I'd love for you to cover zoning in general. How would one decide what buildings get build and what purpose would they have? Because here would the one issue i have with star trek show its ugly head : Who will get to work/expres themselves in such a society? Is there a social credit lottery? Will society utilise the schooling system to either guide or push people to certain fields in order to full fill the zoning/workforce requirements? Any nation state will require a certain amount of workers for a particular field how does the federation meet its work force quota's? And how would any of that change in a state of war say the dominion war where suddely a massive requirement of shipbuilders and ships crew/officer were required? Would there be a draft of sorts mandating people to join massive workforces in times of need?
At the end of the day, at the end of a project, a house builder can look out and say "I built that, and someone will always make use of it, and that's pretty cool." And self-satisfaction matters
In a world with aliens, starships, replicators, warp speed, phasers, Klingons, shape shifters, sentient machines and so on, the moneyless society is still the most futuristic concept.
@@thomgizziz Only if you accept the world as it is today as best you can understand it today. The distant past had differences not known to everyone today, why wouldn’t the future be equally difficult and different for many to conceive of today? Society and socioeconomic systems are not static they evolve and often that evolution is technologically driven. For example, the impact of the printing press on literacy.
Modular construction would be big. Cfi replicators could build housing modules that are plugged into a frame. This would make apartments much easier to build.
We have had that since WW2 and people despise them. Remember the lesson from Betty Crocker, no one wanted a ready to bake cake mix, they wanted to add eggs so they could "feel" like they actually did something themselves. It took a while to figure that out because it's crazy but who said humans weren't crazy?
@@TheRadioAteMyTV I did not mean that they are popular just incredibly easy to build with repliators. This would also allow for a lot of customization too.
@TheRadioAteMyTV what I am saying is that in star trek they would be incredibly easy to build a replicator could create them and a tractor beam could place them it would take almost no effort.
@@TheRadioAteMyTV I think there would be people who would only use replicators for the building materials & build it themselves, but some people would just use the technology to make predesigned houses without having to lift a finger. With holodeck technology you could design your house & walk through then change anything you don't like for example the kitchen with green cabinets or blue & not enough light change the house layout or even change the direction the house is facing then when your happy save the house design upload it to the replicators then sit back & watch as it replicates your house and all its furnishing in a day or two.
Not only are the Picards not hurting anyone, but they are actually providing a service by making wine. Seems like that would be valued and appreciated in a future society
What happens if you want to do the same? You don't get to loser because you weren't born to the correct family. Also there is no need for the picards to keep making wine they could just have a bigger house than you and you being the loser that you are you don't get to have a house. Should have been born to the right person you loser. This whole video is cope that relies on nobody trying to get more for themselves which is a fantasy.
Except replicator wine would be identical. And those that say homemade wine is better have inadvertently removed the equity in society and quickly, capitalism is reverted.
It's possible that there is a large enough group of people on Earth and elsewhere who might want to drink and taste wine made the old fashioned way. The number doesn't have to be huge because there is no real market or negative balance sheet to drive Chateau Picard out of business.
@@Slov01 It might not necessarily mean that the Chateau Picard wine is better, you can throw a Chateau Picard wine into the replicator and replicated it over and over again. It's that the vintage has, well, a vintage. A history. Something with feeling. They might not even be selling the wine, they might very well be giving it to other people. Maybe they're trading it to other people for other non-replicator products. Or maybe it could be the "reputation currency" that is being discussed. Just because a desired good is unequal and scarce doesn't mean the society has reverted to capitalism. If you want a non-replicator wine, there's plenty out there. Everyone has access to as much wine as they like in as good a quality as they like.
I notice that in conversations I had with people, part of them get morally offended at the idea of a system that takes away people's necessity to work. Like, through basic income, or, in the example of this video, a portfolio of goods that covers all their daily needs (bypassing a money system). I've always thought that when you take away people's necessity to work, other human drives kick in that push people to work. E.g., the need to be admired & respected by others; the need for self-development & self-expression; and the need for a meaningful life.
Except in places where they have actually done it and not just thought about it, as certain as heavy things do NOT fall at a faster rate than lighter things - like thought, people do in fact become very lazy, obese and then heavily depressed when given an ongoing amount of unworked for money, be it from tax payers or family members. A simple rule of nature long known that applies to all animals, even the human ones - DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS.
@@TheRadioAteMyTV So, if we would get you on a system that provides you with a full income for like, the next 2 years, for which you wouldn't have to work, you could see this happening to you? You would quit your job (because you wouldn't have to work to get a monthly income), or any sort of volunteer work, get very lazy and obese and then heavily depressed? I'm not trying to mock you! I'm just honestly curious whether you'd see yourself slipping in the sort of downward spiral you describe.
