Posted on 10/22/2014 10:26:03 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
One of my favorite little moments in the very entertaining new “Star Trek” movie comes when the young James T. Kirk activates the computer system of a car he swiped for a joyride, and the Nokia logo comes up. It’s nice to see Nokia’s still in business in the twenty-third century. Such simple touches help to humanize the Star Trek universe, which had drifted a bit too far from recognizable human experience for audiences to fully engage with its characters. The presence of a good old-fashioned corporate logo in the new movie put me in mind of a long-ago, free-wheeling, beer-fueled rant after I saw a previous “Star Trek” movie with some friends, and we asked ourselves, “Who mines the dilithium?”
In the 1996 film “Star Trek: First Contact,” there is a scene in which a woman from our near future asks time-traveling twenty-fourth century Captain Jean-Luc Picard how much the Enterprise cost to build. Picard replies that money doesn’t exist in his enlightened future era. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives,” he assures her. “We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.”
Gee, that sounds swell, doesn’t it? How did the Federation outgrow capitalism? Well, they have a technology called “replicators,” which allows them to manufacture almost any form of matter out of energy. This might not seem like a very useful technology, since if I remember my high school physics correctly, it would take the power of a thousand exploding suns to create enough matter for a decent New York strip steak and a side order of mashed potatoes, but not to worry – they also have virtually unlimited energy in the future, thanks to a crystal called “dilithium.” So, in the twenty-fourth century, they have vast amounts of cheap energy, and they can create matter with it, so nobody needs money, because all material desires are easily fulfilled.
Where does dilithium come from? You mine it from extremely unpleasant planets, where the miners live stoic lives of terrible loneliness and physical hardship, as seen in the 1960s Star Trek TV episode “Mudd’s Women.” The miners’ lives are so wretched, they’re willing to contract with a con artist to bring them mail-order brides. It would seem the mining process cannot be fully automated, since the technology of Captain Kirk’s day was sufficiently advanced to have done so, if it were possible. (Of course, until the character of Lt. Data was introduced in the “Next Generation” series, the Star Trek guys seemed very squeamish about building self-aware machines – and with good reason, since they always turned into planet-destroying psychotic monsters.) So: who’s working in those dilithium mines? Is the Federation lucky enough to have an adequate number of people who find self-fulfillment by volunteering to work in dingy hell-holes, digging up those precious crystals? Those guys aren’t prisoners being forced to work off their sentences, are they? That didn’t seem to be the case in the TV episode.
More evidence of the absurdity of the twenty-fourth century’s flimsy Utopia is easy to find. In the series “Deep Space Nine”, Captain Sisko’s father was an expert chef who ran a restaurant in New Orleans. He might indeed have been cooking because he enjoyed it and found it fulfilling, but what about the people waiting tables in his restaurant? Is that your fate if you score poorly on the benevolent Federation’s aptitude tests? A “D” grade leaves you slinging crawdaddies in Sisko’s restaurant, while an “F” means it’s off to the dilithium mines? That doesn’t sound like a society to brag about. And what happens if you refuse to accept the menial job assigned to you by the Federation, when they determined you’re a moron? Do they force you to work at gunpoint? Or is the future Earth filled with layabouts who just watch holographic game shows and replicate Hot Pockets all day? If so, perhaps they were too quick to repel the Borg invasion in “First Contact” – it would have been their best chance of reaching Bush-era unemployment lows. The Borg are always hiring.
There’s an even deeper flaw in the Star Trek utopia, revealed by contemplating Sisko’s restaurant: Who gets to eat there? The elder Sisko is supposed to be one of the best chefs around. How do you get a table at his restaurant? Is there a four-hundred-year waiting list, the way “free” medicine is rationed in socialist countries? All the free matter and energy in the universe can’t change the fact there’s only one Sisko Senior, and he’s only got two hands to cook with. What about works of art? Certainly they can be copied easily enough, but what if somebody wants an original? All of the “Star Trek” shows had literary pretensions, especially regarding Shakespeare. How are theater seats doled out, when the greatest actors of the twenty-fourth century stage a production of “Hamlet?” If I get sick, I’d sure like to have a doctor as dedicated as Doctor McCoy. How are the services of the top doctors assigned? Are they exclusively assigned to take care of high-ranking military officers and Federation politicians? I’ll bet that would be a feature of the twenty-fourth century that Captain Picard wouldn’t employ to advertise how advanced and enlightened it is.
“Star Trek” is famous for its wonderful transporter technology, which lets people teleport instantly with planetary range. You could have breakfast in France, pop over to Alaska for a moose hunt, and be in Australia in time for dinner. Who gets to do that? How is the limited amount of transporter capacity distributed between the populace? There might be a lot of transporters, but there certainly aren’t enough to allow billions of terrestrial citizens to zip around the globe at will. For that matter, who gets to ride around in starships, besides the military officers that crew the Starfleet vessels? The “Next Generation” crew were forever talking about a wonderful pleasure planet they loved to visit on vacations. Can the people waiting tables in Sisko’s restaurant go there for a holiday?
