8 ms·

Are we Trek yet? – A guide for how close we are to Star Trek technology

41 points by MattSayar 1y ago

ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Dev left a note on a submission a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492750
tonetegeatinst 1y ago
When it comes to Gravity boots, I think using a force sensor to detect the user placing the foot on a surface is going to be essential. From detection, activating an electromagnet or a material inspired by geko grip that is activated by a current would be a great start.
Mistletoe 1y ago
The weirdest thing for me about Star Trek is no money. I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work. It’s a nice idea though. Everyone on the Enterpise working and toiling and risking their lives for their own personal beliefs and self-motivation only. I almost think humans would have to evolve more for that to ever be the case. It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented.
- WaxProlix 1y ago
  People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain. Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Some things will obviously always be scarce, but the demand for merely positional goods in something like the Culture would likely not be that big. The values and norms and desires of people raised in a post-scarcity society would simply be very different from ours. The need to "have more than someone else", just for its own sake, would unlikely be common or socially approved of. Though I wonder if something like nobility would make a comeback – when you can have almost anything you want, one of the things you can’t have is someone else’s family line! "New money" is meaningless in a society without money, but "old money" has the same value as it always has had – and it’s obvious why the former isn’t really held in high regard in many real societies either, compared to the latter. Banks talks about this a bit in Excession. The demand for prime real estate is largely solved in the Culture by Orbitals anyway; indeed preferring to live on something as space-inefficient as a planet is seen as quaint and slightly eccentric.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  It didn't really even work on Star Trek. They could pretend it did as long as they were on a ship that flew away at the end of every episode. But on DS9, since they were stationary and had to deal with other economies, the issue of money came up fairly often. The post-scarcity thing didn't hold up to scrutiny either, even fictionally: there was nearly a civil war on Bajor because the Federation couldn't come up with enough soil reclamators to prevent a possible famine at one point. Any time something needed to be scarce for the sake of the plot or drama, it was.
  - soco 1y ago
    So this underlines the idea that no scarcity works as long there's no scarcity?
- nerdjon 1y ago
  I have thought many times about what I would be doing with my life if money was no object. If I just had "everything" I needed. For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. I would be more picky about what I would be doing but at its core I would likely still be doing work similar to what I am doing now, just instead I would make sure it is working towards something I have a passion for. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life? Just sitting at home all the time, that is boring.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    > For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. Me too. The reality of my existence is that I have tons that I want to do, and having to work for a living really gets in the way of doing it. The irony being working for a living provides funds for doing the stuff I'm actually interested in while at the same time draining away time for that same stuff.
  - jajko 1y ago
    Have you ever backpacked around the world? I mean dirt cheap, immersed with locals and not some sterile luxury bubble. I've spent just in India & Nepal cca 6 months and barely scratched the surface of those places and cultures, I could go on for another 10 years. Life-changing experience. Once you get hooked on travel, meeting cultures, doing various outdoor sports (some more or less extreme), questions like that become meaningless. And that is before the ultimate meaning of life - kids come along.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Gotta remember that the people on Starships are an elite, largely self-selected group of military personnel. And if you want to deal with money there are plenty of opportunities at the fringes of the Federation and beyond.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  > It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented. I think it fails because the only people who want to lead a revolution are megalomaniacs who get into power after the revolution and turns it into a dictatorship instead of turning it over to the people. The average person just wants to live their life which is why populist strong men who promise more of the same old life are getting voted in. edit: As for no money, they have replicators so the barrier to production is pretty much free making money mostly unnecessary. If I can walk up to a machine and have it produce a perfectly cooked steak with only energy and some form of matter input (air?) there's no need for cattle, ranches, ranchers, transport, slaughter, butchering, more transport, markets, etc. Basically the entire supply chain has been eliminated. And if that replicator makes more replicators, batteries and PV or whatever then yeah, game over for money.
