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Comment by g-mork

2 days 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

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g-mork

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XorNot  2 days 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.

  • gmuslera  2 days ago

    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.

  • insane_dreamer  2 days ago

    That's because today's Earth poor are the Outers in the Expanse -- and they're as bad off or worse than today

    • bnpxft  2 days ago

      Yes, the economy of Earth in The Expanse is an extractive colonial one not unlike what we have now in the US. It is the logical extrapolation of the current neo-liberal economic model we have now projected into space.

      The people of Earth live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The UN and corporations extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Earth's bidding. All the while, the belters see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Earth, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.

      It is a pretty accurate analogy of the current state of affairs of Earth today, but the divide is between the Global North and the Global South.

      The people of Global North live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The governments and corporations of the Global North extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Global North's bidding. All the while, the working class of the Global South see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Global North, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.

      The Earth of The Expanse is a warning, not an aspiration.

dinfinity  2 days ago

> 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.

bitmasher9  2 days 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.