It’s interesting to note how quickly the futuristic utopia Captain Picard described to the woman in “First Contact” falls apart when you stop to think about the lives of the ordinary citizens – the people who don’t get to boldly go on adventures in starships. Magical technologies that provide limitless resources do nothing to resolve the eternal shortage of the human resource. The kind of thinking that leads socialists to believe they can create perfect national medical systems, welfare programs, or government-controlled financial institutions doesn’t even work if you have dilithium crystals to back it up… because somebody has to mine the dilithium, and somebody has to do something meaningful and valuable with all that cheap matter and energy.
Freedom, industry, and capitalism will always be the most ethical and efficient way to allocate those precious human resources. The new “Star Trek” film might have a lot of plot holes, but they’ve also got Nokia, which means they’re living in a world that bears some resemblance to the real one.
WHO FRICKIN’ CARES?!? IT’S STAR TREK!!!
The whole point was they didn’t bother to explain such things.
Well, they have a technology called “replicators,” which allows them to manufacture almost any form of matter out of energy. This might not seem like a very useful technology, since if I remember my high school physics correctly, it would take the power of a thousand exploding suns to create enough matter for a decent New York strip steak and a side order of mashed potatoes
This is not a very hard problem. If you need energy to make some mass, you break up some other mass to make energy. Plenty of universal copiers in SciFi have an "in" hopper, which you fill with whatever sand or dirt you happen to have. Inside the machine that mass is converted to energy and rebuilt into atoms that you need.
Is the Federation lucky enough to have an adequate number of people who find self-fulfillment by volunteering to work in dingy hell-holes, digging up those precious crystals?
Yes, this is one of major, carefully ignored problems with Communism. Everyone will want to be an artist and singer, but very few would want to operate robots that clean sewers. It is unreasonable to postulate that such jobs will not be required. They are required even in the Star Trek universe. They will certainly be required in the real world. No robot will be able to get into some stinky place and figure out, all by itself, what happened and how to resolve the problem. (Even if such a robot is created, like Data, he would not be particularly happy to do the work - and you don't want to face 100,000 unhappy androids; they might discover that it's the humans who are the ultimate reason why the sewer is blocked.)
He might indeed have been cooking because he enjoyed it and found it fulfilling, but what about the people waiting tables in his restaurant?
This is another example of a job that is laborious, hard on people, and not very much fulfilling. Working with people is always hard. The owner would have to resort to using robots as servers. Still, he would have to find someone to work as a maître d'hôtel - at least to know what his customers want to order.
Or is the future Earth filled with layabouts who just watch holographic game shows and replicate Hot Pockets all day?
Pretty much that's the official position of Communists. "If you don't want to work, you don't have to." I can still imagine some middle aged guys continuing to work out of habit that they worked out in old, bad days of Capitalism. However what in the world would ever force teenagers to abandon their computer games, their relations with opposite sex, and their tribal instincts to go somewhere every weekday and work for several hours? Glamorous work, like racing car driver, Starfleet (but not Red Shirt,) perhaps art - those will be filled for various reasons. But most of work is not glamorous at all. Robot techs will be the primary occupation of those who work. And if the broken robot was a city bus, you have to work on it in whatever weather is out there. If the broken robot was cleaning sewage... I guess you will go there as well. And who among humans, may I ask, will volunteer to do such work? Such a society has to change humans into some sort of hive mind, like ants or bees.
How do you get a table at his restaurant? Is there a four-hundred-year waiting list, the way “free” medicine is rationed in socialist countries? All the free matter and energy in the universe can’t change the fact there’s only one Sisko Senior, and he’s only got two hands to cook with.
Such place won't exist because no sane person can volunteer to cook for hundreds of patrons every single day. Today an amateur cook makes a dinner now and then for a few invited people, and it's a lot of work already. One person in a whole restaurant cannot cook enough food to sustain a restaurant of any reasonable size (say, more than one table.) But even if that is managed somehow, by using a single dish of the day, or a robot helper, still nobody would want to spend his life cooking. Today people work primarily because they are motivated by necessity - they can sell their labor on weekdays, and then on weekends they can buy something else. Most people who work menial jobs would gladly abandon work if only they could. Their life, their time with children and grandchildren, their appreciation of nature, their enjoyment of existence cannot be made in a replicator - it's a very finite product, and every minute of work distracts you from watching the clouds (as an example.)
How are the services of the top doctors assigned? Are they exclusively assigned to take care of high-ranking military officers and Federation politicians?
Doctors are yet another example of limited human resources. If you want a human doctor, you need a motivation for that human doctor to exist. Some will be motivated enough by their desire to heal people. Perhaps there will be quite a few of those among doctors. But will the society have enough human nurses? It's not one of those glamorous jobs either.
