The implication was he's selling arms to the Federation.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room, this series violates Roddenberry's vision big time
- Thread starter Sci-fi fan
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Scotty says he bought a boat in Star Trek VI.
I suppose even in the future govt is run by assholes.
I'm not happy with TNG's "Hey we don't have money" (one, I don't believe it and two they aren't consistent with it) but I get that that was where they planted their flag. The times they mention "credits" or any such in TNG was usually a little glitchy.
(Oh, and it was Lilly who said they don't get paid and Picard dodged the question saying economics are "somewhat different". Kind of a dodge.)
But TOS never even hinted at not having money. In Star Trek IV it was that they didn't have 20th century US currency and it's the only time in all of TOS that "not using money" was even suggested. In the previous movie McCoy was trying to buy passage on a spaceship.
So I see money / no money as more of the "we can go faster than warp 10 / warp 10 is a limit". It's not inconsistent, it's a change. In other words: Keep your silly post-money TNG off of my TOS.
The military thing is more like "You keep saying that, but you keep blowing things up and waging war."
But there had to have been one. Because "no money" is a definite TNG addition to the franchise. Much like the shift in the Prime Directive and how Starfleet sees itself.
Hell, Flint owned an entire planet, which had a rare, life-saving mineral that Kirk couldn't find anywhere else in that part of space.
At the risk of belaboring a point, I'm not sure TOS was ever supposed to be about life in a "post-scarcity" economy. It was about exploring a frequently harsh and dangerous final frontier, where hardscrabble miners and colonists struggled to make a living, the Klingons and the Federation competed for resources, etc. It's not that the writers dropped the ball in portraying a post-scarcity economy on TOS; that was never what the show was about.
The economy back home on Earth never really figured into the plots, except for, eventually, a comedy bit in the whale movie. And let's be honest here: that bit was more about setting up a comic situation than about making a serious statement about the economy of the 23rd century. That was just a throwaway bit of comedy relief.
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Picard was also subjected to:
- Borg Assimilation.
- A probe that had him live a 70+ year life on an alien world for 20 minutes of 'real time' but left those 70 years of memories intacct.
Bottom line: By the time he tells Lilly that is ST:FC - maybe he's not 'all there'.
Just to torture the Biblical analogy further, given that DISCOVERY takes place in the 23rd century, are we surprised that it leans more toward the Old Testament (TOS) than the New Testament (TNG)?
In other words, who cares what Picard said? That's a hundred years later.
In other words, who cares what Picard said? That's a hundred years later.
Just to torture the Biblical analogy further, given that DISCOVERY takes place in the 23rd century, are we surprised that it leans more toward the Old Testament (TOS) than the New Testament (TNG)?
In other words, who cares what Picard said? That's a hundred years later.
If some of the rumors we've heard are true, the show might get kinda turned upside down a bit too,
"if"
We can square most of this by un-linking the words Money and Currency. The Federation, in both TOS and TNG, uses a non physical currency, that, much like modern fiat money, it's not based on a commodity. Since it's all digital, people have stopped referring to it as "money". For example a debit card is linked directly to a bank account, but you wouldn't call it money is I asked you what it was you would say it was a debit card. But that wouldn't prevent McCoy from referring to it as money, especially since the alien uses the term "money" in the conversation first.
The real problem is the episode of DS9 where Jake and Nog buy the baseball card, and Jake can't explain it to Nog. Nog says explicitly that humans have abandoned currency-based economics. Interestingly, he doesn't say the Federation has abandoned it.
My point is that if we have money in the 23rd century, and no money in the 24th, that's a major societal change - one of the biggest in human history, in fact. Yet it doesn't seem to have changed much at all. Other than tighter uniforms, fewer buttons, and more pompous captains, Starfleet and the Federation doesn't seem to be any different. They can just make earl grey tea out of thin air. Nothing to indicate the seismic social changes that would come with inventing a replicator.
Shuttles and space stations, for example, didn't exist 100 years ago, they were pure science fiction, yet now they are part of our reality. Drastic changes can and do happen in such relatively short periods of time. It's not unimaginable that in the Trek universe all those things - a complete elimination of money, implementation of technology such as replicators, etc. - could've happened within a relatively short time-span of ca. 80-100 years.
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Watching TOS as a kid I thought the food slots were exactly the same as replicators because of how insanely fast the food appears after making an order, that they might as well be replicators anyway.
Money or no money is a non-issue to me. If the 23rd century is retconned into not having money that doesn't really mean much to me because the economics have always been relegated to the background far enough for me to ignore, with only episodes like "Mudd's Women" being the outliers.
What does it matter if the future works with money or not?
Money or no money is a non-issue to me. If the 23rd century is retconned into not having money that doesn't really mean much to me because the economics have always been relegated to the background far enough for me to ignore, with only episodes like "Mudd's Women" being the outliers.
What does it matter if the future works with money or not?
Any government that would allow Section 31 to operate almost completely unchecked is a government that clearly has some ethical and bureaucratic issues, even if they're buried deep down under a veneer of civilized behavior.
It could happen nearly overnight with the invention of the replicator rendering the concept of material value nearly irrelevant. It's not the timescale that's unrealistic. It's the changes that a society goes through in such circumstances that are just not evidenced on screen. Think about the way the world has changed as a result of the internet in 30 years, and then imagine the scale of societal and political change that would result from ending the existence of money and scarcity of material. Yet the Federation and Starfleet of the 24th century are essentially the same as that of the one where Scotty was able to buy a boat. A bit more up themselves perhaps, but fundamentally unchanged.
That’s a failure of the imagination of the writers more than anything else.
If replicators re-use matter rather than create things out of nothing, then it doesn't reverse limits to growth. What does is extraction and use of resources from other planets.
Perhaps similar can be seen concerning the Internet. Rather than that leading to global change, it is likely increased mining and manufacturing that did, leading to more oil and minerals available for devices, infrastructure, and energy used for the Internet.
Perhaps similar can be seen concerning the Internet. Rather than that leading to global change, it is likely increased mining and manufacturing that did, leading to more oil and minerals available for devices, infrastructure, and energy used for the Internet.
Welcome to Star Trek.