  - megaman821 1y ago
    Money is symbolic. You still have private ownership and trade. If I have a house on a beach and you want that house, something of value to each party has to be traded. Even if you don't call it money, it still functions as money.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  If all your material wants could be supplied by replicators, and your service wants by an GAI computer, the need for most commerce would go towards zero. At that point, I can see people mostly having hobbies, whether its cooking so you open a restaurant or exploring on the Enterprise. But in all those cases, you wouldn't need to charge, because what would you spend the money on?
  - megaman821 1y ago
    This doesn't seem true. The luxury goods market is huge, and the utility of luxury goods vs basic goods is extremely little to none at all. People will still want to signal their status and will still find ways in a post-scarcity world.
    - HWR_14 1y ago
      I don't see why my replicator would not make a Birkin bag as easily as a Walmart brand purse. People will still seek status, but luxury goods as a concept will cease to exist.
      - megaman821 1y ago
        It would make getting a Birkin-like bag as easy as any other but not a Birkin Bag since Hermes owns and controls the distribution of those. You can already get a Birkin quality bag for a fraction of the price and you can get a Birkin looking bag for an even smaller fraction. Owning a Birkin bag has very little to do with its utility as a purse, but as a signal of your status since you can both afford and get invited to purchase one.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  > It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented I think it unfortunately only works on a small scale where humans have a reason to care about each other, where they personally benefit from "sticking together" or the risks of not doing so are high. I.e., a village or small tribe (Native Americans were essentially communists), the crew of the Enterprise, a kibbutz or small colony, etc. Once you scale it up, people just don't care enough about the millions of others to be willing to do anything other than looking out for themselves.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
  Star Trek presents a super idealistic utopian post-scarcity society, probably naively so, but it's primarily intended as an inspiration. Very good science fiction depicting post scarcity society are Iain M. Banks Culture novels. To me it feels like a far more realistic post-scarcity future than Star Trek (although The Expanse feels more likely than either). In the Culture there are AIs which remove the need for humans to do any more work and at times in the book he mentions how citizens find meaning to their existence despite a lack of drive for wealth or materials. In one book (I can't remember which one) in passing it talks about a spaceship being somewhat pointlessly assembled by people, not because it's needed (AI and machines can do it), but because those people wanted to do something they thought would be interesting, I guess they thought of it like building a cathedral. In the Player of Games, the protagonist prides themselves on being able to master any kind of (non-sports type) game and has built their social status and identity around it. Despite the utopian existence, messy situations do arise and the stories tend to revolve around an organization within the Culture called "Special Circumstances", which exist to handle "Special Circumstances" which is anything outside of the usual, sometimes covert, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes crisis solving. Anyway, I highly recommend them if you're into reading.
  - krapp 1y ago
    I think it's less naive and more that the showrunners find themselves stuck with "fully automated luxury space communism" as part of the brand and so they have to at least acknowledge it sometimes, and lean into it when the plot requires, but otherwise they couldn't care less. The only person who took the politics of Trek seriously was probably Gene Roddenberry.
- jerf 1y ago
