In The 24th Century, How Did They Do It?

[Xerxes1979]

nuclear fusion combined with a unified planetary goverment and Vulcan assistence.

Food synthesizers seem to be very early inventions, meaning that no one on planet Earth was starving. Adequate nutrition and better medicine problably lead to a global rise in IQ and indirectly moral development.

Also there might be genome wide genetic changes to the human race several hundred years after the invention of birth control. Traits associated with sociopathy may be less prevelant in the future.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Seriously, people are confusing "optimistic" with "utopian." Trek, especially TOS, was never meant to be utopian. There are still personality conflicts, rare alien diseases, broken hearts, family problems, crime, etc. It's just that, in the more civilized quarters of the Federation, things seems to be better than they are today. Not perfect, better.
............
"Captain's log. A mysterious plague has wiped out the crops on Vega Omicron V, a distant colony that has been waging war against Brewster's Planet for over 10,000 years. In the meantime, Ensign Chekov has been poisoned and we have reason to believe that there is a traitor aboard . . . ."

Does that sound like utopia?

When you look at the first couple of seasons of TNG they strongly imply that humans live in some type of Utopia. TNG is one of the main culprits, the other shows toned it down a bit afterwards.

Here's a few examples;

For starters, the miniskirts for men and women, remember?
Suggests humans see social sexuality in a much, much different way in the 24th century'.

...but these lifeforms feel such passionate hatred over differences in customs, God concepts, and even strangely enough, economic systems...

Picard just doesn't understand why...

WESLEY: Have you got a... a "cold?"
DATA: A cold what?
WESLEY: It's a disease my mother says people used to get.

Exactly. Cryonics. It was akind of fad in the late twentieth century. People feared dying. It terrified them.

Apparently humans in the 24th century have NO fear dying. At all.

Picard;.....we've learned how to detect the seeds of criminal behavior... Capital punishment is no longer justified in our world as a deterrent.

Suggests that crime is eliminated, at least to a huge extent.

Starfleet is not a military organization. Our purpose is exploration.

They don't consider their organization the military--they have either renamed it, or changed the definition entirely. They just don't want to call it the military.

We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.

Extreme Utopian statement ^. The need for want, even the need for possessions is gone. That means no money, and possibly personal possessions doesn't exist for them.

When humans work, they "pretend" to make money, just like they "pretend" to be in the military, except it's not called that.

It;s interesting that these quotes come from the first few seasons of TNG....

 

[horatio83]

The crucial events are the ones depicted in the background of FC. Civilization was destroyed after WWIII and such a situation is always open, e.g. the aftermath of WWI paired with economic malaise opened up the space for fascism.
In this post WWIII ideological void entered the Vulcans as involuntary father figures. Humans did not want to embarrass themselves in the eyes of these people whose gaze made them want to get their sh*t together.

How did they get their sh*t together? Nobody knows but politics seems fairly Western whereas economics seems focused on providing everybody with basic goods which is at least in the 24th century very cheap.

I still think that innate human ambition and greed would pose problems, but overwhelming peer pressure growing up in this new environment would serve to limit this and end the exploitation of the majority by a powerful few.

I agree and would like to continue along your lines:
Humankind would have had to require a serious degree of collective discipline (The quasi-military aspect of Starfleet illustrates that this is not a liberal, hedonistic paradise but one based on discipline. Or to say it with Aristotle: "The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement."). Obviously this is a pretty controversial word so let me shortly elaborate on it. This does not imply that there are any explicit rules that forbid you e.g. to accumulate wealth or be a racist. That would make the society uber-regulated or even tyrannical. But there would have to be implicit rules that make anybody who behaves like this a pariah.
My favourite example is the incest taboo. It has been created some thousands years ago for the purpose of expanding families via getting cousins and it is pretty hard-wired into us yet nobody has to ever explain it to you. It basically exists in what you could call the social subtext. This is also where I would locate Picard's remark about "the acquisition of wealth [...] no longer [being] the driving force in our lives". Another words for this might be social norms.

