Hey, we're half way there! We can de-materialize matter in many different and effective ways. The re-materialization process still needs some work though.
I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to. Everyone living on hand outs is the road to hell
> I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to.
That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.
This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.
Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years ago.
If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful.
In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
Communicator
Communicate remotely between two arbitrary points.
It claims smartphones is that (though surely cellular phones would count then; why not list Motorola or whatnot?); but in Star Trek, the communicator works everywhere without cellular towers (well except when it doesn't for plot reasons). I wouldn't say a device like the communicator is available yet.
My favorite game watching TNG is trying to figure out how the communicators somehow always perfectly know when the user means to use them. It's very common for a character to tap it to initiate the conversation, but then the back and forth is magically seamless, as well as the end of the communication. All while being mixed up with talking to other characters mid conversation.
According to the TNG Technical Manual (which is not entirely canon, but whatever) it's all handwaved by a context-sensitive AI that figures out who you're trying to talk to from context clues.
"<number> to beam up" drives my wife nuts and she's right: how the heck does the transporter tech know who they're targeting?
Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work?
(Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.
You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.
The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
Trek doesn’t have anything remotely resembling orbital mechanics, the ships are just assumed to "park" wherever needed (a planet may be shown to rotate under them because they’re supposed to do that, but that doesn’t really affect anything, it’s purely for show).
I think the comparisons of Star Trek to Iain Banks’s Culture series are immediately obvious and welcomed by me and many others in this comment section. I’d like to draw attention toward Peter F. Hamilton’s works, and specifically those in his Commonwealth Saga and its sequels and one-shots. The Advancer and Higher subcultures embody different strains of hacker archetypes; the Higher culture is largely post-scarcity for commodities and incidental expenses, with everything excess costing “matter-engergy credits” essentially, representing the cost to their society to provide you with rabbits from hats upon request. Everyone gets a UBI of these credits every pay period, and they may be stockpiled, traded, and vested. More importantly, they can be discounted, as humans are only in the loop as a formality for most civilian requests. It’s a really interesting concept, and I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are new to the books, of which there are many.
Readit News
"Dematerialize matter from one location and then rematerialize it in a second location. "
is worth the same as "Automatic sliding doors"
This sentence reads delightfully well in Data’s voice.
This is similar to when people call The Sprawl a dystopia: conditions in it are far better then what most people live in today.
That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.
This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.
Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years ago.
If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful.
In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
>resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
if you have this
>post-scarcity economics
And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
This one is a fantasy, which communism (that I lived in) had shown many times.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/55156/why-is-there...
Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work?
(Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.
You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.
The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641
From detection, activating an electromagnet or a material inspired by geko grip that is activated by a current would be a great start.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Civil_War