  "I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work." This is essentially why I stopped reading books that exist solely to push some economic philosophy or something. You can make anything work in fiction. Here, watch: "On Dysokis, the fifth planet settled by Earth, everyone is happy and healthy and lives in perfect harmony all the time, working together to advance the common good." That was easy to write. It's not particularly any harder to expand it out into a story. But it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean I have a path to that any more than anyone else does, or that if I do expand it out into a story, or a massive multi-decade shared franchise, that it has anything that can be practically obtained or emulated. What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise. I know that's not what Roddenberry would have thought, but it's what it comes out to practically in the end in the shared universe. And it works, and on the net despite its unreality I think it was a fantastic thing for the franchise. In the end, despite my disagreements with it being possible, the fact that I don't think Roddenberry meant it that way, and the fact that I don't even think Roddenberry was a particularly good guy, I think he backed into something that is a great deal of what made the Star Trek universe very special and why so many of us have enjoyed it so much. There's nothing wrong with the science fiction that explores societies that still have money and still have the resulting conflicts, but there's also nothing wrong with sometimes saying "Hey, that's not what this franchise is about" and using that as a way to explore into story spaces that the other franchises really can't, because money and conflict and such are forced by the logic of that particular franchise to wedge their way in and essentially dilute the rest of the story. Would The Measure of a Man (can Data be dissembled and studied by Starfleet against his will?) been improved by adding a subplot about an argument about the size of the bond that should be posted before the trial? Would the Dominion War have been improved by an extensive plot about bribery causing substandard war ships to be created because someone at Utopia Planetia was just straight-up lining their pockets? There's nothing abstractly wrong with these ideas and they've been used in other series to good effect, but it's nice to have a series that spent no time on that particular aspect. And there'd be nothing wrong with some other franchise focusing almost exclusively on such a story. But I don't think of the Federation "not having money" as anything other than a story device, and were I in charge of the franchise I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely, or try to write stories around how the idea doesn't really work. There's nothing to emulate there, there's no path from here to there, it just doesn't work. At least not with the model of human that I live with.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Canonically, the moneyless economy precedes the invention of replicators. It arose from humanity rethinking its life choices in the aftermath of WWIII, and first contact with the Vulcans. Humans did "evolve", to become capable of that kind of economy, but it was a cultural evolution, not a biological evolution.
  - krapp 1y ago
    My personal headcanon is that humanity's "evolution" was the result of cultural indoctrination and propaganda on the part of the Vulcans' attempt to "civilize" post-apocalyptic, warp capable humans. It didn't really happen, but believing it did was a useful mass coping mechanism for humanity to deal with the trauma of WW3 and the cultural shock of first contact. This would explain why throughout the franchise, people believe Earth is a paradise and they claim humans have evolved beyond their base desires but it obviously isn't true.
cainxinth 1y ago
We also need another one for the alternative scenario: Are We Mad Max Yet?
- hollywood_court 1y ago
  I think we're much closer to that than we are to Trek.
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    Well, the 21st century of the Trek timeline included mass homelessness and WWIII, so we're pretty close to that.
- Balgair 1y ago
  Depends on where you're sitting I'd guess. San Francisco Bay area? Nope. South Sudan? Been Mad Max for a while, near as I can tell.
kmacleod 1y ago
The technologies I’d like to see tracked include post-scarcity economics, resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
- g-mork 1y ago
  I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to. Everyone living on hand outs is the road to hell
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    They depict two very different economies. If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful. In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
  - delichon 1y ago
    I agree, and one reason is that it didn't dally with the post-scarcity fantasy.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    The Earth of the Expanse has a much higher standard of living then the Earth of today. This is similar to when people call The Sprawl a dystopia: conditions in it are far better then what most people live in today.
    - insane_dreamer 1y ago
      That's because today's Earth poor are the Outers in the Expanse -- and they're as bad off or worse than today
itisuseless 1y ago
Won't load without JS. Was it absolutely needed?
Svip 1y ago
Communicator Communicate remotely between two arbitrary points. It claims smartphones is that (though surely cellular phones would count then; why not list Motorola or whatnot?); but in Star Trek, the communicator works everywhere without cellular towers (well except when it doesn't for plot reasons). I wouldn't say a device like the communicator is available yet.
- fouronnes3 1y ago