 

[Greg Cox]

Granted, the first couple seasons of TNG pushed the utopian thing a bit hard, but that got toned down later on. And it never really applied to TOS or DS9.

 

[T'Girl]

Apparently humans in the 24th century have NO fear dying. At all.

And yet, look at the efforts they took to save Tasha Yar. Doctor Crusher kept "zapping" her long after her death was obvious. In Tapestry Picard was medically dead, again Crusher expended efforts to return him to life. Death is viewed in the 24th century as a negative, just as it is today.

Suggests that crime is eliminated, at least to a huge extent.

But beyond just having just a few jails, these people have penal colonies.

They don't consider their organization the military

Old debate yes. Starfleet, naming aside, is the armed forces of their civilization. Failure on their part to acknowledge this shows ... what? A blindness to what their civilization does. And who they are as a people.

We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.

Extreme Utopian statement ^. The need for want, even the need for possessions is gone. That means no money, and possibly personal possessions doesn't exist for them.

We've seem possessions, so that part isn't there.

People obviously still want things, so that part isn't there.

Eliminated hunger, they've learn to grow food and move it around, bravo.

And how Picard's verbalization's in The Neutral Zone translates into "no money" is hard to see.

if you watch a show set in a present day restaurant or bar, you won't alway see people paying for what they eat or drink ... but sometimes you do.

In the future of Star Trek we hear about the use of money ... sometimes.

When humans work, they "pretend" to make money,

Why would they do this? At all? Ever?

just like they "pretend" to be in the military

And pretend to wear "uniforms" and pretend to tell Deanna to actual wear one on the bridge.

And they pretend to fire weapons into the warships of other civilizations and pretend to kill everyone aboard.

Just having fun?

 

[Timo]

Elimination of poverty is a stunt that should be relatively easy to pull. It's no different from rescuing an economy through make-work: Hitler had it easy there. Just set economic equality as your political platform and then take suitably drastic steps towards it, one of these being massive investment in infrastructure expansion using unskilled labor.

The trick is in making such a thing stay. Generally, these quick solutions have no staying power, and aren't intended to have any. But elimination of poverty might suddenly become popular in its own right, especially if it proved much easier to do than feared thanks to help from the heavens. Clearly, it hasn't led to elimination of lifestyle differences - it appears to only have eliminated certain specific lifestyles based on desperation and hunger. And hunger is the greatest desperation, yet also something we can trivially conquer with improved distribution. And scifi utopias are all about improved means of moving about...

Conquest of disease might be a technicality and a triviality, effected simply because a society of alien species would have significantly more skill in dealing with diseases as a phenomenon, and could start shipping all-curing pills to Earth on short notice. Or it might be a question of improved hygiene, or very narrowly of just improved water purification. With 90% of the most common infectious diseases suddenly going away, it would certainly be appropriate to yell "Miracle!" and declare disease a thing of the past.

The only real trick here would seem to be stopping mankind from expanding to meet the new Malthusian limits. WWIII would be of great temporary help, as it reputedly removed something like 10% of mankind within the first ten years already. But if improved transportation and distribution of resources also brought the two-kid lifestyle ideal to the peripheries of Earth, then the greatest threat to our existence might be dodged without need for further assistance from the heavens.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Lol...
Well, creating a Trek-like 'utopian society' is possible today.
The only problem is that you'd need to keep greedy people in check.
And while I will agree that numerous things are a part of human nature, we CAN change things for the better because that too would be part of human nature.
Seems to me the ratio of those who exhibit greedy tendencies and selfish behavior are in the minority compared to those who don't (and capitalism as a system does nothing to change that... actually, it's making things progressively worse).

Solving worlds problems has been possible for decades now... but it's not my problem that people have 0 clue as to what we could have done by now and conform to mainstream views/news and thoughts that come from people in positions of power who have 0 interest in making a tangible change in the world.

