Kirk shoots first. Amirite?
Just how old is Capt Pike? (based on 1 line in Saints of Imperfection)
- Thread starter Yistaan
- Start date
But only on stun.
On the other hand, Tilly was outside the Federation, and the people on those planets seemed to regard every Fed national they'd seen pass through as a fancy-pants rich person (though that probably says more about how hardscrabble those planets were, and not that it's just a coincidence we never saw Joseph Sisko in his vacationing outfit made of fine silks and large jewels).
Well that's better.
I guess since he didn't get paid either, Joseph sisko just really loved making creole food.
If there's no currency in the 24th Century...
How did Dr. Crusher purchase the bolt of fabric that magically appeared before her on Farpoint Station?
(which she then had beamed up to her quarters)
From Memory Alpha...
"While Beverly and Wesley Crusher were shopping at the mall of Farpoint Station in 2364, they witnessed how the fabric of one of the Bandi shopkeepers changed to please Beverly as she said before. As a result she purchased the entire bolt and had it sent up to the USS ENTERPRISE. (TNG: Encounter at Farpoint)"
How did Dr. Crusher purchase the bolt of fabric that magically appeared before her on Farpoint Station?
(which she then had beamed up to her quarters)
From Memory Alpha...
"While Beverly and Wesley Crusher were shopping at the mall of Farpoint Station in 2364, they witnessed how the fabric of one of the Bandi shopkeepers changed to please Beverly as she said before. As a result she purchased the entire bolt and had it sent up to the USS ENTERPRISE. (TNG: Encounter at Farpoint)"
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Uh...If there's no currency in the 24th Century...
How did Dr. Crusher purchase the bolt of fabric that magically appeared before her on Farpoint Station?
(which she then had beamed up to her quarters)
From Memory Alpha...
"While Beverly and Wesley Crusher were shopping at the mall of Farpoint Station in 2364, they witnessed how the fabric of one of the Bandi shopkeepers changed to please Beverly as she said before. As a result she purchased the entire bolt and had it sent up to the USS ENTERPRISE. (TNG: Encounter at Farpoint)"
Picard lied to Lily!
He was actually voicing his own wishes for a galaxy without money, hoping that telling Lily about such a system would cause her and Zefram Cochrane to actually implement it.As such, there was money in Star Trek before First Contact! And then, after Picard changed the timeline in First Contact, Lily set in motion a series of events leading to the New World Economy where there was never any money in Trek and all such mentions of money are the result of an older timeline.
"The Federation has invested a great deal of money in our training, they're about due for a small return" said Kirk to Spock in "Errand of Mercy"
These days I tend to see Trek productions as their own versions of the universe. TOS is especially rife with money references, the movies too (Scotty bought a boat in STVI, McCoy is trying to barter a flight to Genesis in III etc) with the exception of IV, which could even be finessed to be a reference to paper money.
Then Next Gen, Voyager and DS9 took the STIV reference (after "Farpoint") and ran with it.
Orci and Kurtzman said the Kelvin universe definitely had some form of currency in interviews for ST'09, since Kirk tried to buy Uhura's drinks. Kurtzman has brought a heavy Kelvin influence to Disco, so it's possible they have money too.
Certainly Disco isn't post-scarcity, hence Stamets and Reno's little argument about Dilithium.
These days I tend to see Trek productions as their own versions of the universe. TOS is especially rife with money references, the movies too (Scotty bought a boat in STVI, McCoy is trying to barter a flight to Genesis in III etc) with the exception of IV, which could even be finessed to be a reference to paper money.
Then Next Gen, Voyager and DS9 took the STIV reference (after "Farpoint") and ran with it.
Orci and Kurtzman said the Kelvin universe definitely had some form of currency in interviews for ST'09, since Kirk tried to buy Uhura's drinks. Kurtzman has brought a heavy Kelvin influence to Disco, so it's possible they have money too.
Certainly Disco isn't post-scarcity, hence Stamets and Reno's little argument about Dilithium.
Yes, it is. (TOS somewhat less so—at least out on the frontier—inasmuch as replicator technology apparently hasn't quite been perfected yet, but TNG very much so.)
Consider. If you live on Earth (or any other major Federation world), the tech level means you have essentially free unlimited access to...
- Food
- Clothing
- Shelter
- Transportation
- Education
- Health care
- Entertainment
Sure, if you want to get away from the status quo and seek more adventure, you can go join Starfleet — or if that's not your thing (or you don't make the cut), join up to help settle some colony world — and go do things by hand and deal with people (and aliens) who aren't part of your socioeconomic system. But if you stay at home, you're free to pursue whatever floats your boat to the best of your abilities, whether it's science or archaeology or viticulture or gourmet cooking or musical performance or what-have-you. Complete freedom, because the supply of Stuff so vastly exceeds the supply of labor necessary to create it.
Who knows? Nobody said there's "nothing to regulate these things." Presumably there's some sort of fair and democratic system in place. It might, in fact, even be some carefully regulated form of "market" (since one thing markets are actually pretty good at doing is efficiently allocating the distribution of fungible private goods with high demand elasticity). That still doesn't require the use of "money" as we know it today.
