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The problem of telling the story of that transition is that it's like trying to go into detail about the physics in Cochrane's ship in First Contact—the writer

The problem of telling the story of that transition is that it's like trying to go into detail about the physics in Cochrane's ship in First Contact—the writer would be trying to explain a completely made-up thing (warp drive or the TNG socio-economic system) that itself is nothing more than a handwave to allow stories to be told.

lostcolony 9y ago
Not really. It would be trying to describe the human element of the technology. We'd not be trying to explain the post-scarcity utopia, but -how humans first reacted to it-. Look at how humans act now. We have more than enough resources for everyone on earth to have sufficient food. And yet some starve. Why? Because of distribution problems, of corruption, etc. We expect people to work if they want to eat. Why? Because we culturally view it a moral failing if someone doesn't work without good reason (and even then we view those who have reason with suspicion). Look at the discussion around automation + UBI. Even if we assume automation can handle all the work that has to be done, people take the stance that it won't/shouldn't work, that it will only destabilize the economy, rather than improving everyone's lives. A replicator is just another form of automation in that regard, and there would be plenty of people who could object to it. Just because we have the technology doesn't mean it's initially available to everyone. And even when there's enough availability of the tech, some humans will try and regulate it, to protect the existing interests, and other selfish reasons, with various rationales. That would be -interesting-. Moreover, it would, like all good scifi, reflect our current society, by showing the same attitudes and concerns currently at play, but in a different, futuristic context (one that ideally challenges people's perceptions, but without the baggage that causes them to instinctively get defensive). I think it could make damned good television. Though, I think, it would be a far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  > it would be a far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'. CBS is already playing successfully in the dark side of Star Trek. This would be a very attractive pitch if the success of Discovery extends further. And I'll go as far as to say this is a story that must be told. The stories we tell form the language with which we see our present and future. If all we know are dystopias, well only have ideas to express dystopias and this will be our future. If, however, we incorporate utopian narratives, we'll be able to express utopias too. We need that.
- still_grokking 9y ago
  Sadly this show won't happen, imo. If it would try to be a realistic show it would scare to many people in the first place. A lot of very inconvenient questions about our near future would have to be asked in such a show. (Robots & AI are our "replicators"…) On the other hand if it wouldn't go into detail there wouldn't be much of an interesting story left to be told. So, scary intellectual stuff doesn't sell well. Also I don't think one could make a "simple enough" show for the masses dealing with such a complicated theme like a global social transformation. Especially as the masses are in great fear of such a transformation. (Rightly, because we're not on Star Trek and we don't know the outcome yet. Somebody could get nervous in such a transformation process and out of worry of losing to much push some red button, or similar).
- ehvatum 9y ago
  Incentives shape behavior, and we grow weak and unsatisfied without working against resistance. Without exertion, there is no strength. Consider the rapid deterioration of the human body when deprived of gravity. In the Federation of Planets, what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible? Are they allowed to reproduce? This creates rather massive selection pressure. Somebody somewhere is going to have a gene encoding wanting to make maximum possible babies, and it's going to swamp your population in a few rapidly paced generations. The inevitability of this circumstance is total. Television exploring the overcoming of this, the human condition, could be a profound thing. Perhaps STNG neglects to show us the teeming planets of "welfare dropouts", where reproduction is limited by space, and Federation ships stop by to recruit the few ambitious worthies who yearn for a challenge other than sleeping in the same room as 300 family members? As a