Was Kirk Lying?

[Ithekro]

On a visual level perhaps, but what about on a functional level? Do the manufactured versions do what the gems are needed to do aside from be rare bobbles that look pretty? Do they look pretty as well? Is the only fuctional difference that one is natural one processed?

 

[Starborn Dragon]

When it arrives it does mean that there will be the ability to make as much gems and precious minerals that the government or the corporations that controls it wants.

Providing it's possible to tell the natural jems mined from the Earth, from the manufactured jems, the natural ones might be more valuable.

Authentic is usually more valuable than a well executed fake.

If they can use the technology to make a material that is a hundred times stronger than steel by compacting the atomes so that there is no space between them, what makes you think there will be any difference?

I think that's more of a psychological reaction.

The gems made from the tech will be no different than the ones formed in nature, they are all atoms, the tech simply rearranges them.

So in a blind test i don't think anybody will be able to tell any difference.

 

[Ithekro]

The real ones would have flaws. But is that really a selling feature? (it is in jewels oddly enough)

 

[T'Girl]

The flaws in diamonds give them their sparkle.

 

[Kor]

^ Exactly. A gem's imperfections give it's glimmer and shimmer.

A gem that is uniform on a molecular level won't have that... it's probably better for industrial uses, though.

Kor

 

[JTShanks]

In Catspaw, Kirk and party are the captives of Korob and Sylvia, in a attempt to bribe Kirk, Korob places plates of jewels on the table that Kirk is seat at.

Korob: "Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires. All the crystalline forms that you cherish above all things."

Kirk responses with: "We could manufacture a ton of these on our ship. They mean nothing to us."

Now was Kirk telling the truth, or was he lying? Korob's source of information concerning the value of the jewels would have been the minds three people who originally beamed down, and who they gain control of.

If the minds of Scott, Sulu and Jackson held the current esteem and value placed on jewels, this would have been where Korob obtain this knowledge.

Kirk wasn't about to be bribed, not into abandoning Scott and Sulu to people who had already killed Jackson. Kirk is the master of the bluff, if the jewels in fact still held high value in the 23rd century to Humanity, Kirk wasn't about to tell Korob this.

Or, Korob's mind reading was in fact flawed, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires formally were of value, but no longer, they can be manufacture with such ease that they hold the value of a sack of dime store marbles.

Truth or lie?

Nah, Kirk was telling the truth, the thing is; I don't think they tried the same tactical means of mind control with Scott and Sulu. Nothing from what I have seen in the storyline seems to invoke such or point to such but still; it's no doubt the Enterprise could manufacture them easily and they truthfully had no worth outside of the Federation where money and scrupulosity is more commonplace than inside the Federation Core-Worlds.

 

[JTShanks]

Most monetary uses were inside Starbases being used for merchants who were non-aligned to the Federation, similar to Quark for example; he's not an official member of the Federation but he is on a Federation starbase and uses money and scrupulous means. Clearly this is something more so outside the Federation.

 

[Christopher]

Most monetary uses were inside Starbases being used for merchants who were non-aligned to the Federation, similar to Quark for example; he's not an official member of the Federation but he is on a Federation starbase and uses money and scrupulous means. Clearly this is something more so outside the Federation.

But there are several references in TOS to money being used within Starfleet. In "Errand of Mercy," Kirk says to Spock, "The Federation has invested a great deal of money in our training." And in both "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and "The Doomsday Machine," Kirk tells officers (Chekov and Scott, respectively) that "you've earned your pay for the week." In "The Apple," Kirk asks Spock if he knows how much Starfleet has invested in him, and Spock begins rattling off the exact monetary figure. So it's not just civilian traders and non-Federation merchants. Starfleet in TOS unambiguously operates within a monetary system.

Also, in "I, Mudd," Kirk and Spock point out that Harry Mudd didn't pay royalties to the patent holders of the "modern industrial techniques" he sold to "backward planets." If we're talking patents, we're talking about a government that grants those patents, and since they're the most modern techniques around, that probably makes them Federation patents. And they entitle their owners to royalties, i.e. to monetary payment for their use.

 

[Timo]

When money goes out of fashion, we don't know. All we do know is that it does - or, like Tom Paris puts it, it "goes the way of the dinosaur". (So, it evolves and takes flight?)

We could argue the watershed is before the TOS movies, as Kirk in ST4 argues he has no money. But there are many reasons why Kirk would have no money in that specific movie. For starters, all of it would be stuck several centuries away from where he's sitting and trying to dodge the pizza bill! A more natural watershed would come when replicators are introduced for general use, and this we know is after the TOS movies, as stated in "Flashback".

Whatever happens to money, we know that as of TNG, Starfleet personnel no longer have salaries, and while they can pay with "credits" when interacting with foreign cultures, their kids apparently rather categorically don't have any access to that type of money. Money might exist in other respects - but replicators should certainly make jewels trivially obtainable and hence probably more or less worthless.

