I think they’ve also explained that food replicators do start with some sort of organic raw material, too. I seem to recall that the raw material is nutritive, and could be eaten as itself, in an emergency. This can be reconciled with them working via energy-matter conversion: That doesn’t say where the energy came from in the first place, and after all, transporters also work via energy-matter conversion. So you start with your E-rat sludge, beam it into crewmember kitchens, and in the process rearrange it into pecan pie. I gather that they can make almost any changes to the stuff in the process, but that it’s easiest to transform it into something similar to the source material.
Also, the reason that latinum (whatever that is) is used as specie in the first place is the fact that it’s not replicable. It’s not just happy coincidence that the money-stuff can’t be mass-produced. This does suggest, though, that gold, platinum, and all the other usual suspects are replicable (though perhaps with more difficulty than pecan pie).
As for prosperity, maybe they have eliminated poverty etc… in the Federation. Consider the modern United States. One could very reasonably argue that we have eliminated poverty… here. While there are still folks in this country who are not well-off, nobody in the US starves to death any more. But at this moment there are still starving people in Somalia, and Afghanistan, and many other places. So maybe the Federation is the same way: They’re proud that they’ve eliminated many social problems in the Federation, but there are still many humans not in the Federation, perhaps even on Earth, who may not be so well off.
True… the CIA (or somebody) has drawn an arbitrary line based on personal income and decreed that those beneath it are in “poverty”.
How political do you suppose THAT process was? I would argue that such figures are essentially meaningless outside of direct comparison.
By Ethiopian standards, those “poor” people are comfortably wealthy: they have clothes, roofs over their heads, some of them eat enough to be grossly obese, and they seldom have to step around the mounds of excrement that are blessedly absent from our city streets.
We’ve eliminated poverty!!
But wait! By 1700’s standards, I am terribly poor: I don’t own a single horse, slave, or acre of arable land.
We’re plagued by poverty!!
You see, it’s simply a matter of what you choose to set as a standard, and is thus meaningless except in direct comparison between subjects to whom identical standards are applied.
Poverty (by the poverty line definition) is still a far cry for starvation. The typical American welfare recipient is a lot better off than the typical third-worlder. It says a lot about our economic comfort that our standard of “poverty” is consistent with owning a house, holding down a secure job, and feeding and raising a couple of kids to adulthood.
So, basically, poverty is a cultural and social idea, depending on the particular definitions, values, and expectancies of the specific culture group or political or economic state.
So, the question would be, if poverty is an entirely relative, cultural concept, what has allowed the Federation to eliminate this “cultural icon or idea”?
One could argue that the Federation has eliminated poverty because they believe they have, in other words, the society and culture of the Federation does not allow the acceptance of the IDEA of poverty, and therefore that is why poverty no longer exists, completely regardless of any actual circumstances.
Quick nitpick, altho’ I dunno if you meant to imply it: one of the big reasons that I understand why latinum is so valuable is that it CAN’T be replicated, due to its unstable molecular structure or something like that. So maybe the monetary part of the system is based around such materials (which obviously probably have some sort of secondary use, like gold and diamonds do now)?
Chekov, anyone? Remember, the Rooskie from TOS? He was a helmsman.
And, technically, Sulu was an astrophysicist on his first appearance.
There was a white woman at the helm of the Grissom in ST: III.
And as for Torres’ father being “white”…well, who’s to say that the Torres family couldn’t marry “outside it’s race,” in the few hundred years between now and the 24th century? With racial mixing, they might have been “white” for a couple of hundred years already.
Now I’m pretty sure this time that Chekov was navigation officer. I do know that Kirk frequently said “Take us out, Mr Sulu”, which is more than a suggestion that he was at the helm, yes?
**
If the Torres family are now interbred to be white and the Picards are now English, surely there must be some families that have married heavily into Hispanic strains?
You might want to look up the definition of ad hominem. Here, I’ll help:
I never called you asinine, just your assertion, which I have proven to be false.
Let’s go through this step by step. You said:
I, and a couple others, point out that:
Captain Sisko is black, and a starship captain
Wesley Crusher is white, and a helmsman.
In case you still don’t get it, these facts make you what we in the reason business call “wrong.”
Normally I wouln’t even bother pointing this out, except that I get remarkably pissed off when people make accusations of racism in places where it’s clearly not the case. So are you going to admit your mistake, or just remand me to the Pit again instead?
Sure, why not? It’s plausible enough, it’s just that we haven’t seen them—yet—on the series.
But, heck, for all we know, maybe one of the “swarthy” complexioned red shirts walking down a corridor was really a character named José Stakanov (“José Vasilovich” to friends and family.)
Y’know, I was always kinda disappointed that the NextGen was less diverse than the original series. The British-French captain, whitebread First Officer, whitebread doctor, whitebread doctor’s son, whitebread security officer, Oreo helmsman-later-engineer, culturally neutral android, culturally neutral counsellor (the only time Betazoid culture ever came up was during those agonizing Majel Barett episodes, and it looked unnecessarily goofy with all the golden chalice and five rings crap). But for the Klingon, the original NextGen cast was beige in their blanditude.
As for economics, it’s clear nobody writing for any of the shows ever really cared enough to spell it out, leaving it for us speculators.
The helmsman on Pike’s Enterprise was Lieutenant Jose Tyler. A hispanic. Can you please drop this subject or at least take it to the other recent thread on the Ferengi, where it’d at least be on topic now?