@@TheRadioAteMyTV Depression, boredom, tend to be drivers for change. Feeding animals makes them aggressive, and most animals are faster and stronger than humans, so that's dangerous for people to do, it does not make the animals depressed. And if you are correct about it being a certainty, which you are not, the wealthy would donate their children's inheritance rather than have their children become lazy, obese, and depressed. Of course people that have much more wealth and free time than every one around them tend to be isolated, which can cause depression. But should everyone share in such abundance, that would no longer be a problem. And finally, places that have done that only do it short term, and I have yet to see a study where it was worse for those people, in fact every study I've seen suggests the opposite. The only people it may be worse for are business owners that treat workers like crap, they'll have a harder time finding people willing to work for them.
@@roofdogblues7400 There are a sizeable number of rich people who do not give their children anything after they die for this very reason. So too, the amount rich kids who are not forced to work are widely known to be on chemical mood adjusters either legally or not. Your studies of places that have done it must not include the US, where the results have regularly shown it doesn't have positive effect on the subjects except in tiny numbers and widespread worsening conditions for the rest.
Sounds terrible🤣 I'm sorry, but your joke made me think, what is a HOA? I don't see something like the terrible examples, I've primarily heard of from the US, ever pop up in the Star Trek universe. At least not on earth. A HOA is in it's essence, a group of people, who live close to each other. They band together, to help each other, take care of common tasks. Primarily concerned with money, and avoiding/solving internal disputes, in the neighborhood. So since in Star Trek, land is abundant, you are not forced to live close to other people. If you do, and you dont get along with your neighbors, you move, and build a similar house, to the one you had. You are not locket in place, for possibly years. Because neither of you have the resources to move, before you get your house sold. Since money is not a factor, you don't need to agree with neighbors, whether to pay for a new playground, or a yearly steet BBQ. You just build a neighbourhood HoloSuite. Money, and the perception of money, is in it self, a giant contributor to conflict in any setting. Also with your neighbors. Even if you are not forced to socialise with them, in say a HOA. In my country (Denmark). We have something similar to, what I understand as a North American HOA. But I don't think I've ever heard any examples as bad, as the ones, I'm sure you're joke is based on. But then again, most of the tasks that I understand, that a HOA does in the US. Is here taken care of by government, or local municipality. What most Danish HOA's does, is mostly social gatherings. So the amount of money, that you pay into it, the "volunteer" work you do, and the power of the Danish HOA is extremely limited, comparatively. And I'm not sure, that you can even be forced to be a member. Also, here, there are stringent rules/laws for, how you donduct any kind community/club. To make sure, that they follow some specific democratic procedures, especially regarding finances. And there are effective, and fair ways, in which a "club" can be forced to abolish, or restructure. E.g. based on member complaints. I don't think most single family homes here, are connected to a HOA. Whether because of some of the above. Or because we don't have the same concept of suburbs, with cul de sac's, as in North America, Idk. But our version seems more like something that could exist and function, in a world of abundance. But then again, in our current "world limitations", Denmark is closer to the ideals of the Federation, then the US, on pretty much every metric🙄
@@soul0360 In America, "Homeowners' associations' tend to be about busybodies and developers and real estate interests trying to control what everything looks and sounds like in a neighborhood and that everyone conforms in the name of 'Property Values.' They tend to be the opposite of 'Social Justice Warriors,' they tend to want extreme gentrified conformism. Don't try to fix your own car or wave a rainbow flag or fail to align your trash bins perfectly or else.......
Nice video. “Remove the need to be connected to a grid” in an advanced sci-fi world kinda circles back around to “wizards crap on the floor and then vanish the evidence”😅
This is really all a discussion about being more open minded to what 'work' means. When you spend so much of your life in some dreary 9-5 in can seems like the non-work bits of life are what make it worthwhile. But ultimately I believe that we all need to feel that what we do matters to other people, that we are contributing.
we need a Star Trek villain who is like ferengi Ayn Rand. her story should end on a comfortable federation colony in her custom dream home luxury council flat/villa, having failed utterly in her goals.
My best friend and I have marathon discussions about the next stage of economic development is and what AI/automation replacing the workforce means. I've had to show him these videos because he couldn't (and still struggles) with wrapping his head around what a scarcity-less economy looks like. I have to frequently remind my of what Ursula LeGuin said "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings."