Look at our developments over the past 100 years and when we first had the capacity for mass production... then ask yourself why hadn't we already fully (or mostly) tapped into energy sources such as solar power, geothermal, wind, tidal, etc...
And if someone tells me it's 'too expensive', I'm gonna send a virtual smack in the face to you.
From a resource/technological/manpower point of view, it wouldn't be an issue to mass produce solar panels so everyone could have them regardless of the lower efficiency (which would incidentally provide more power for a household than what is needed, while the rest can be funneled to others).
Recycling is not done to it's fullest capacity... again... people bring 'money' into the equation when it's perfectly doable from a technological/manpower point of view.
We wouldn't even have touch new resources from all the garbage we could use and reuse on a constant basis (especially the landfills that piled up over the centuries) by breaking them down into base elements and reconstituting them into new things.

Convert nuclear waste into Plutonium and use it as a power source for other things... stop making lame excuses about weapons production increasing as a result (as if current ones aren't deadly as it is - but yeah, let's just go right ahead and poison the planet and ourselves instead).

The US majority of foods ends up in the dumpsters when it could be used to feed the starving countries (and more).
We can grow foods in deserts...

I mean seriously... if you people are going to continuously prank about how 'scarcity' is a problem, go back to swallowing everything you are being fed by those you placed in power.

Trek humans got rid of their issues way before transporters and replicators came to fruition - while the Vulcans mostly sat back and offered moral support (ENT clearly demonstrates that Vulcans interfered in a minimal way and withheld technologies - humans caught up for the most part due to the Vulcan's influence - being exposed to more advanced technologies - but getting rid of money and doing things for betterment of mankind without profit coming into play would definitely result in a much faster technological growth - today the market is filled with out of date technologies because it's far more profitable for a company to create revisions of a product and release the end version after years of money milking - with occasional 'jumps' happening for the sake of it).

If people wised up in real-life as well, maybe we'd be able to create a better world - and not the current profit/money driven technologically stagnated one lead by a bunch of infants.

 

[BillJ]

They didn't.

Most everything else in Trek points to Picard being full of shit.

 

[T'Girl]

The trick is in making such a thing stay.

And this is the problem I've alway seen with the "everyone just volunteers" idea. For while I can see a maybe society changing so that occures for a short period of time, maybe at most a couple of decades, what happen when your society changes again?

Oh, well once it change to that, umm ... it just never changes again.

And you have to stipulate that over a hundred alien species with likely multiple cultures and multiple societies each, which are spread over hundreds (if not thousands) of colonies also "just volenteer."

using unskilled labor

From Poland? Maybe they "volunteered" too.

Most everything else in Trek points to Picard being full of shit

Or, simply be avocating a personal philosphy.

 

[horatio83]

Actually Trek does not imply any kind of voluntary work. It merely implies that people work for the sake of work and not for the sake of getting access to luxury goods. By the way, the real world is full of such people. Workaholics, artists, the old patriarch who does not wanna hand over control of the firm to his son ..
Who would you rather wanna visit, a doctor who cares about his patients or a doctor who cares about the latinum? Recently a Goldmann Sachs executive quit his job and wrote an article in the NYT about the change of norms in the company, from serving the customer to exploiting him. If the Ferengi norms are yours, so be it. They certainly ain't mine.

If premodern folks had sci-fi capitalism and democracy would have looked as crazy to them as Trek does to us. Anybody who cannot imagine different forms of societies might wanna read some history books to spur his imagination. Intellectual laziness, cynicism or ideological dogmatism is no excuse.

 

[Deks]

They didn't.

Most everything else in Trek points to Picard being full of shit.

Such as?
Most of what was conveyed to us (the viewers) was done for convenience sake because a lot of humans in today's western society are conditioned into thinking that no other system sans capitalism can work, or that humans will be prevented by 'human nature' from working together despite their differences.
Sure... pile all of our differences on the table, use them to pit people against each other (or introduce a system or society that does that in some fashion by introducing inequality) and you have mayhem.

As for Trek pointing to Picard being 'full of it'... I disagree.
Tasha Yar for example came from a failed colony, but that's just 1 example out of how many colonies that Humans have in Federation space?
Then you have the Maqui... sure, labeled as terrorists, but the Federation didn't want to go to war with the Cardies, so they made a few choices to avoid just that, and gave those who refused to resettle a fair warning (and an option to be evacuated).

