I see no reason to think they have an abundance of energy. Is there any evidence for that on screen?
We know matter-antimatter reactors are available, as they are used to power ships, even small ones such as the
Delta Flyer. We know fusion reactors are common enough for colonists to have a fusion reactor
in their house, per the Uxbridges in the TNG episode "The Survivors". If every home has its own fusion reactor, then energy should be pretty abundant. I'm not stretching the facts, just putting together the pieces laid out in the show.
It's been suggested here that Federation economy is based on the abundance of resources, thanks to the use of replicators - but replicators need energy to work, and all those replicators need a lot of energy.
I'm one of those that suggested that. It seems that given the fundamental technology depicted in Star Trek that the UFP society should be using a post-scarcity economic system. Given a replicator, able to produce anything given available power, then what could be scarce anymore? Is there anything that a replicator cannot produce? Even gold-pressed latinum was never said to be unreplicable. Some dangerous substances were restricted, and living biological specimens were beyond the capabilities of 24th century replicators, but overall there's apparently nothing a replicator couldn't produce. Food, drink, machines, clothing, even musical instruments have come out of replicators. That kind of technology would transform an economy.
Yes, replicators may need a lot of energy, but apparently the UFP society is able to provide that energy. Why else would replicators be common enough for households to have one? Every cabin on the
Enterprise-D had a replicator terminal; is it a unreasonable to think that individual households would have a replicator? We know that replicators are small and portable enough to be installed in a home. The
Enterprise-D crew donated a portable replicator to the Uxbridges when investigating the distress calls from Delta Rana in "The Survivors". And even though Robert Picard elected to
not have a replicator in his home, the fact that he and Marie discussed
getting one indicates it's possible to have at least one replicator per household, and the power to supply to it, probably from a fusion reactor either in the home or from the local power grid.
First of all, we don't know what the population is, because Trek rarely really focused on Earth and revealed very little about its society (not counting speeches given by Starfleet officers), but I've already listed the reasons why it's very likely that it's overpopulated. The human population of Earth has in real life been growing ever since the 15th century. For the last 200 years, it has grown from under 1 billion to almost 7 billion. Even if we assume that the World War 3 decimated the human race, the conditions in the next 3 centuries would mean a huge growth in population.
Sure, the high quality of life in the 24th century almost guarantees conditions ripe for "overpopulation" to occur, but what do we know about population growth post-WWIII? Did single-child families become more common? I think that's certainly possible. How many of the
Star Trek: Enterprise characters (all born post-WWIII) had siblings, and how many did they have? Apparently Reed, Tucker, Sato and Mayweather all had at least one sibling (according to Memory Alpha), but Mayweather was a child of a Boomer family plying the space lanes, and Tucker and Reed each only had one sibling. Only Hoshi had more than one sibling. In the 22nd century, then, population growth may have been flat. By the 23rd century, of the TOS crew we only know that Kirk had a brother; the rest of the crew may have been only children (we know Chekov was, since his brother Piotr was a false memory), meaning that population growth on Earth in the 23rd century could be negative. By the 24th century, of the TNG crew, only Picard and LaForge had siblings. Smaller families may be more common in the 24th century, with possibly negative population growth
on Earth. And even if population growth were quite high, I don't think we know enough about the capacities of colony ships to say whether significant chunks (hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions?) of the population could be moved rapidly to M-class worlds in Federation space.
Second, by "land" I don't mean just any land, but land that can be lived on. How many of those planets in the galaxy have the conditions suitable for the life of a Human? Same goes for Vulcans, or any other race in the Federation. You can't just pick any random unpopulated or underpopulated planet. (And in many cases, they might be unpopulated or underpopulated exactly for the reason that the life conditions are unsuitable for many species.)
M-class planets seem to be common in the Trek universe. McCoy in "Balance of Terror" cited the probability of "three million" Earth-type planets in the galaxy. How many of those M-class planets are in the territory claimed by the UFP, I don't know. But in addition to the naturally-occurring M-class planets, the UFP is capable of terraforming worlds to M-class conditions in a matter of decades. In the solar system alone, Mars and Venus were undergoing terraformation.
Third, if you polled Humans from Earth if they'd rather remain on Earth and on the land where their family lived and where they were born, or if they'd rather go to live on a planet thousands of light years away, which option do you think would prove more popular?
That's tough. I admit that a lot of people would choose to stay at home, but you have to admit that humans like to travel. Millions of people emigrated from their ancestral homes to the US in the 19th century, so ties to ancestral land aren't always strong. For instance, my family has no land, and so my family has no ties to any particular plot of dirt on this planet.
In the 24th century, warp travel seems quick and easy enough for people to live on a planet hundreds of lightyears from Earth but still be able to visit home (if they even consider Earth home). Of course some of that is due to writing (ships always travel at the speed of plot), but even so, moving around within the UFP is probably little different than flying from one major city on Earth to another nowadays. For instance, in the 22nd century, Trip was able to take a trip to Vulcan while supposedly on shore leave
at Earth, so a 16-lightyear trip is apparently no big deal even then, and travel between Earth and Vulcan should be much quicker and easier in the 24th century. Travel between Earth and furthest reaches of the UFP may not take more than a few weeks, and the passengers would probably travel in comfort the whole time.
So is it really a hardship to live thousands of lightyears from Earth in the 24th century? Do most humans even live on Earth? And would they necessarily care if they never even visit Earth?
There is absolutely no reason to think that there is an abundance of land in the Federation, and a lot of reason to think that there is scarcity. In fact, isn't the overpopulation and scarcity of land one of the driving forces behind the process of establishing colonies on other planets?
I don't think so. In the TNG episode "Sub Rosa", it is said that the Caldos colony
was an attempt to make the colony an accurate replica of Scotland. A frivolous idea if the goal is to move large portions of a population to a new planet, but in my view such an activity is to be expected of an interstellar society's population that really doesn't have anything else to do with its time and energy. If someone is bored of the easy life on Earth in the 24th century, they can find a group of like-minded people (and aliens) and decide to found a colony just to recreate Scotland on a distant planet. That kind of undertaking takes a lot of energy and effort, and if energy and land weren't abundant in the 24th century UFP society, then those colonists must be the super-rich elite of the UFP. Maybe they are.
Bottom line is, though, that fusion power alone would give a society a great deal of energy to expend on things that we can't afford to try now, and a replicator, by it's very nature, would quickly give the entire population the means to support itself without laboring for money. Even if access to replicators and patterns were initially restricted, with licenses and software limits, it would only take one guy crazy enough to just give away intellectual property (replicator designs and patterns) rather than selling it, to demolish the idea of "selling" patterns or "leasing" replicators.
You don't see the correlation with the medical advances, availability of medical care, better nutrition and sanitation? Population hasn't grown because people have been having more children - in fact, with the availability of good contraceptives, the opposite would be true - it is because infant mortality has gone down, far less children are dying, far less women are dying at childbirth, and human mortality rate in general has gone down.