This video isn't going to fix things. If you have unlimited resources and are greedy then what would be stopping you from making a house for yourself the size of a city? You could use a different room every night and thus what argument do you have to try and take that house away from that person? Picard has a house way bigger than he needs why does he get that and others don't? People aren't magically going to stop comparing themselves or being greedy. You have to just ignore and hand waive away every problem with your utopia. You still would end up forcing people to live where they don't want to and in conditions they are against. Everybody doesn't get what they want because some people would still want things that are way beyond what they can use and just a fraction of the population doing that would make serious issues. You are pretending that greed or even trying to keep up with jones family would go away. It wouldn't. If people weren't running away to new places... you know they don't do that on earth, they tend to congregate in cities. And if you want to live in the city and it is full then what do you do? You are playing pretend and your friend is living in reality and you can't accept that your ideas could ever have any exceptions or drawbacks. I know I think like you do sometimes but I know that I'm playing make believe.
@@thomgizzizYou are the one playing make believe if you don’t think that your paradigm leads to anything other than complete human annihilation. And very quickly. This is something that only those who choose to do it, will do it. Which won’t be forced onto anyone.
@@thomgizziz This is one of the most bizarre and myopic comments i've ever seen Who gets to tell someone they can't make themselves a house the size of a city? A regulatory apparatus conceived by a peoples' government such as the Federation, with common sense policies such as: "One guy can't claim 500 square miles for his own house". Sorry if that treads on your freedom to establish a kingdom of one at the expense of 12 million other citizens, but in post-capitalism we don't build society around the needs of psychopaths
@@thomgizzizThat's a poor example for your argument. It's predicated on 1 person being able to physically build a city sized mega-structure on their own. You're also bestowing some kind of exclusive pre-eminence on to that single individual, weighing their desire as somehow equal to the entire collective of everyone else, rather than how it actually is, only equal to the man who wants a vineyard on the same land, the woman that wants an art school on that land, the alien that wants a habit module for their people to live comfortably. It's all conflict resolution; Civil Society organisations; and Civic government administrations.
@@the_Kutonarch I have unlimited ability to create robots and make more replicators. I could have a whole city built in literally a day. So how much can the collective decide to restrict you? Why are some people going to be more unrestricted? If I want to live on the beach but all the beach property is full doesn't that make the beach property more valuable and I might trade a lot of things to get it? We already have way more than enough and could be in a post scarcity soceity for the essentials to live and we have "It's all conflict resolution; Civil Society organisations; and Civic government administrations." so why aren't we living like star trek? Humans aren't machines and you can't make them act like you wish they would. You are way off base here to the point of being delusional.
Here's my question: if 24th century me wants to "buy" a real bottle of Chateau Picard, how do I do that? Can I just wander over to the vinyard and help myself to a bottle, or do I have to knock on the door and ask? What if I want a case of wine, is that cool? I'd like to sample some of the rare vintages please. And what if they don't like my face, can they trespass me from the premises if I've done nothing other than ask for alcohol?
First, you would need to ask for one, and if you are worried about the lack of money to pay for it problem, this is where ether A) you offer something you make in exchange in a barter, b) leverage social clout as a reason to receive the bottle as part of an event or service being performed, c) if you did want to break it down to 'i just want to buy it' latinum is still a monetary substitute in star treck, it is used by capitalistic societies in the universe because it's a non-replicatable substance.
I would imagine it could be just that simple. Either get in touch with the vineyard ahead of time or politely knock on the door and ask nicely if you might sample some wine. It may be that you "pay" for your bottle or case of wine by helping out with the chores, or through other mutual agreement between yourself and the Picards. As the winery and all its contents are private property, you can't simply show up and take stuff whenever you want no more than we can do so today. Likewise if they ask you to leave they have every right to do so, ditto on barring you from the premises if you want to act like a beligerant ass. Presuming you minded your manners and you still left empty-handed, you troop back to your hotel room and ask the computer to track down the distributors of Chateau Picard to get in touch and see if they have a bottle or a case you can have. All that done and you still don't have your wine? Go to the replicator and tell it to make you a bottle, specify real alcohol instead of synthehol and then you sit down and crack 'er open.
I never realised how different building houses works in US and where I live until I saw your video. Here, houses very often are not built by developers. Instead, you buy land and then pay a construction company to put a house onto it. Of course, there also are investors building homes here, especially apartments. But for houses it's way less common. In the Star Trek future, it should be very simple to get some land and plan your own house with the computer. You wouldn't even need an architect since the computer would do all the calculations for you. Then, robots and replicators simply would build it.