And what's so odd about Picard stating that people eliminated obsession for material possession or that Humans are working for betterment of mankind?
Sure there might be certain things of material nature that may hold personal value to them, but those were mostly connected to people's fields of interests.

DS9 simply did things differently, and generally went into a different direction TNG did (in some cases defying Roddenberry's premise - and that station show wasn't exactly my favorite in the first place).

 

[Nightdiamond]

Augustus wrote: For this reason, I think religion has to be involved in such a change. ..But the kind of religion that calls us to a higher purpose and a sense that other people should be treated a certain way.

Very, very true, religion (a rational one) does have a positive effect on human behavior. Religious people feed the poor, control their behavior/impulses, commit little crime.

But, Trek is claiming humans did this without any aid from religion.

In fact, they say religion causes more problems than it solves.
It's view--wars, dangerous superstition, and eventually people ending up fighting over different versions of said religion that brought utopia.

They seem to have some type of motto ("We work to better ourselves and humanity") For all intents and purposes, that's their religion.

ZJulian wrote: WWIII could have had a major change in peoples psyche leading to a genuine desire for co-operation and peace.

My first thought--but.. WWII should have been enough in that case-yet as soon as people become comfortable revert back to their old ways--hence, here we are today.. Is it genes that's causing the stubbornness?

horatio83 wrote: If premodern folks had sci-fi capitalism and democracy would have looked as crazy to them as Trek does to us. Anybody who cannot imagine different forms of societies might wanna read some history books to spur his imagination.

Some people think Trek society is completely socialist, or communist

 

[T'Girl]

Actually Trek does not imply any kind of voluntary work. It merely implies that people work for the sake of work and not for the sake of getting access to luxury goods.

Working for someone else and not expecting to be paid for it, is volunteering.

If the Ferengi norms ...

The Ferengi "norms" are at the far end of the spectrum, there is a very comfortable middle ground, a merchant economy model that will work just perfectly in the future Federation.

No poverty could nicely be the result of (near) universal employment.

Anybody who cannot imagine different forms of societies ...

This is what I was writing about above. I believe the Federation has a dizzying number of different forms of societies, what I resist and reject is the Federation having (somehow) just one society. I can see the various Federation members having everything from oppressive and dysfunctional central planning, all the way through to laissez faire and caveat emptor capitalism on their many worlds.

And there is room in there horatio83, for your economic model somewhere too. Just not everywhere.

Convert nuclear waste into Plutonium and use it as a power source for other things... stop making lame excuses about weapons production increasing as a result

President Carter banned commercial reprocessing in 1977. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan lifts Carter's ban on commercial reprocessing. In 1993, when Bill Clinton took office, his policy was to discourage the nuclear industry from reprocessing nuclear fuel. President Bush's 2001 national energy policy called for U.S. companies to develop reprocessing technologies. In his first year in office, President Obama ended the environmental impact study that was needed for commercial reprocessing facilities. John McCain favors commercial reprocessing.

Maybe it isn't "what's the problem?" It's who.

*************************

In New York there was a "Pay What You Feel" restaurant, it started that policy last fall, it recently went out of business. It wasn't because too many people ate without paying, it was because they just stopped coming in at all. Another such restaurant south of me in Portland, Oregon had a reverse problem, it turned into a daytime homeless shelter, people ate for free, then would not leave. People who might have paid for their meals couldn't get in. To be fair Panera Bread restaurants have had limited success with having a handful of such restaurants, limited success meaning they haven't gone under.

http://gothamist.com/2012/03/15/new_yorks_pay_what_you_feel_restaur.php

 

[Crazy Eddie]

How did they do it?

They invented replicators.

 

[scotpens]

In The 24th Century, How Did They Do It?

A wizard did it.

 

[horatio83]

Actually Trek does not imply any kind of voluntary work. It merely implies that people work for the sake of work and not for the sake of getting access to luxury goods.