  My favorite game watching TNG is trying to figure out how the communicators somehow always perfectly know when the user means to use them. It's very common for a character to tap it to initiate the conversation, but then the back and forth is magically seamless, as well as the end of the communication. All while being mixed up with talking to other characters mid conversation.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    "<number> to beam up" drives my wife nuts and she's right: how the heck does the transporter tech know who they're targeting? Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work? (Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
    - Svip 1y ago
      The '<number> to beam up' line is an instruction to the transporter operator; since they can detect life signs, they can guess by proximity. It's thus not the computer making the call, but a human operator.
      - nosmokewhereiam 1y ago
        Fun addition: "Beam me up, Scotty" wasn't ever a line on the show, just a fun reference.
mhogers 1y ago
How close are we to building our own digital Commander Data with the current iteration of voice based agents? "In progress" according to the website - mind blowing that this is current reality. Cool website. Would love to subscribe to status changes via email.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Extremely far. Not very far from the ship computer. It doesn’t seem sentient but it has a voice interface to all operational data/stats plus a snapshot of all known knowledge at the time of departure from space port.
  - mhogers 1y ago
    I had not considered the ship computer, indeed feels more close to current progress. Having said that, I started rewatching TNG recently and it is quite fascinating to compare Data to the current voice models.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      It's hinted at that Data has a voice model as subsystem. :) He allegedly can't use contractions IIRC. (Then of course he does eventually, because what actor could keep track of that, but anyhow.)
  - ajdude 1y ago
    When dealing with LLMs and prompt engineering to get CAI to do what I needed to do, I am reminded of the scene from TNG where Geordi is continuously rephrasing and readjusting his requests for the computer in the holodeck (especially around 3:30 timestamp): https://youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      That episode is almost uncanny. So accurate seeming and foresighted.
digger495 1y ago
I don't really see the point of this until we have abundant, virtually free energy. (Which I think we never will, thanks to climate change and capitalism)
bluelightning2k 1y ago
This is fun - although I think the scoring system could do with some weighting. "Dematerialize matter from one location and then rematerialize it in a second location. " is worth the same as "Automatic sliding doors"
- anonymousiam 1y ago
  Hey, we're half way there! We can de-materialize matter in many different and effective ways. The re-materialization process still needs some work though.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    > We can de-materialize matter in many different and effective ways. This sentence reads delightfully well in Data’s voice.
jpm_sd 1y ago
I think we're more or less on schedule? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Civil_War https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Civil_War
patel011393 1y ago
Now let's see this timeline for how close we are to Harry Potter tech. In some ways, we're closing the gap.
orbisvicis 1y ago
I'm going to need references for these claims, like a cloaking device. BAE and Northrup Grumman? edit... Actually a lot of these are going to need evidence of progress beyond a mere website.
aspenmayer 1y ago
I think the comparisons of Star Trek to Iain Banks’s Culture series are immediately obvious and welcomed by me and many others in this comment section. I’d like to draw attention toward Peter F. Hamilton’s works, and specifically those in his Commonwealth Saga and its sequels and one-shots. The Advancer and Higher subcultures embody different strains of hacker archetypes; the Higher culture is largely post-scarcity for commodities and incidental expenses, with everything excess costing “matter-engergy credits” essentially, representing the cost to their society to provide you with rabbits from hats upon request. Everyone gets a UBI of these credits every pay period, and they may be stockpiled, traded, and vested. More importantly, they can be discounted, as humans are only in the loop as a formality for most civilian requests. It’s a really interesting concept, and I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are new to the books, of which there are many. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-series-by-peter-f-hamilton.158323/ https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-se... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641 https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641
zebomon 1y ago
Creator here, just seeing this. Thank you very much for the share! I'm reading all the comments now and will make updates to our database accordingly.