It depends on how urbanized an area is. Rural areas are commonly developed by the eventual homeowner, either doing the work themselves or hiring a private contractor. But suburbs and megacorp developers are the majority of new build
Hopefully in the next video you can discuss the people who hold less creative/passionate/industrious jobs, like janitor, waiter, or plasma conduit scrubbers. What’s their motivation? (Before they were replaced by holographs and synths)
We see a miniature version of construction in both Voyager and Enterprise. In voyager a team of designers and engineers work together to build an advanced shuttle craft. Then in Enterprise a repair station is visited that uses entirely automation and replicators to repair the ship in short order.
So no you don't. You see people on the ship in voyager doing things in not the best possible way. Enterprise that was an alien station that was trying to steal people.
If you still feel cramped on Earth, there's a passing mention of an Atlantis Project that will create a new continent, presumably where you could live.
Considering that humanity is suggested to be more evolved, I'd imagine that a whole honor system for society would work well for them in all things, especially for land use. Everyone cooperates to make sure everyone has a life that is fulfilling and rich in experience.
Humanity hasn't evolved in the past 5000 years we have written records, sure we have more tech but we act the same and it seems we probably haven't evolved in the past 200,000 years and still act the same as people from long ago. So pray tell how are we going to "evolve" in hundreds of years? Evolution doesn't really work on that scale? What happens when everybody doesn't cooperate and a few people take advantage of the situation? You can see it in our modern day. If everybody did what they were supposed to there would be fewer problems but a small percentage of the population is corrupt and look what happens. You can't even cooperate with your family and friends and you have problems there, so how are you going to be cooperating with strangers that don't care about you and they are there to "get theirs"?
in Star Trek's case as seen in Voyager, the lack of profit motive leads to the enslavement of the holograms. EI EMH mark I cleaning out engine cores and other dangerous jobs to humans, in the context of that episode, something they wouldn't choose to do. when humans are all too busy bettering themselves, technologies and AI slavery seems to be their solution.
And those programs generally don't exist when they are shut off. The 'person' it creates ends when the program is reset. That's why on voyager, when the medical program begins wanting for more it does need to be acomindated. In theory he could have been reset, but that goes against their principles. A different culture might have just hit the reset every time it starts asking for something.
For most of history the answer to "who bulds the houses" is whoever it is who is going to live in the house. With replicators and robots around that sound be a lot easier than ever
That means that there is functionally a currency system. Just a less fungible one. If holodeck time is artificially or practically scarce, it's a resource that is being used as an incentive in the same way money is now.
@@JamesRoyceDawson This is explored somewhat in Voyager, where people will trade holodeck time (and rations) for favors, etc. There isnt a COMPLETE overabundance of everything in Star Trek (only certain people could work alongside Picard), so there is currency, but its largely social.
@@briannevs2772 Rations... if things are rationed then you are back to an economy. That means picard's land can be traded for things and if you have more land or a bigger house you are now wealthier than others and can trade things to get things so you have more MONEY. If being higher ranked means your rations go up you now have class and wealth disparities. Some people will be able to make more advantageous trades and make more profit and become more wealthy and powerful than other people. The whole system is now back to what people like to call capitalism but is really just human nature, we try to get the most out of our time and effort. You are so short sighted that you think about how you want things to work or how you wish they would work and you pretend that is how it will play out. That is really bad for any decisions you make and it also makes you look slow.
@@briannevs2772 Well, especially aboard starships.... and on Voyager in particular they often had to ration due to their unique circumstances. Also on DS9 the station's largely full of people doing somewhat more conventional commerce.
A restaurant that doesn't need to make a profit doesn't need every customer who walks in the door. To someone who has worked in restaurants, this is... interesting. 🙂
In an episode of DS9, Sisko mentions that at one point he almost took a job helping to build orbital habitats. So even though we never see them and don't know what forms they would take, we know they probably exist.
You still must designate land for backup agriculture and environmental stability. And there is a planetwide power grid as replicators actually are not generators.
@@RowanJColeman If that were true...then anyone with enough replicators could have enough power to control the universe. Have one replicator build another, and multiply it out until youve made 50 billion replicators with 500 billion quantum torpedos. This (along with the conservation of mass) shows that replicators themselves are not a infinite generator. I cant think of anywhere in ST where they have said that a replicator can generate its own power. Replicators are obviously a finite resource (Voyager's replicators are down? Why didnt we park 200 in a separate cargo bay and have them replicate a new Delta Flyer?) which require other resources (otherwise, if you had a downed shuttle on a planet with a working replicator, you wouldnt need rescue because then you'd say "Computer, replicate me a new shuttlecraft") which are finite.
