Vivi22 said:
mattttherman3 said:
I would sincerely hope, Star Trek. Warp Drive aside, what humanity does is great, replicators, no money(yes, there is Latinum, but Earth has no actual currency), people strive to better themselves instead of being selfish and all about money(looking at you oil companies and banks!!!!). Humanity has stopped fighting itself(in general). Also, it seems that God is RARELY mentioned outside of DS9, and that is quite an encouraging thought.
I agree with you. Though one thing that never bothered me as a child but has come to interest me now is the concept of there being no money in the Federation. It makes sense with respect to replicators to some degree since material goods lose a great deal of value when they can simply be replicated in seconds with no real labour or materials cost. But there are two questions which arise relating to it.
1) You can't replicate planets so how is land and living space allocated?
2) Replicators still require energy which is still a finite resource, though clearly much more plentiful, but should really have some method of rationing it.
Now I get it's a sci-fi TV show and they probably didn't have actual answers for sustainable systems which are fair that can accomplish this efficiently. It just boggles my mind lately since money is, despite its inherent problems, a pretty efficient and impartial way to allocate resources.
As for what future is actually most likely, probably something involving a massive ecological disaster. Looking at agriculture alone we're already well on our way, to say nothing of our growing use of oil (BP oil spill anyone). Frankly, I'll be surprised if we don't destroy our present civilization within 200-300 years. Accidentally or otherwise.
That is a tough one. But there are clues.
For instance, right at this minute there'd be no real problem in terms of resources in making all copyrighted materials in existence available to everyone on the planet. (well, everyone with digital equipment, anyway.)
The only reason this is a problem is because the people involved in creating it expend other resources in doing so.
However, those resources are pretty similar regardless of how many people get the end product.
You can see in theory that the same logic would apply to anything that can be replicated.
As for energy... Well, that's a different question. It depends on just how much energy is required.
Remember we're talking a setting where it's possible to have a fusion reactor the size of a suitcase, and indeed it was demonstrated at one point that the replicator on a ferengi shuttle, which apparently had a built in power supply was enough to keep two ferengi going for several years...
Energy is not as big a deal as it seems by real-world predictions. It's been estimated for instance that at the rate we currently use energy, if you extract deuterium from seawater we could meet our entire current energy needs for a period of at a minimum, several thousand years.
As to money being efficient and impartial, that's debatable. One obvious aspect of our current financial systems is that the easiest way to get money is to already have money.
That is, the relationship between how much money you have, compared to how much you can make seems to be close to exponential.
(Eg, making 1 million is harder than turning 1 million into 10 million.)
There also seem to be signs of some serious negative consequences to money, especially the way we use it right now that bias what gets produced in ways that aren't necessarily desirable, or even efficient.
Does a society such as the federation still have limited resources though? Clearly, yes.
Leaving aside the issue of land and housing, starships come to mind.
While we occasionally see privately owned freighters apparently owned by federation citizens, in general, it does not seem easy to get access to a starship of your own.
If resources weren't a problem, you'd assume anyone that wanted a starship could have one. But that clearly isn't the case.
Still, the answer to the question might be cultural as much as technical. As Picard said (in First Contact I think, but it might've been somewhere else.) "We've moved beyond the need for material posessions...".
Although land is in limited supply, keep in mind that limited is a relative statement, and it all rather depends on what you need it for.
(apologies if you're not overly familiar with metric units, but I'd have a hard time calculating any of this in imperial ones.)
For instance, currently we have in the region of 7 billion people on the planet.
The Earth is not perfectly spherical, but can be approximated as a sphere with a diameter of 12,742 km.
The surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2
with r being the radius, which is half the diameter, (or 6,371 km), you get a surface area for the earth of roughly 510,000,000 km^2
Now, roughly 71% of the planet is covered in water, so the actual area of land is only about 148 million km^2
But, what does that mean? Well, our current population has 0.021 km^2 to their name. Or, 21,131 m^2 (Remember, when dealing with areas 1 km^2 = 1000*1000 m^2)
That might not sound incredibly huge, but keep in mind a few things here:
That's the actual surface area, and a lot of the areas in cities is covered in multi-story buildings which have a floor area greater than the amount of surface area they occupy.
To give you a sense of perspective about this though, you'd have to have some sense of scale.
I live in a relatively small studio apartment. It's small, granted, but I don't think a single person would have much reason to live in any more than about 2-3 times this space unless they really had extravagant tendencies.
