Comment by dinfinity

> 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.