@@RowanJColeman That literally makes no sense. The laws of thermodynamics are still in effect in star trek. You can't create energy out of thin air, that would probably destroy the universe. Replicators would work on the principle of E=MC2 so they would take as much energy plus a bit extra to run the electronics to create something as antimatter would release so no they can't just replicate antimatter and power itself.
@@thomgizziz A better idea would be that due to advanced technology and the ubiquity of fusion power, a replicator and an attached micro-fusion cell can be run off atmospheric hydrogen. On earth, we need various heavier isotopes or elements, but in star trek, they could probably just use protium-protium fusion. If you don't have air, just add water. There. It's not infinite energy but in this case, energy that is literally too cheap to meter.
@@Scriptedviolince No. The amount of energy that is needed here isn't just a large amount it is astronomic. Replicators work at best by taking bulk matter of some sort and then breaking apart the atoms to be the atoms we need and then combining them together and the amount of energy needed to make a baseball would be weeks of that fusion reaction at best and at worst it is more energy hungry than turning energy directly into matter. The other way to do it is converting energy into matter which means we use E=MC2 and that means at the very very low end you will need to use up 100lbs of fusion material for every pound of thing that you make. Creating something from nothing isn't magic and you cant cheat the laws of physics even in Star Trek because they talk about the laws of thermodynamics being real and valid there.
An interesting idea that's never brought up in Star Trek but might play into the "owning land" issue is the notion that the Federation or local government has some kind of "you need to provide some type of service that the rest of the community approves of" mandate in order to retain ownership of the land. Both the Picard family and Joseph Sisko are providing tangible services and are therefore able to maintain their land use. I know this might come off as uncomfortable in light of Roddenberry's intentions as there is an implicit threat to citizens in such a mandate, but one thing I should point out that you might actually bring up in the next video is that the Federation is shown consistently kicking people off of land, including their own citizens (especially their own citizens). This implies that all land is "owned" or at the very least regulated by the governing bodies and not individuals in Federation law.
I think there would be all sorts of volunteers, and people would have a passion for construction, for example. I think people would also do different things in different stages of their lives. Not just one career but as many as they want.
Construction may become such an artform that non-replicated hand crafted homes may be desirable to some where they would find artisans to built or become apart of the building team.
Some people also do things like be criminals or they have jobs but are corrupt because they want more. You have to control those types of people and people that exhibit some of those qualities. Things aren't going to be nice and happy with everybody singing and holding hands. You have to think about the unintended consequences not your idealized fantasy of how you'd like things to go.
@@ArchOfWinter Why would they do that for you and not for themselves? If they are highly desirable how would you convince them to do the work for you and not for somebody else? Maybe you can trade them something that is desirable. Now we have barter and guess what money is? It is just an intermediary for bartering. Now, given some time, you again have something that will be traded as money and a whole economy with some people ending up with more value than others. Now you have wealth stratification that leads to class stratification. How are you going to stop that from happening?
@@thomgizziz Contractors today get to pick and choose which projects and customers they want to pursue. You are also injecting 21st Century capitalist culture into the Federation era in which the culture has drastically changed. Virtually anything can be replicated. There's nothing stopping there from being orbital replicators that could beam down a home to someone's specifications. Not all human societies have been based on or allowed rapacious individual need for acquisition of things.
Because it still has value. You are thinking about a fantasy utopia where there are no unintended consequences and nothing is desirable. There are going to be people that have houses in every major city in prime locations. What do you do if you want to live in those prime locations that many many other people want to live? The only reason you think this way is because you aren't really doing a lot of actual thinking.
"Fundamentally Broken" what an awesome phrase to close with.🤣 Canon contradicts itself far too often. Canon, such as it is, is the work of hundreds of different writers working with a 'rulebook' that has evolved over time. It's been said that I found all 3 parts of this series to be informative & thought provoking. I have long wondered how flexible Federation membership is with the degree of autonomy that member worlds are allowed to have. Here in the USA, State level laws vary far more than should be allowed to differ from the national consensus. I look forward to the next installment.
Replicators have to be the prerequisite for a future like this, abundance makes things boring, if you can get something so easily, you want to learn how to do things yourself.
Great video Rowan. Im really enjoying this series. Im hoping in the next part you might posit why you think Raffi has a trailer instead of a nice house. Also on your tease of the system being broken my mind went to turkana 4 and nimbus 3.
I hope I haven’t misunderstood something (I’ve watched the other videos in this series, but am only part-way through this one), but would another incentive for people to build houses be to increase their social status? Building more and better houses would make the builders ‘wealthier’ in a world where social currency exists, as building good houses for people is seen as a good thing and something worthy of high regard.
