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Incentives shape behavior, and we grow weak and unsatisfied without working against resistance. Without exertion, there is no strength. Consider the rapid deter

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........

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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.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Sure, but in the Culture, it's AI Minds who are fundamentally in control. Very benevolently, of course. Nothing so sinister as Stross' Eschaton, or even Asher's Polity.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  You're exactly right. The unexplained question in Star Trek isn't why they don't have uncontrollable population growth, it's how do they get enough people to have babies to maintain a stable population on Earth and still have some people leftover to start colonies.

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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.

mirimir 9y ago
Sure, but in the Culture, it's AI Minds who are fundamentally in control. Very benevolently, of course. Nothing so sinister as Stross' Eschaton, or even Asher's Polity.
TheCoelacanth 9y ago
You're exactly right. The unexplained question in Star Trek isn't why they don't have uncontrollable population growth, it's how do they get enough people to have babies to maintain a stable population on Earth and still have some people leftover to start colonies.