Re: How do you account for the drastic design change between TOS and T
I'd argue there is at least as much progress being made today as there was fifty years ago - it just doesn't manifest in consumer goods at the moment. If anything, the mid-20th century was a time of stagnation where no significant discoveries were made in natural sciences, and experimentation and measuring techniques only slowly caught up with theories from the beginning of the century. In contrast, the recent decades have seen development in fields that are highly likely to have applications, such as nanotechnology, genetics, molecular engineering and computing.
Rapid progress might well exist regardless of need, and would instead create needs of its own. Equilibria may well be beneficial, yet also quite possibly unattainable. The ongoing trend of anti-globalization, the fragmentation of the world into increasingly dissimilar segments with astronomical income and lifestyle differences, may be both cause and effect for rapid development that necessarily leads to innovation explosions in parts of the world and stagnation and extinctions elsewhere. Singularity may hit us soon enough - but just some of "us", considering the fragmentation. Other segments may take radically different paths.
We might argue that the Trek society of Earth has reached an equilibrium only because it has stamped hard on any evolution of the human species, and because it has desperately grabbed and held onto the drag chute of the social inertia and historical ballast of hundreds of intertwined cultures in the interstellar community. Without an interstellar rat race in reverse (you only develop enough to match and beat the neighbor in the most conventional game possible), the individual cultures might have exploded technologically already.
Timo Saloniemi
I'd argue there is at least as much progress being made today as there was fifty years ago - it just doesn't manifest in consumer goods at the moment. If anything, the mid-20th century was a time of stagnation where no significant discoveries were made in natural sciences, and experimentation and measuring techniques only slowly caught up with theories from the beginning of the century. In contrast, the recent decades have seen development in fields that are highly likely to have applications, such as nanotechnology, genetics, molecular engineering and computing.
Rapid progress might well exist regardless of need, and would instead create needs of its own. Equilibria may well be beneficial, yet also quite possibly unattainable. The ongoing trend of anti-globalization, the fragmentation of the world into increasingly dissimilar segments with astronomical income and lifestyle differences, may be both cause and effect for rapid development that necessarily leads to innovation explosions in parts of the world and stagnation and extinctions elsewhere. Singularity may hit us soon enough - but just some of "us", considering the fragmentation. Other segments may take radically different paths.
We might argue that the Trek society of Earth has reached an equilibrium only because it has stamped hard on any evolution of the human species, and because it has desperately grabbed and held onto the drag chute of the social inertia and historical ballast of hundreds of intertwined cultures in the interstellar community. Without an interstellar rat race in reverse (you only develop enough to match and beat the neighbor in the most conventional game possible), the individual cultures might have exploded technologically already.
Timo Saloniemi