I feel like personal property can still exists in form of holding an uninhabited property because people recognize the sentimental value others may hold to it. With housing needs, available space, infrastructure, and commute time being so flexible, not having a particular property wouldn't be that big of an issue. Without the immediate demand and needs of housing like modern time, homes can be left vacant for their owners to return to even as little as once a year or even longer. The only time I can see where vacant property may be disputed for ownership may be those of historic or artistic significant that isn't currently owned by family attached to those association.
What is in use? If I use it once a year should somebody be able to take it from me? What about once every other year? What about periodically? If I were to use it one a year and then I plan on using it but don't for 40 years and then use it again? What happens if I want places in 100 cities? What happens if there is no more room where I want to live? You are in a fantasy where you don't think about all the issues or you hand waive them away because you assume them to be minor, they are minor to you but not to the people that have to deal with the issues.
@@thomgizziz I literally said that people wouldn't be needing to take property away. The video literally said room and space won't be as much of a fixed problem. You say I'm in a fantasy, but we are talking about a post scarcity society with tech that can pretty much create anything out of anything. So yes, it is fantasy to us in the modern day.
@@ArchOfWinter Room and space would literally be a problem. It is a problem now with people wanting to live places they can afford but there is no room think what happens when everybody can "afford" it. Then at some point if the population gets large enough or people get greedy enough there will literally be no more places to build or live. What will you do then. The other major problem is if I hold desirable property I now have wealth that can be traded for more than others have. It isn't a fantasy in just the modern day it is a fantasy period. Their society isn't post scarcity, it is post basic needs but there is still scarcity. The energy also isn't infinite it has to come from somewhere.
@@thomgizziz Seriously, did you even watch the video? Room and space isn't a problem in the described future because location of convenience isn't a problem on the vastness that is planet Earth and even beyond with transporter and warp tech. Sure there will be people who must have specific criteria of a specific city or even street, but for most people, since the commute is just a few seconds of beaming away, then anywhere with a general vibe would be good for them. "Desirability" wouldn't be one specific street address or even a city center. And my initial comment about sentimental or emotional value about a property is purely personal. That desirability doesn't exists for other people so other people won't have the demand for that particular property. Said property wouldn't be 'wealth' since most home would more or less have the same practical value to anyone else. So holding onto a vacant property wouldn't be seen as exploitative since there is no 'wealth' to increase nor would it drive up the 'cost' of nearby homes. Not everyone would have enough sentimental value for a home that they decide to keep after they move either. It's not like everyone will hoard every home they ever lived in. So some people holding onto vacant property wouldn't be as big of a deal. Here is a real world example. In IRL Japan, home prices depreciate, even in high demand areas. There are also many vacant homes and properties willing to be sold at a low price, but some won't ever sell because of sentimental value like childhood home or grandparent's home. They aren't driving up the rent or prices of nearby homes because of it. There is no exploitation of others and there is no wealth to trade since homes doesn't retain any monetary value. The only reason why some address are more desirable is the real life factors of convenience like proximity to public transits or shops.
what i find hard to belive about startrek society is 1- The fact people still do thing for only social rewards, mostly because what would most likely happen is that people who do nothing with their lives would tend to make social groups, and the ones who do stuff out of pure pleasure would also form groups, over time creating some kind of social bubbles. 2- The fact that by the 24th century we essentialy become a post-scarcity civilization, for you see, unless replicators break the rules of thermodynamics and create matter from nothing (which would mean the federation could at any point in time create a second big bang) the replicators still need matter to transmutate with, meaning we would still need stuff, only in a much grander scale, but by all means we wouldn't be a post-scarcity society. Given that, a society more realistic in the federation, from my point of view, would be one more like the movie Wall-E, where people leave all "hard" work to machines and just chill in social circles dong essentialy nothing, because, why would you expend time building a nice house when you can spend more time in your social circle, or you can even do it in a holodeck, doing escentialy 3d modeling to the most extreme, of course some exceptions might pop up once in a while, but it'll be that, exceptions, not the norm. One thing to note is that i think a post-scarcity civilization is indeed possible, a good example could be the culture, from Ian M. Banks, in which society is not run by humans, but by sentient AI, where the AI essentialy does everything, but also teaches and guides the humans and other species into doing stuff to the point that playing and working are considered the same thing.