Working for someone else and not expecting to be paid for it, is volunteering.

If the Ferengi norms ...

The Ferengi "norms" are at the far end of the spectrum, there is a very comfortable middle ground, a merchant economy model that will work just perfectly in the future Federation.

No poverty could nicely be the result of (near) universal employment.

Anybody who cannot imagine different forms of societies ...

This is what I was writing about above. I believe the Federation has a dizzying number of different forms of societies, what I resist and reject is the Federation having (somehow) just one society. I can see the various Federation members having everything from oppressive and dysfunctional central planning, all the way through to laissez faire and caveat emptor capitalism on their many worlds.

And there is room in there horatio83, for your economic model somewhere too. Just not everywhere.

Your paradise is obviously a highly federal anarcho-capitalism, basically the contemporary US, whereas mine is social democracy aka moderated capitalism.
But that is not the point. The point is that post-Cochrane humankind differs probably more from us than we do from premodern folks so your one-dimensional central planning vs. free markets game makes no sense. You view the issue through your paradise lenses whereas I say that the space is open. Furthermore I think that a focus on implicit rules aka social norms instead of upon explicit rules makes more sense.

About your federal point, I seriously doubt that any oppressive species would be allowed to join the UFP. By the way, you might not know this but if you wanna achieve full employment in the real world you need some governmental intervention during recessions, usually monetary policy respectively in a liquidity trap like right now fiscal policy. I know that this doesn't fit your 'capitalism good, socialism bad' ideology but the real world rarely does.

 

[Deks]

How did they do it?

They invented replicators.

No... the changes they made came well before invention of replicators or transporters (in the 50 years that followed FC with the Vulcans).

 

[Nightdiamond]

Make no mistake--humans don't use money. They didn't use money even before replicators were invented.

This is not just Jake as a teenager thing, Nog replied that humans in generally didn't use money. Humans are happy, well fed, don't want anything, need anything, and don't use money.

Problem is with this model, is there is no type of capitalism that I can see. Money is what generally feeds people, so if it's obsolete, and there are no replicators... what's going on?

Is this some type of universal, government sponsored welfare thing?

When humans work, they "pretend" to make money

T'Girl wrote: Why would they do this? At all? Ever?

Why would humans pretend to use money? The same reason they open and run businesses in a society that claims not to use money anymore

I'll argue, that in Sisko's restaurant, on earth, where humans don't use money, it's either for free, or there's some weird pretending going on...

T'Girl wrote: And pretend to wear "uniforms" and pretend to tell Deanna to actual wear one on the bridge.
And they pretend to fire weapons into the warships of other civilizations and pretend to kill everyone aboard.

Yes, actually. By referring to the only force that defends them from invaders, as exclusively an exploration organization, they are in effect, pretending to be the military when the situation calls for it.

They are pretending (like Sisko's restaurant) - Picard, flagship captain, didn't even want to participate in a simulated war game. Utopian-ism

The Bajorans are very peaceful, there's no danger of them of going on a rampage or anything, but they call their forces what they are...the Militia..

 

[F. King Daniel]

How did they do it?

They invented replicators.

No... the changes they made came well before invention of replicators or transporters (in the 50 years that followed FC with the Vulcans).

They borrowed the Vulcan replicators

 

[Deks]

Why wouldn't a restaurant be open and give food for free in a system where money doesn't exist?
It's a place where people come to socialize (much like the mess-hall on starships) and eat food prepared by Sisko's dad in his own way (and he does it because he enjoys doing it - never-mind if there's 'hard work' in question - we've seen evidence that some folks like to do things with their own hands without too much technological aid).
Same principle is on star-ships, except that most go to the mess-hall for socializing and get food from the replicators (and not from the chefs - but they do seem to have waiters nevertheless - I would imagine numerous people would work on all kinds of 'menial work' because they enjoy it - just because others cannot fathom this is not my problem).
In Voyager's case, Neelix was the chef.

And yes, humans stopped using money way before replicators were invented (in the late 22nd century per Voyager - which fits into the time-frame of when the Federation was founded).