Yet the very fact that jewels in TOS still appear to have some worth might mean that advanced manufacturing technologies would be applied in their creation early on. The TOS era might mark a breakthrough where natural diamonds become worthless overnight when Starfleet sends a software upgrade to its fabricators... And that night could fall between "Arena" and "Catspaw"!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

But there are many reasons why Kirk would have no money in that specific movie. For starters, all of it would be stuck several centuries away from where he's sitting and trying to dodge the pizza bill

Kirk's rule number six:

"The bitches alway pay."

 

[ToddPence]

This discussion kind of reminds me of THE TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" in which

[SPOILER ALERT]

we learn at the end of the episode that the kicker is that future society will have learned how to manufacture gold. Now, since gold is a base element, that means that this future society will have learned how to manipulate the atom and create elements at will. That's some seriously badass technology.

 

[Timo]

Replicators certainly should cause major upheavals in the way we think about possessions, manufacturing, and recompensing. The owner of a replicator is self-sufficient in terms of all materials and items; what does this mean for a payment system for the rest (services, permits, damages etc.)?

If a service can be recompensed for by handing over a material or an item, but said material or item is "worthless" to both parties because it cost the payer nothing to create and was already accessible to the payee before the transaction, is this recompense valid? Importantly, is its symbolic equivalent in abstract monetary units any more valid? Will abstract money become worthless as well, and does a counterservice become the only "worthy" means of paying for a service? Would a monetary system be needed for running a "timebank" of services, or would that be a completely superfluous complication when the exact "cost" of a given service would be far too tedious to measure in universal units?

In Trek, we know that certain items still have a specific cost in TOS (tribbles) and even in VOY (Vulcan dagger), despite the latter case definitely falling within the performance specs of the replicator. We never hear of services having an attached cost in intra-Federation affairs, though - only UFP-alien interactions (such as with Quark's services on DS9) feature price tags. It's a rather upside-down take on the issue...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

because it cost the payer nothing to create

How do you figure this to be true?

 

[FormerLurker]

He's dismissing the material and power requirements of the replicator, and only allowing that the replicator had been used.

It is often forgotten that replicators do not make something out of nothing. But the replicator uses resources, the same as any other type of manufacturing. Just because those resources are abstract does not permit them to be infinite.

 

[Christopher]

It is often forgotten that replicators do not make something out of nothing. But the replicator uses resources, the same as any other type of manufacturing. Just because those resources are abstract does not permit them to be infinite.

Still, they'd be far more abundant than they are in our society. For one thing, transporter-based replicators are also the perfect recyclers. There'd be no garbage, no waste -- virtually every atom could be reused. That alone would practically eliminate scarcity. And an interstellar civilization would have access to trillions of asteroids, moons, planetary atmospheres, etc. from which any desired quantity of resources could be obtained. All they'd need is energy, and that's also available without limit to a spacefaring civilization, because the galaxy is littered with a few hundred billion fusion reactors just blasting out free energy in all directions.

 

[Kor]

^ And the replicator system could be tied directly into the trash and bathroom systems so that all available resources could be used efficiently.

....which reminds me of an old coworker who had grape vines on their property that were doing REALLY well; big and healthy plants, with lots of delicious grapes. It turned out that the roots were into the septic tank.

Kor

 

[Timo]

He's dismissing the material and power requirements of the replicator

As is the user. If those didn't come to him at (nearly) zero cost, he wouldn't use the machine to create each and every one of his meals, complete with the plates and cutlery. The point of household replication is that it's totally ubiquitous and used without any concern for cost: dialogue establishes that people use it more lightly than they consume toilet paper.

The other point is that replicating anything at all is literally peanuts - it supposedly takes the exact same energy and effort to create a pound of gold or a pound of complex electronics as it takes to create a pound of peanuts. Or probably less, as peanuts need to have their complex chemistry exactly right for that pleasant taste, while gold is simple bulk and electronics can be replicated with wide tolerances.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Hatshepsut]

Variations of this have been accepted parts of the mythology since the beginning. Need one hundred flintlocks? Use the industrial printer/fabricator...

I'm not even sure when 3-D printers were first brought up in discussions of Star Trek episodes. Certainly not back in the '60s and 70's. I'm not sure if a near-magical future technology will use them, either, as we'll have moved up by then. 3-D printers do have the limitation of having to make something as a lamina, one thin layer at a time.

But I reaally wonder is whether the cat was lying.

 

[FormerLurker]

One could easily project that by the 23rd century, 3-D printers, while still using lamina technology as a basis, have progressed to be at least several thousand times faster at disbursal, and spraying layers several times thinner, so as to easily replicate materials like wood to where natives won't wonder where they came from. The same would hold true for softer materials, like the clothing that was replicated for Kirk and McCoy so Tyree's people won't think they're evil spirits. 23rd century pleather and pinewood would be indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye.

 

[Hatshepsut]

But I keep thinking we're thinking inside a box. Why not a "4-D printer" that can inject new material directly in the interior of a 3-D object? After all, if they have "warped" space in connection with propulsion, then why not warped space during fabrication? It's not a totally idle issue, as there are geometries which cannot be built as a lamina.

Laminas also necessarily have cleavage planes, rendering them unsuitable for some high-strength applications. I can 3-D print a gun to get around gun bans, but I might not trust the chamber not to explode upon firing! (Beside the problem of printing the smokeless powder that's also banned.)