Most people don't understand just how _big_ earth is One number I've seen was that earth could easily house 54 billion people and still remain green The problem has never been lack of resources. Never. The problem is how the resources we do have are distributed
The older I get, the less I believe in Roddenberry's future coming to pass and see things becoming more akin to Mega City One. The last 5 years in particular.
That's mostly the fault of squabbling elites who can't concieve of a world where they're not in charge. If the rest of us made the decision, we'd have been living in utopia decades ago.
I feel as though there has to be some kind of regulation about where and how housing is built. Not to accommodate people, but the environment. If someone can just pick a spot and build a house in the middle of nowhere, what's stopping them from paving over a habitat or something, even on accident
I would love to live in a society like this (minus the Borg and Klingons and Romulans and Cardassians, etc). But you can bet that most people would just sit at home and play video games all day. I certainly wouldn't risk my life flying around the galaxy in a spaceship what with all the deadly anomalies and aliens everywhere you turn!
You might not, but there are definitely people who would. The beauty of such a system is you can do whatever you want or even nothing at all if that's what you prefer. I would definitely prefer to sit at home with a nice book than to go fighting space aliens or whatever personally.
But there is an innate need for humans not only to rest on their laurels, but to get more of something. Sure, a small number of people would just sit home and play video games, but what ELSE would you want to do? If you COULD do most anything, you would WANT to do more than what you are currently doing.
I fantasize about being an earth bender in ATLA and just traveling around the countryside using my powers to secretly make stone or clay houses. I even make the pots and dishes the new occupant may need.
Certainly when it comes to say homebuilding, there really are plenty of people who actually love that sort of thing and might well have 'I'm a builder' as a big part of their identity. And there's always DIY people, who'd be much helped by the ability to replicate the tricky parts or such. (A few self-sealing stem bolts would come in pretty handy on what I'm building now in fact. :) (I mean, if you think starships are cool. imagine the *tools.* Holographic levels, a 'here hold this' tractor beam thingie, levitating toolboxes, phaser sanders or something maybe, who knows. :) ) I see a lot of commenters kind of not-getting it that you don't need scarcity and capitalism to get things done. I really find that most people who imagine they/people would be particularly prone to excess of one kind or another for long are ...repressed or 'starving' in one way or another. (Then blame 'human nature' for the effects of problematic *systems.* ) That's still treating, say, money or food or other things as an external locus of control, whether you have a lot or not. An evolved society such as Star Trek posits would have little such 'learned helplessness,' I'd say.
Reminds me of the Creative modes of Sandbox games- all this possibility in combining base/living items, features and decor, and no one to indulge in it… That was always a failure in game design for me- I’m one player who can’t possibly indulge in all that I’d create. I’d like to think in Star Trek the freedom of video game Creative Modes combines with engagement with whoever would like to take your creation for a spin. Whether structural, architectural, vessel, or pilotable.
Arrgg.... This is what I get for starting to write my comment before the video ends. The following are some issues that jumped out at me, but then the very end the video acknowledges that what it said isn't true. I'm still posting it because these are issues that need to be addressed in future videos in the series. ==== This entire video is hand-waving to try to make something seem plausible that clearly isn't. For example, people will want to live in a penthouse or on a beach, which will create scarcity. You can't try to paper that over by saying everyone will live in a holodeck. For one thing, authenticity and scarcity matters. The fact that something is rare and is the real thing will be a large part of its value. If given the choice between actually living on the beach or living your entire home life in a holodeck, most people will choose to live on the real beach. Also there is absolutely no indication that holodecks are anything but highly specialized and rare devices that are used in places like high end star ships, where crews can be on deployment for extended periods of time. For example, Riker had never been in one before he got to the Enterprise, so they are definitely not something everyone owns and lives in. This video also contradicts itself on land ownership. It says that land ownership would continue through inheritance, but it also says land would be free for anyone to use as they see fit. Both can't be true, since just about all land is currently owned by someone, who would pass that land down to their decedents.
Huh? The video says that land that's not in use could be used. People have to check about availability. Chateau Picard is not available. How is that not understood? When the shift occurred to the moneyless economy, people weren't stripped of their homes. Yes, there may be scarcity of some property, but that doesn't mean that there aren't non-monetary means of allocation.
@@ScoobySnacksYum Because people would inherit land, all land would be in use, so it is a pointless exercise to ask. What land today isn't owned by someone so that you could just walk up and take it? Outside of Bir Tawil, a small strip of land in Africa, there is none.
I would imagine there's some sort of land use department, that a record of someone using a particular chunk of land, so no one could force you off it. I assume compact and reliable fusion generators are a thing, for powering the house. There would be craftsmen. and women , who replicate wood and materials, for the joy of building by hand.... maybe building a house as a gift for family or friends. I would guess robots do a lot of the grunt work required to keep up any city...
