonics satellite, and revived. As the command staff’s briefing went—
In other words, their immature, fearful attitude towards defeating their own mortality with technology…worked perfectly. Their fatal maladies are now cured, and they’re free to “go about their business.” One of them was an artist. Another was a woman still of (unaided, 21st century) child-bearing age. The oldest survivor was only 55—given the extended lifespans we’ve seen in other humans in the 24th century, even that man could live a hundred years more!
It’s tempting to suppose that this attitude against “heroic” life-extending measures might be some kind of insidious social-engineering plot to keep a decadent, unproductive human population down to a maintainable level—but personally, I don’t think any human society needs a conspiracy to keep doing some damnfool practice or attitude, long after the point where it might have been genuinely useful.
Indeed it is, as seen by what happened to Dr. Bashir’s dad on DS9: Richard Bashir | Memory Alpha | Fandom
What pissed me off the most during the first season was Picard basically ordering Riker not to revive a child who had been killed moments before, after he had been given such power by Q. He then says something like “Thank heaven you didn’t revive her!”
Pontificating asshole! You can use every means at your disposal to try and revive your dead Security Officer, who was all but begging to get zapped, but not a little girl who died in an accident? If I had been there with a phaser, I’d’ve blown him away point-blank!
I also fail to find anything admirable (or healthy) about someone (or some society) that doesn’t fear death. That’s … just … plain … crazy! What degree of societal control is required to brainwash people to that extent?!?
Well I don’t know anyone who fears death at the end of the human lifespan, terrified of dieing at 85 for example.
But yea a society that doesn’t fear premature death is kind of creepy.
That would depend on your state of health, and a number of other factors, I imagine. I can understand someone suffering from a terminal disease, or just a generally shitty life, welcoming death at any age. But to not have any trepidation at all is weird. Why bother saving anyone from death if it’s not to be feared?
Also, I have no particular desire to die at age 85, though I realize it’s pointless to worry about it. When your time comes, it comes.
Sounds to me like Corey never realized there’s people who actually like menial work (I promise there are).
Corey didn’t address it in the novel, but I’m sure that anyone who wanted to do menial work could get credit for it and live a more lavish lifestyle than those who do basic. The part where they (Corey is actually a pseudonym used by two collaborating writers) explained how education worked was just a little side note in the book, a couple of sentences in one paragraph, as a barista explains to a space marine why she works. I’m sure the idea could be fleshed out more. My thought when I read it was that there was, even in an automated future, probably a lot more menial work than university students spending a year or two prepping for work could handle. So your idea might flesh things out.
In the Federation, doctors can fix almost anything.
In fact, in TNG, I don’t even recall seeing any fat people.
Or any ugly ones either. But they’re seldom shown on TV anyhow.
Brainwashing, again: love of excercise and other healthy habits. No smoking, for example.
Seems like they have a lot of shit to worry about dying from in the future.
I would assume that premature death on Earth is a fairly rare phenomenon. Not just because of great futuristic health care. There’s no extreme weather. Presumably no other natural disasters. I would even assume accidents of any kind (other than those involving a transporter) are pretty rare. Probably not a lot of murders either due to the fact that it would be nearly impossible to get away with it, given the level of surveillance and forensic technology.
Really, unless you entered into a high-risk profession like Starfleet Security, the expectation is you will probably live until whatever age Federation folk typically live until.