Comment by kmacleod
2 days ago
The technologies I’d like to see tracked include post-scarcity economics, resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
2 days ago
The technologies I’d like to see tracked include post-scarcity economics, resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
We'll never be Star Trek without these because the tech of Trek will just be used by the powerful to exploit and repress us.
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
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.
That is a 1st world country point of view. Reality is that we don't have an unified, global living standard now, and neither probably by the Expanse point of time.
And if a critical amount of people decided to try luck working on asteroids, it might mean that they didn't had a comfortable way of life down here at the start of the process, and probably by the end of it too.
That's because today's Earth poor are the Outers in the Expanse -- and they're as bad off or worse than today
3 replies →
> I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to.
That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.
This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.
Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years 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.
I agree, and one reason is that it didn't dally with the post-scarcity fantasy.
Why do you need these
>resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
if you have this
>post-scarcity economics
Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
> Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
Land can't be that scarce. How many times did we see an entire planet colonized by like 200 people? Also, it seems like very few cities in the future have put hard caps on building height.
People have their own replicators, as you say; and cheap abundant energy. The need for labour is vastly reduced.
And dilithium, while 'rare' is not an essential commodity for anything except space travel.
> even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense.
Sure; but they are abundant enough that 'fair distribution' hardly matters, which I think was the OP's point.
6 replies →
After Khan wiped out the population of India and China, land was not scarce.
> needs-based allocation systems
This one is a fantasy, which communism (that I lived in) had shown many times.
Communism was never post scarcity; if there is basically infinite of whatever we need, nothing that we have seen before applies anymore.
If there’s infinite of whatever you need, you don’t need needs-based allocation. It can be entirely wants-based.
Your communism didn't include replicators and cheap energy to run them.