kid, I wondered about this, and my parents explained that the lazy Star Fleet kids go into a transporter beam and never come out, and their parents so happy to be done with backtalk that they aren't even sorry about it. This would be a feasible selection pressure, except for the case of double mutants possessing both fecundity and nurturing instincts, a possibility of which my parents were clearly unaware. (Just kidding. This would be hilarious, though.) Alternatively, perhaps Starfleet regularly purges the population of lazy bastards? Like, when the population of San Francisco gets too high, if you are more than two generations removed from a successful Star Fleet veteran, you get vaporized? This would explain how Star Fleet Academy is located there without having to pay staff more than Google or even anything at all. I would be totally binge watch a Trek exploring friction between Google and Star Fleet in the San Fran real estate market. Couldn't possibly be worse than Voyager........
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible? This is contradicted by the real world experience that when you give people education and contraceptives they really don't do this. There are not that many people who really enjoy the process that much - it's called "labour" for a reason. Star Trek is likely to be the sort of utopia where boys and girls get reversibly vaccinated against pregnancy in childhood, and having unconsidered or large numbers of children is socially frowned upon. Now, in Iain M Banks' Culture, it's spelled out. There is no space pressure and there are trillions of humans, but it's also sufficiently post-human that characters can get pregnant, abort a pregnancy, change gender, or get high simply by sitting down and willing it to happen, telling the nanobots in their bloodstream to do their thing.
posterboy 9y ago
And it's so easy it doesn't even need telling. They simply replicated earth like environments until one succeeded. If they you divide by infinity anything may happen.
abecedarius 9y ago
It's true that Star Trek is just a story. OTOH, a machine that cheaply and quickly assembles feedstock into pre-programmed patterns is not physically impossible like warp drive -- it's just something we can't yet make. 3d printers are a crude preview. 19th-century people could have tried to forecast the consequences of Babbage's idea of a computer. It wouldn't have been a ridiculous thing to try: they had electricity and classical economics. OTOH I wouldn't expect a look at a world with 'replicators' to look much like Star Trek, in the same way Robin Hanson's The Age of Em reads differently from Altered Carbon.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> The problem of telling the story of that transition is that it's like trying to go into detail about the physics in Cochrane's ship in First Contact—the writer would be trying to explain a completely made-up thing (warp drive or the TNG socio-economic system) that itself is nothing more than a handwave to allow stories to be told. I'm binge-watching Voyager and DSN and the truth is that we are treated to quite a bit of made-up science, like subspace physics and the like. Everytime an away team has to be trapped at the far end of a mission to advance the story, someone jumps up to explain why they can't be beamed up in "technical" terms (then someone is ordered to "remodulate"). Everytime a technologically superior enemy corners the Voyager, one hit brings the shields down to 0 because they've been "rotating their weapons frequency" (then someone reports they're "compensating"). Almost every episode of Voyager at least has some made-up-on-the-spot techno-babble like that. It's been a while since I watched TNG but I think it wasn't different there, either. It's not like the series skirts away from made-up science is what I'm saying, at least when it comes to "physics". They could just as well make up some "sociology" or "history" if they wanted.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  The key thing about all of those is that the technology (and techobabble) is just the setting. The real story is interaction. It always is in good scifi. We may find the technical underpinnings interesting, they may be worth an article or two, they may even help influence the direction science takes (due to the choice of problems that researchers choose to tackle, and the vision they have for the possible solutions), but what makes it compelling as a consumer is the human element. Sci-fi and fantasy are grouped together as genres a lot for a reason, being essentially just constructed settings to explore the human condition.