Politicians are yet another issue. Communism is not supposed to have a government. People just magically do what is right, all the time and in every circumstance. SciFi suggests that there would be some Councils that gently guide the society... but if the members of the society are free, they have every right to ignore those recommendations. The government cannot function unless it can somehow force the people to obey. (This is why theoretical Communists dislike governments.) This is where their deus ex machina comes handy: in the Communist society everyone - magically - willingly obeys the decisions of those Councils. Even if those decisions kill them, and they know it. There was an original Star Trek episode about two planets that simulated attacks on each other, but killed their "victims" for real. That episode really pushed the limits of belief. It's not in human behavior to meekly go into disintegration chambers.
Communists are painting an appealing future, but it is always full of holes like these. Sociologists do not know how to patch them up. We have to invent those methods pretty soon, as automation (and cheap foreign labor, which is equivalent to automation) is sending many US workers into involuntary retirement. Why does the USA need a metalworker to make a pot if the whole thing can be obtained, already made, from China in exchange for a number in a computer somewhere deep within Federal Reserve? Who would need workers if every Wal-Mart has a replicator in the basement? Who would have money to buy anything from that Wal-Mart, if nobody works? If everyone wants stuff for free, why that Wal-Mart should even exist, as it takes nonzero human labor to run replicators? Somewhere in the chain, near raw resources, or near the energy (those Dilithium crystals,) or near antimatter reactors you have to have people who work, as opposed to everyone else who does not work because there are no jobs for them. What will make those workers spend their life doing dangerous work if they don't have to? Even if you get a starry-eyed teenager interested, his interest will disappear after a few boring shifts, or after a few weeks of crawling through the bowels of the reactor, with tools in his teeth, while his friends relax at a beach and chase girls. That behavior would be normal for an ant, but not for a human. Chances are that humans, as we know them, simply cannot form a Communist society. It's far more likely that they will form an Anarchist one, just as they have done so for many centuries of written history.
Robots will handle many of the unpleasant tasks in a high-tech future, if we get there. At least for a while.
“I don’t know what made you dig up this fossil...”
Nice Star Wars reference in a thread about Trek. :)
“More evidence of the absurdity of the twenty-fourth century’s flimsy Utopia is easy to find. In the series “Deep Space Nine”, Captain Sisko’s father was an expert chef who ran a restaurant in New Orleans.”
In an all-effort to prove my geekdom, DS9 doesn’t really fit the Roddenberry utopia the author is trying to assault. It’s a much more morally ambiguous setting, with very little of the Preachy Picard moral lessons of the early TNG, and a lot more of making deals with the devil to get things done. Money certainly exists, too.
Everything is created through labor, both mental and physical. If you consume more than your labor produced, you’re taking what belongs to someone else. Unfortunately there are people who think someone other than themselves should do the work. There are whole political movements around that idea.
It’s science fiction. What do you expect, workable detailed economic cycles?
I don’t know what made you dig up this fossil but it has a point.
...and for me the point would be, always date check or you will wonder where the new Star Trek movie is the author is talking about.
...and you don’t find out until post 4 Pontiac.
As for vacuuming the floor, you forget that Enterprise is a military ship. Things don't have to make sense.
I do the same sometimes.
A major problem with using rocket propulsion to reach the velocities required for interstellar flight is the enormous amounts of fuel required.
Isn't fuel requirement the problem with most forms of propulsion?
Yes, it sounds like many people want to know all the details of the economic systems of the science fiction world of Star Trek.
Heck, somebody created an entire Klingon language. Some people really want to know all the details of these fictional worlds.
Whenever I hear someone use Star Trek as an example of the economic policy mankind should strive for, I want to smack the person saying it. They clearly don’t have enough brains to ask “Where does all that stuff they use come from?”
There isn’t no money in Trek. There just isn’t a lot of need for it. But credits exist, so you can get a job with pay, but you don’t have to.
Only a progressive liberal mind could manufacture a puerile diatribe about something created as entertainment 54 years ago!
Apparently he/she/it could not be motivated to find a more contemporary truly nasty, valueless, incomprehensible, immoral, illiterate and disgusting series, of which most in the last 20 years qualify.
I read the article all the way through, astonished at how long a tiny intellectual idea could be milked for ignorant, absurd, and petulant childish reactions masquerading as deep insights.
Just wow.
Whew!
Fortunately, the real world, and all available history going back many millennia clearly shows that reality never works that way.
< /sarc >
Name one successful great utopian (I read "progressive") civilization (that survived to be known) which didn't.
Of course there are.
They're called the Borg, which absorb every useful, living, sentient thing in the universe, to exploit all their knowledge and usefulness, then kill them and everything else in their path.
All done with brutish mindless force, for no apparent purpose other than increasing their number.
Which sounds suapiciously like dilithium cartel.
Sound familiar?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.