41 points by MattSayar 1y ago

Dev left a note on a submission a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492750

tonetegeatinst 1y ago

When it comes to Gravity boots, I think using a force sensor to detect the user placing the foot on a surface is going to be essential. From detection, activating an electromagnet or a material inspired by geko grip that is activated by a current would be a great start.

Mistletoe 1y ago

The weirdest thing for me about Star Trek is no money. I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work. It’s a nice idea though. Everyone on the Enterpise working and toiling and risking their lives for their own personal beliefs and self-motivation only. I almost think humans would have to evolve more for that to ever be the case. It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented.

WaxProlix 1y ago
People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain. Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...
- Sharlin 1y ago
  Some things will obviously always be scarce, but the demand for merely positional goods in something like the Culture would likely not be that big. The values and norms and desires of people raised in a post-scarcity society would simply be very different from ours. The need to "have more than someone else", just for its own sake, would unlikely be common or socially approved of. Though I wonder if something like nobility would make a comeback – when you can have almost anything you want, one of the things you can’t have is someone else’s family line! "New money" is meaningless in a society without money, but "old money" has the same value as it always has had – and it’s obvious why the former isn’t really held in high regard in many real societies either, compared to the latter. Banks talks about this a bit in Excession. The demand for prime real estate is largely solved in the Culture by Orbitals anyway; indeed preferring to live on something as space-inefficient as a planet is seen as quaint and slightly eccentric.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
It didn't really even work on Star Trek. They could pretend it did as long as they were on a ship that flew away at the end of every episode. But on DS9, since they were stationary and had to deal with other economies, the issue of money came up fairly often. The post-scarcity thing didn't hold up to scrutiny either, even fictionally: there was nearly a civil war on Bajor because the Federation couldn't come up with enough soil reclamators to prevent a possible famine at one point. Any time something needed to be scarce for the sake of the plot or drama, it was.
- soco 1y ago
  So this underlines the idea that no scarcity works as long there's no scarcity?
nerdjon 1y ago
I have thought many times about what I would be doing with my life if money was no object. If I just had "everything" I needed. For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. I would be more picky about what I would be doing but at its core I would likely still be doing work similar to what I am doing now, just instead I would make sure it is working towards something I have a passion for. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life? Just sitting at home all the time, that is boring.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. Me too. The reality of my existence is that I have tons that I want to do, and having to work for a living really gets in the way of doing it. The irony being working for a living provides funds for doing the stuff I'm actually interested in while at the same time draining away time for that same stuff.
- jajko 1y ago
  Have you ever backpacked around the world? I mean dirt cheap, immersed with locals and not some sterile luxury bubble. I've spent just in India & Nepal cca 6 months and barely scratched the surface of those places and cultures, I could go on for another 10 years. Life-changing experience. Once you get hooked on travel, meeting cultures, doing various outdoor sports (some more or less extreme), questions like that become meaningless. And that is before the ultimate meaning of life - kids come along.
actionfromafar 1y ago
Gotta remember that the people on Starships are an elite, largely self-selected group of military personnel. And if you want to deal with money there are plenty of opportunities at the fringes of the Federation and beyond.
MisterTea 1y ago
> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented. I think it fails because the only people who want to lead a revolution are megalomaniacs who get into power after the revolution and turns it into a dictatorship instead of turning it over to the people. The average person just wants to live their life which is why populist strong men who promise more of the same old life are getting voted in. edit: As for no money, they have replicators so the barrier to production is pretty much free making money mostly unnecessary. If I can walk up to a machine and have it produce a perfectly cooked steak with only energy and some form of matter input (air?) there's no need for cattle, ranches, ranchers, transport, slaughter, butchering, more transport, markets, etc. Basically the entire supply chain has been eliminated. And if that replicator makes more replicators, batteries and PV or whatever then yeah, game over for money.
- megaman821 1y ago
  Money is symbolic. You still have private ownership and trade. If I have a house on a beach and you want that house, something of value to each party has to be traded. Even if you don't call it money, it still functions as money.
HWR_14 1y ago
If all your material wants could be supplied by replicators, and your service wants by an GAI computer, the need for most commerce would go towards zero. At that point, I can see people mostly having hobbies, whether its cooking so you open a restaurant or exploring on the Enterprise. But in all those cases, you wouldn't need to charge, because what would you spend the money on?
- megaman821 1y ago
  This doesn't seem true. The luxury goods market is huge, and the utility of luxury goods vs basic goods is extremely little to none at all. People will still want to signal their status and will still find ways in a post-scarcity world.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    I don't see why my replicator would not make a Birkin bag as easily as a Walmart brand purse. People will still seek status, but luxury goods as a concept will cease to exist.
    - megaman821 1y ago