lostcolony 9y ago

Not really. It would be trying to describe the human element of the technology. We'd not be trying to explain the post-scarcity utopia, but -how humans first reacted to it-. Look at how humans act now. We have more than enough resources for everyone on earth to have sufficient food. And yet some starve. Why? Because of distribution problems, of corruption, etc. We expect people to work if they want to eat. Why? Because we culturally view it a moral failing if someone doesn't work without good reason (and even then we view those who have reason with suspicion). Look at the discussion around automation + UBI. Even if we assume automation can handle all the work that has to be done, people take the stance that it won't/shouldn't work, that it will only destabilize the economy, rather than improving everyone's lives. A replicator is just another form of automation in that regard, and there would be plenty of people who could object to it. Just because we have the technology doesn't mean it's initially available to everyone. And even when there's enough availability of the tech, some humans will try and regulate it, to protect the existing interests, and other selfish reasons, with various rationales. That would be -interesting-. Moreover, it would, like all good scifi, reflect our current society, by showing the same attitudes and concerns currently at play, but in a different, futuristic context (one that ideally challenges people's perceptions, but without the baggage that causes them to instinctively get defensive). I think it could make damned good television. Though, I think, it would be a far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'.

rbanffy 9y ago
> it would be a far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'. CBS is already playing successfully in the dark side of Star Trek. This would be a very attractive pitch if the success of Discovery extends further. And I'll go as far as to say this is a story that must be told. The stories we tell form the language with which we see our present and future. If all we know are dystopias, well only have ideas to express dystopias and this will be our future. If, however, we incorporate utopian narratives, we'll be able to express utopias too. We need that.
still_grokking 9y ago
Sadly this show won't happen, imo. If it would try to be a realistic show it would scare to many people in the first place. A lot of very inconvenient questions about our near future would have to be asked in such a show. (Robots & AI are our "replicators"…) On the other hand if it wouldn't go into detail there wouldn't be much of an interesting story left to be told. So, scary intellectual stuff doesn't sell well. Also I don't think one could make a "simple enough" show for the masses dealing with such a complicated theme like a global social transformation. Especially as the masses are in great fear of such a transformation. (Rightly, because we're not on Star Trek and we don't know the outcome yet. Somebody could get nervous in such a transformation process and out of worry of losing to much push some red button, or similar).
ehvatum 9y ago
Incentives shape behavior, and we grow weak and unsatisfied without working against resistance. Without exertion, there is no strength. Consider the rapid deterioration of the human body when deprived of gravity. In the Federation of Planets, what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible? Are they allowed to reproduce? This creates rather massive selection pressure. Somebody somewhere is going to have a gene encoding wanting to make maximum possible babies, and it's going to swamp your population in a few rapidly paced generations. The inevitability of this circumstance is total. Television exploring the overcoming of this, the human condition, could be a profound thing. Perhaps STNG neglects to show us the teeming planets of "welfare dropouts", where reproduction is limited by space, and Federation ships stop by to recruit the few ambitious worthies who yearn for a challenge other than sleeping in the same room as 300 family members? As a kid, I wondered about this, and my parents explained that the lazy Star Fleet kids go into a transporter beam and never come out, and their parents so happy to be done with backtalk that they aren't even sorry about it. This would be a feasible selection pressure, except for the case of double mutants possessing both fecundity and nurturing instincts, a possibility of which my parents were clearly unaware. (Just kidding. This would be hilarious, though.) Alternatively, perhaps Starfleet regularly purges the population of lazy bastards? Like, when the population of San Francisco gets too high, if you are more than two generations removed from a successful Star Fleet veteran, you get vaporized? This would explain how Star Fleet Academy is located there without having to pay staff more than Google or even anything at all. I would be totally binge watch a Trek exploring friction between Google and Star Fleet in the San Fran real estate market. Couldn't possibly be worse than Voyager........
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 9y ago
  > what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible? This is contradicted by the real world experience that when you give people education and contraceptives they really don't do this. There are not that many people who really enjoy the process that much - it's called "labour" for a reason. Star Trek is likely to be the sort of utopia where boys and girls get reversibly vaccinated against pregnancy in childhood, and having unconsidered or large numbers of children is socially frowned upon. Now, in Iain M Banks' Culture, it's spelled out. There is no space pressure and there are trillions of humans, but it's also sufficiently post-human that characters can get pregnant, abort a pregnancy, change gender, or get high simply by sitting down and willing it to happen, telling the nanobots in their bloodstream to do their thing.

posterboy 9y ago

And it's so easy it doesn't even need telling. They simply replicated earth like environments until one succeeded. If they you divide by infinity anything may happen.

abecedarius 9y ago

It's true that Star Trek is just a story. OTOH, a machine that cheaply and quickly assembles feedstock into pre-programmed patterns is not physically impossible like warp drive -- it's just something we can't yet make. 3d printers are a crude preview. 19th-century people could have tried to forecast the consequences of Babbage's idea of a computer. It wouldn't have been a ridiculous thing to try: they had electricity and classical economics. OTOH I wouldn't expect a look at a world with 'replicators' to look much like Star Trek, in the same way Robin Hanson's The Age of Em reads differently from Altered Carbon.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> The problem of telling the story of that transition is that it's like trying to go into detail about the physics in Cochrane's ship in First Contact—the writer would be trying to explain a completely made-up thing (warp drive or the TNG socio-economic system) that itself is nothing more than a handwave to allow stories to be told. I'm binge-watching Voyager and DSN and the truth is that we are treated to quite a bit of made-up science, like subspace physics and the like. Everytime an away team has to be trapped at the far end of a mission to advance the story, someone jumps up to explain why they can't be beamed up in "technical" terms (then someone is ordered to "remodulate"). Everytime a technologically superior enemy corners the Voyager, one hit brings the shields down to 0 because they've been "rotating their weapons frequency" (then someone reports they're "compensating"). Almost every episode of Voyager at least has some made-up-on-the-spot techno-babble like that. It's been a while since I watched TNG but I think it wasn't different there, either. It's not like the series skirts away from made-up science is what I'm saying, at least when it comes to "physics". They could just as well make up some "sociology" or "history" if they wanted.

lostcolony 9y ago
The key thing about all of those is that the technology (and techobabble) is just the setting. The real story is interaction. It always is in good scifi. We may find the technical underpinnings interesting, they may be worth an article or two, they may even help influence the direction science takes (due to the choice of problems that researchers choose to tackle, and the vision they have for the possible solutions), but what makes it compelling as a consumer is the human element. Sci-fi and fantasy are grouped together as genres a lot for a reason, being essentially just constructed settings to explore the human condition.