Trek studiously avoided the bad implications of replicators and holodecks. But it’s there if you’re willing to read between the lines. They have replicators that provide for all basic needs, and a HUGE military finding new planets for their civilians to colonize. Sure they sell it as everybody being “free to grow to their potential” but the reality is there.
Trek studiously avoided the bad implications of replicators and holodecks.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned matter transmitters (yet anyway-I haven't read the whole thread yet). One thing I'd like to mention about the replicators and matter transmitters is that they were added to the Star Trek universe for one simple reason. It saved a lot of money in production costs. You don't have to spend time in the series mucking about with landing craft except when the craft has something to do with the story itself. Replicators were essentially introduced for the same reason. No mucking about with menus, waiters, or much of anything else to do with food. It's a time and money saver as far as production costs are concerned.
Warp drive is essentially the same when you get right down to it, and you see it all over the place in science fiction for a very simple reason. Space is big. It's bigger than most people think. Much, much, much bigger than most people think. Download a copy of Celestia if you'd like to personally experience exactly how freaking big space is. Try travelling around the solar system from planet to planet, limited to merely the speed of light, and you get a very small taste of how big the solar system is. Just as an example, here's how long it takes to run through the solar system as it stands at this moment (21:45 CST 08/20/12)
| Planet | Time to Planet |
Cumlative Time> |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | Begin | -------- |
| Venus | 00:04:13 | 00:04:13 |
| Earth | 00:06:15 | 00:10:38 |
| Mars | 00:14:31 | 00:25:09 |
| Jupiter | 00:54:23 | 01:09:32 |
| Saturn | 01:58:41 | 03:08:11 |
| Uranus | 00:4:03:10 | 07:11:20 |
| Neptune | 02:26:14 | 09:37:34 |
| Pluto | 03:53:45 | 13:19:59 |
I really hope I got the math right with that. Adding time is a PITA, as it uses 3 different bases. Again, all of the above is at the speed of light, and it is actually nowhere near a worst case scenerio for travel distances within the solar system. The planets aren't badly lined up at the moment. The first few planets aren't all that bad, but the last few get really tedious. If, after your little trek, you wanted to make a final stop at Voyager 1, and swipe the LP hanging on the side, that would take you an additional 12:20:09 from Pluto. From Earth straight to Voyager 1 is 15:30:30, which puts that particular spacecraft into the 'really far out' range.
Now, so far I've just been puttering around the solar system. Yeah it's fun, but only really gives you a feel for what the local neighborhood is like. I have some time on my hands though, so lets take a trip to the nearest star. It's 4.242 light years away. so the calculation at the speed of light is pretty obvious. (4.242 years for those of you in Rio Linda) So let's bump things up a bit. Let us propose to have a spacecraft that is able to travel the distance between the earth and the sun (known as an Astronomical Unit) in one second. That's pretty freaking far. It takes light 8:34.9 to get from the Sun to the Earth. We'll round that off to 505 seconds. So, you're travelling 505 times faster than the speed of light. That's pretty honking fast. How long does it take you to get to Proxima Centauri travelling at 1 AU per second? Well, there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Multiply that by 4.242 and that gives you 133,775,712. Divide that by 505 gives you 264,902, which, when converted back into time is equal to about 3 days. So, in order to make space travel something that doesn't take years to decades to go anywhere, (Betelgeuse is almost 500 LY away) you have to have a starship that can travel much faster than the speed of light. If you want to leave the galaxy, you're talking a need to travel light years per second.
BTW, Celestia is one of the coolest programs I've ever seen. It is essentially a real-time universe simulator. It is awesome fun for the whole family!