Comment by dguest
21 hours ago
I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
21 hours ago
I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.
I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.
Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.
Star Trek is a socialist society.
Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
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