Well, the term itself wasn't coined until the mid-'80s (AFAIK), and didn't really gain widespread usage until the past decade, so it's no surprise that it wasn't thrown around in Trek. Nonetheless, the overall future society it posits seems to fit the definition.
Yes, because in "DITD" the setting fits the "remote outpost on the frontier" scenario and the Pergium fits the "dilithium-like plot-driven Unobtanium" scenario that I've already acknowledged as exceptions to the general scheme of things. By the very nature of the Enterprise's mission, the ship and crew are going to run into a disproportionately large number of scenarios that are "outliers" compared to the status quo on fully civilized Federation worlds. That doesn't mean we should generalize from the outliers.
Well, yeah, that's exactly what I've always assumed. Do you think he does it out of the need to make a living because otherwise he'd be homeless and starving? On Earth of all places?
Humane socio-economic policy?
Any UBI proponent would argue the technology exists to do all those things now, even with the resources available - or even that it's a moral imperative. It would take an impossible - by all practicality - redistribution or wealth and resources to do so but it could still be done within the framework of scarcity and currency-based economics. I mean, talk about 'doing it in fifty years' - imagine if humanity got its collective ass up out of its Lay-Z-Boy the evening of September 8, 1966, and said: "Hold my beer."
And that's always been my biggest problem with the no money thing. Because 'money' and profit motive are ultimately mutually exclusive. Yet Star Trek treats them as symptoms of the same problem. However, I would argue that the much more meaningful and powerful message would be showing humanity figuring out how to do all those things without the need for magical energy/matter converters and chance meetings with the local Ambassador Pointy-Ears.
Well, yes. Most (if not all) of this could be achieved today, and it would be a far more just society. The tricky (not impossible, but indeed tricky) part would be the transition. People who have hoarded wealth and power do tend to cling to it, after all.
Still, there's nothing inevitable about our current economic paradigm. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to meet real human needs. Lots of alternatives exist. More than a few of them have been written about in SF. You're a fan of SF; surely you're familiar with some?
Not mutually exclusive at all — they're intricately intertwined! — although, perhaps, not necessarily a matched set; it's possible to imagine either one without the other. FWIW, Star Trek's reality has greatly reduced (if not completely done away with) the power of both. But Trek isn't a show about "people figuring out how to do these things," as Greg points out; it offers a setting where these things have been done, and our present-day problems have been solved, and the resulting society is merely a backdrop for the stories of people seeking out challenging and exciting new problems.
I have no problem with that. Other works (both fiction and non) can and do focus on that "much more meaningful and powerful message."
That depends how the system of private replicator technology works. I can see it being organized similar to how internet and wi-fi are organized now. a very high percentage has wi-fi at home and/or at work or uses it in a coffeeshop, just like people would have replicators at home, at work or at Quark's. That doesn't mean it is free. The coffeeshop owner has to pay for the wi-fi that you use, at home, depending on your dataplan, you pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of free data per month and at work the corporation you work for has their own dataplan they pay. If replicators allow for a certain amount of mass being materialized per month for a specific fee (and everything over that amount costs extra), I'd guess Starfleet as a huge ass military organization might have a better deal with the replicator company than civilists in their homes.
But the notion of "paying" for such a thing — specifically, of paying for something that can be provided at almost any scale for negligible marginal cost (like wifi) — suggests that someone is engaged in rent-seeking, looking to derive profit from the basic needs of others. More broadly, and problematically, it suggests that the profit motive still exists. When Trek characters talk about money being a thing of the past, that is what I envision their society having done away with. Hoarding personal profit is what motivates narrow-minded cultures like the Ferengi. The Federation is more civilized.
(There may still be a few "rich" people on Federation worlds... but those people would be recognized as anachronisms. Similarly, a few countries on Earth today still have formal monarchs and nobility and so forth, but that status is mostly symbolic, and no longer carries the kind of genuine power it once did.)
(There may still be a few "rich" people on Federation worlds... but those people would be recognized as anachronisms. Similarly, a few countries on Earth today still have formal monarchs and nobility and so forth, but that status is mostly symbolic, and no longer carries the kind of genuine power it once did.)
The writers have been incredibly inconsistent on this point, so why don't we just say the Federation has no money on Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Saturdays (Earth calendar, natch), and has money on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and alternate Saturdays?
As a kid of divorced parents, I approve this notion
He is the age of pure perfection. I mean, have you seen him? Yowza.
Crewman Yowza was the Andorian who had the tonsillectomy in season 1I must have missed something...
Whose "Yowza"???
Maybe our system of money is eradicated in favor of some bizarre future version of bitcoin? I'll call it fitcoin. When Picard says, we work to better ourselves, maybe every Federation citizen has a chip installed that tracks neural connections, physical health, etc.
Working out, learning new languages and advanced science, performing tasks, etc. is loaded into a chip installed in every person. Personal improvement is the new bitcoin mining, called fitcoin mining. The more you work out and study, the more fitcoins you have.
Thus, when Picard says people work to better themselves, they are just mining more fitcoins. All other currency (dollars, renminbi, euros, even bitcoins) are eliminated in favor of fitcoins. Thus you reconcile statements saying there is no money since the late 22nd century with the obvious references to money in TOS etc.
Those money references are references to fitcoins, which people earn through bettering themselves.