      It would make getting a Birkin-like bag as easy as any other but not a Birkin Bag since Hermes owns and controls the distribution of those. You can already get a Birkin quality bag for a fraction of the price and you can get a Birkin looking bag for an even smaller fraction. Owning a Birkin bag has very little to do with its utility as a purse, but as a signal of your status since you can both afford and get invited to purchase one.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented I think it unfortunately only works on a small scale where humans have a reason to care about each other, where they personally benefit from "sticking together" or the risks of not doing so are high. I.e., a village or small tribe (Native Americans were essentially communists), the crew of the Enterprise, a kibbutz or small colony, etc. Once you scale it up, people just don't care enough about the millions of others to be willing to do anything other than looking out for themselves.
jonathanlydall 1y ago
Star Trek presents a super idealistic utopian post-scarcity society, probably naively so, but it's primarily intended as an inspiration. Very good science fiction depicting post scarcity society are Iain M. Banks Culture novels. To me it feels like a far more realistic post-scarcity future than Star Trek (although The Expanse feels more likely than either). In the Culture there are AIs which remove the need for humans to do any more work and at times in the book he mentions how citizens find meaning to their existence despite a lack of drive for wealth or materials. In one book (I can't remember which one) in passing it talks about a spaceship being somewhat pointlessly assembled by people, not because it's needed (AI and machines can do it), but because those people wanted to do something they thought would be interesting, I guess they thought of it like building a cathedral. In the Player of Games, the protagonist prides themselves on being able to master any kind of (non-sports type) game and has built their social status and identity around it. Despite the utopian existence, messy situations do arise and the stories tend to revolve around an organization within the Culture called "Special Circumstances", which exist to handle "Special Circumstances" which is anything outside of the usual, sometimes covert, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes crisis solving. Anyway, I highly recommend them if you're into reading.
- krapp 1y ago
  I think it's less naive and more that the showrunners find themselves stuck with "fully automated luxury space communism" as part of the brand and so they have to at least acknowledge it sometimes, and lean into it when the plot requires, but otherwise they couldn't care less. The only person who took the politics of Trek seriously was probably Gene Roddenberry.
jerf 1y ago
"I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work." This is essentially why I stopped reading books that exist solely to push some economic philosophy or something. You can make anything work in fiction. Here, watch: "On Dysokis, the fifth planet settled by Earth, everyone is happy and healthy and lives in perfect harmony all the time, working together to advance the common good." That was easy to write. It's not particularly any harder to expand it out into a story. But it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean I have a path to that any more than anyone else does, or that if I do expand it out into a story, or a massive multi-decade shared franchise, that it has anything that can be practically obtained or emulated. What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise. I know that's not what Roddenberry would have thought, but it's what it comes out to practically in the end in the shared universe. And it works, and on the net despite its unreality I think it was a fantastic thing for the franchise. In the end, despite my disagreements with it being possible, the fact that I don't think Roddenberry meant it that way, and the fact that I don't even think Roddenberry was a particularly good guy, I think he backed into something that is a great deal of what made the Star Trek universe very special and why so many of us have enjoyed it so much. There's nothing wrong with the science fiction that explores societies that still have money and still have the resulting conflicts, but there's also nothing wrong with sometimes saying "Hey, that's not what this franchise is about" and using that as a way to explore into story spaces that the other franchises really can't, because money and conflict and such are forced by the logic of that particular franchise to wedge their way in and essentially dilute the rest of the story. Would The Measure of a Man (can Data be dissembled and studied by Starfleet against his will?) been improved by adding a subplot about an argument about the size of the bond that should be posted before the trial? Would the Dominion War have been improved by an extensive plot about bribery causing substandard war ships to be created because someone at Utopia Planetia was just straight-up lining their pockets? There's nothing abstractly wrong with these ideas and they've been used in other series to good effect, but it's nice to have a series that spent no time on that particular aspect. And there'd be nothing wrong with some other franchise focusing almost exclusively on such a story. But I don't think of the Federation "not having money" as anything other than a story device, and were I in charge of the franchise I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely, or try to write stories around how the idea doesn't really work. There's nothing to emulate there, there's no path from here to there, it just doesn't work. At least not with the model of human that I live with.
NoGravitas 1y ago
Canonically, the moneyless economy precedes the invention of replicators. It arose from humanity rethinking its life choices in the aftermath of WWIII, and first contact with the Vulcans. Humans did "evolve", to become capable of that kind of economy, but it was a cultural evolution, not a biological evolution.
- krapp 1y ago
  My personal headcanon is that humanity's "evolution" was the result of cultural indoctrination and propaganda on the part of the Vulcans' attempt to "civilize" post-apocalyptic, warp capable humans. It didn't really happen, but believing it did was a useful mass coping mechanism for humanity to deal with the trauma of WW3 and the cultural shock of first contact. This would explain why throughout the franchise, people believe Earth is a paradise and they claim humans have evolved beyond their base desires but it obviously isn't true.