The floor space of my place works out to something in the region of 35 m^2. And I live in a 3 story building, so the ground area is quite a bit less than that. (for point of reference, background materials for TNG claim each crew member aboard a starship is allocated about 110 m^2 - and that's onboard a starship, where space is definitely at a serious premium!)
That means, assuming you'd divide it up equally, I physically occupy only about 1/500th of my share of the land surface of the planet.
Of course, in reality, large chunks of this aren't really all that hospitable (deserts for instance), some allowance would have to be made for nature, there'd be shared spaces in the area I live in that cut into that figure, and much of the rest is in fact in use for farmland.
Although... Widespread use of replicators would clearly have an impact on the need for farmland, which is by far the single biggest use of land area we currently have.
Assuming energy is abundant enough, a lot of land could be freed up by switching from agriculture to replicated food.
(Though there is clearly still some farming going on in Star Trek, given that Picard's family owns a vineyard. - but this may have less to do with necessity and more to do with tradition and/or other more personal reasons to the people that tend such a place.)
In any event, when something is cheap enough, rationing it may not be necessary. (As could theoretically be done with software right now), but how would such a society function?
There clearly still needs to be some method to ration more expensive objects (such as houses, starships, and so on. - It's possible that an item such as a car is cheap enough in technical terms to be given to anyone that wants one, but then again, maybe not.)
OK, I'm starting to ramble on a bit here.
But consider the cultural effects of being able to get all kinds of stuff for free whenever you wanted it?
Want a new computer? Go get one. New furniture? Sure.
I suspect a side effect of this would be that people would be less inclined to hoard things.
Because, after all, if you can get most things you want whenever you want them, the reasons for hanging on to them start having more to do with sentimentality than any actual need to keep them around.
But, in the end it's all so much speculation. And of course, the real answer about Star Trek is it was never given a huge amount of thought as to how such a society would function.
As an aside, some unofficial materials imply it's mostly just earth that doesn't use money. Which kind of makes the whole situation a bit more peculiar.
In particular, the implication is that all of the member planets have their own way of governing their own planets, and aside from the common elements (such as starfleet and the like), and an agreement to share resources to some extent, they are free to set themselves up however they feel like.
It's all a bit confusing.
Anyway, I have my own reasons (partially inspired by Star Trek, but overall largely unrelated) to consider the logistics of a society without money, but let's just say it's pretty complicated.
Especially because there seems little precedent for it. And it's pretty difficult to predict the results of something which seems like it's never been attempted.
Nor is it that easy to see what kind of arrangements stand some chance of working, and which would clearly fail outright.
For instance, using modern technology rather than speculative future stuff, it seems plausible, assuming no interference from capitalist influences to hand out software, films, games, etc, entirely for free. - Equally, it seems reasonable that moderate size durable goods could be handed out on demand from a free service akin to a library - which would actually be marginally more efficient because anyone that no longer needs an item can return it, and it could go to someone else. - further, if you decided to move, why keep your existing stuff, when you could just return it all, and get new stuff from the local service near wherever it is you've moved to?
Also, how many people actually need a car of their own? Most cars spend large amounts of time sitting around doing nothing. A system where you could take a car as and when required would cut down both on the number of cars needed, and the amount of parking space in use. - schemes reminiscent of this exist, by the way, but their use is fairly restricted.
- Existing capitalism related concerns interfere with the practicality of such ideas, but they do seem workable in theory.
Speaking of capitalism, the need for corporations to always be making a profit leads to some obvious inefficiencies of their own. Consider the constant construction of new cars for instance. Yes, they are marginally better than older ones usually, but not by a big enough margin for that to be a good reason to replace them at the rate we do.
It's quite obvious that a car should be able to last 30-40 years without much trouble depending on how it's built, and in principle, it's not out of the question to design something which could last 100 years or more.
Meanwhile, the industry seems to try and push to get cars replaced every 4-5 years. And while second-hand cars do tend to get used a lot as well, the rate at which cars get replaced still seems to have less to do with any technical or practical need, but more the fact that the manufacturers need to keep selling new cars at a fairly substantial pace to remain viable.
Efficiency can to some extent depend on how you frame the question it seems.
Anyway, sorry to everyone for that massive and mostly tangentially related post. Hopefully it's at least vaguely interesting...