cainxinth 1y ago

We also need another one for the alternative scenario: Are We Mad Max Yet?

hollywood_court 1y ago
I think we're much closer to that than we are to Trek.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Well, the 21st century of the Trek timeline included mass homelessness and WWIII, so we're pretty close to that.
Balgair 1y ago
Depends on where you're sitting I'd guess. San Francisco Bay area? Nope. South Sudan? Been Mad Max for a while, near as I can tell.

kmacleod 1y ago

The technologies I’d like to see tracked include post-scarcity economics, resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.

g-mork 1y ago
I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to. Everyone living on hand outs is the road to hell
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  They depict two very different economies. If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful. In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
- delichon 1y ago
  I agree, and one reason is that it didn't dally with the post-scarcity fantasy.
- XorNot 1y ago
  The Earth of the Expanse has a much higher standard of living then the Earth of today. This is similar to when people call The Sprawl a dystopia: conditions in it are far better then what most people live in today.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    That's because today's Earth poor are the Outers in the Expanse -- and they're as bad off or worse than today

itisuseless 1y ago

Won't load without JS. Was it absolutely needed?

Svip 1y ago

Communicator Communicate remotely between two arbitrary points. It claims smartphones is that (though surely cellular phones would count then; why not list Motorola or whatnot?); but in Star Trek, the communicator works everywhere without cellular towers (well except when it doesn't for plot reasons). I wouldn't say a device like the communicator is available yet.

fouronnes3 1y ago
My favorite game watching TNG is trying to figure out how the communicators somehow always perfectly know when the user means to use them. It's very common for a character to tap it to initiate the conversation, but then the back and forth is magically seamless, as well as the end of the communication. All while being mixed up with talking to other characters mid conversation.
- XorNot 1y ago
  "<number> to beam up" drives my wife nuts and she's right: how the heck does the transporter tech know who they're targeting? Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work? (Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
  - Svip 1y ago
    The '<number> to beam up' line is an instruction to the transporter operator; since they can detect life signs, they can guess by proximity. It's thus not the computer making the call, but a human operator.
    - nosmokewhereiam 1y ago
      Fun addition: "Beam me up, Scotty" wasn't ever a line on the show, just a fun reference.

mhogers 1y ago

How close are we to building our own digital Commander Data with the current iteration of voice based agents? "In progress" according to the website - mind blowing that this is current reality. Cool website. Would love to subscribe to status changes via email.

actionfromafar 1y ago
Extremely far. Not very far from the ship computer. It doesn’t seem sentient but it has a voice interface to all operational data/stats plus a snapshot of all known knowledge at the time of departure from space port.
- mhogers 1y ago
  I had not considered the ship computer, indeed feels more close to current progress. Having said that, I started rewatching TNG recently and it is quite fascinating to compare Data to the current voice models.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    It's hinted at that Data has a voice model as subsystem. :) He allegedly can't use contractions IIRC. (Then of course he does eventually, because what actor could keep track of that, but anyhow.)
- ajdude 1y ago
  When dealing with LLMs and prompt engineering to get CAI to do what I needed to do, I am reminded of the scene from TNG where Geordi is continuously rephrasing and readjusting his requests for the computer in the holodeck (especially around 3:30 timestamp): https://youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    That episode is almost uncanny. So accurate seeming and foresighted.

digger495 1y ago

I don't really see the point of this until we have abundant, virtually free energy. (Which I think we never will, thanks to climate change and capitalism)

bluelightning2k 1y ago

This is fun - although I think the scoring system could do with some weighting. "Dematerialize matter from one location and then rematerialize it in a second location. " is worth the same as "Automatic sliding doors"

anonymousiam 1y ago
Hey, we're half way there! We can de-materialize matter in many different and effective ways. The re-materialization process still needs some work though.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  > We can de-materialize matter in many different and effective ways. This sentence reads delightfully well in Data’s voice.

jpm_sd 1y ago

I think we're more or less on schedule? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Civil_War https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Civil_War

patel011393 1y ago

Now let's see this timeline for how close we are to Harry Potter tech. In some ways, we're closing the gap.

orbisvicis 1y ago

I'm going to need references for these claims, like a cloaking device. BAE and Northrup Grumman? edit... Actually a lot of these are going to need evidence of progress beyond a mere website.

aspenmayer 1y ago

I think the comparisons of Star Trek to Iain Banks’s Culture series are immediately obvious and welcomed by me and many others in this comment section. I’d like to draw attention toward Peter F. Hamilton’s works, and specifically those in his Commonwealth Saga and its sequels and one-shots. The Advancer and Higher subcultures embody different strains of hacker archetypes; the Higher culture is largely post-scarcity for commodities and incidental expenses, with everything excess costing “matter-engergy credits” essentially, representing the cost to their society to provide you with rabbits from hats upon request. Everyone gets a UBI of these credits every pay period, and they may be stockpiled, traded, and vested. More importantly, they can be discounted, as humans are only in the loop as a formality for most civilian requests. It’s a really interesting concept, and I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are new to the books, of which there are many. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-series-by-peter-f-hamilton.158323/ https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-se... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641 https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641

zebomon 1y ago

Creator here, just seeing this. Thank you very much for the share! I'm reading all the comments now and will make updates to our database accordingly.