Whats stopping people from building anywhere and everywhere? there are rules and regulations around where you can build, for example it might ruin the environment or might ruin the view of the area, or rules around preserving a historic look to cities
i think the problem with the difference in the depiction and how it should be depicted is a lack of imagination of the writers. another problem, particularly within NuTrek is that the writers/producers fundamentally wanted to make dark/gritty scifi and shoehorned it into StarTrek.
Economy is based on resources and Wealth is based on a subjective view of social status and personal welfare, Money is just grease for an overly frictious machine Chateaux Picard is a great deal of work, if it were to fall into disrepair and go unproductive in a system where people go and do as they please, I don’t see any friction in the Picards moving on to what pleases them and being displaced by someone with a fresh interest in wine or a socially acceptable redevelopment plan
The JJ trek enterprise construction always bothered me. I know it’s off topic, but those ships seem designed to only be built in space. It would seemingly be difficult to construct the ship’s design in gravity as opposed to in space, where the weight of the saucer section and nacelle pylons would not be an issue….
Of course Star Trek is fundamentally broken as a setting. The magic space elves came down and fixed everything.... In Star Trek, no matter what anyone in or out of universe argues, it All comes down to the fact that humanity got Lucky and so, there's no real lesson to be learned or way to build That specific future for ourselves. Who knows what's out there? And also, Bones is right Teleportation is murder and I Don't want that future anyway.. so yeah... Great video Rowan! Love the channel
They were also trying to raise the sea floor in that episode Picard got into a muddy fistfight. Why would they do that? I have no idea. Building space doesn’t seem to be a concern. Because they could I guess.
When Gene Roddenberry was pitching his ideas for Star Trek he shared a very bad habit with Irwin Allen - when pressured by distributors and sponsors, Roddenberry would throw out ideas off the top of his head, usually cliché concepts popular with '60's hippie culture. The cashless society is an idea as old as the United States. Our history is filled with Utopia: freedom from the need for money as all assets are shared equally. Just like the 17th century protestant community of the Shakers. Roddenberry in 1965 throws out a casual cliché that even I knew, of at age 8.
I think the most likely explanation of the Star Trek economy is that a wide variety of goods are post scarcity, but some goods remain "rival" or "scarce" by definition. 1) There can only be so much beachfront property. Or so many houses near "important" places. 2) People's time is scarce. Being able to trade time for some fungible good that can be exchanged for other peoples time is a completely reasonable thing. 3) It's unclear what role "intellectual property" has in the federation. I suspect that there is a strong social incentive towards giving away ones discoveries, but its not clear this is compelled. Hence, we need something like the Federation Credit to settle who will control "rival" or "scarce" goods. It's just that such goods aren't necessary to live what we might call a modern first world life of leisure, even if you don't have a beachfront villa.
Re:beachfront property - yeah, on Earth, but there are thousands of planets like Earth out there, with billions of miles of coastline. And with a holodeck you can turn any tiny apartment into your own sprawling palatial estate on whatever beachfront property you like, tailored to exactly how you want it. Or even have it procedurally generate some totally new beach no one has ever seen before every day until the end of time or whatever.
@@stevepittman3770 Who wants a fake coastline when you can have a REAL one on the homeworld of the humans? In the ST world, having A thing is not the goal...its having THE REAL thing. You want the thing that noone else does.
"People's time is scarce. Being able to trade time for some fungible good that can be exchanged for other peoples time is a completely reasonable thing." You literally just brought back so called "capitalism". Not all people are going to value their time the same and not all people's time will be worth the same amount. So when you "trade time" with other people it will take more of your time than some other people's time. So now people have jobs and those jobs are paid at different "time rates" aka money. So you still have an economy and some people will still want power and wealth and so you get corruption. These new corrupt individuals will have a much easier time of causing problems because most of society will have given up on the competition part so they will only have to dominate a small part of society to control more. Things in your fantasy world are now much much worse than they are now. Not only are things easier to corrupt people have much less incentive to invent things and put work in.
@@thomgizziz Yes, I think that the federation is still "capitalist". It's just capitalist with a large UBI brought about by cheap energy and replicators. Yes, accomplished scientists or artists or whatever are going to have more people who want their time than they have time to give. They will have to ration their time. The same goes for certain goods in the federation that are not infinite. It's clear that while energy is cheap, it's not infinite. They can't replicate whole starships, and there seem to be some scarce resources that can't be replicated and are perhaps key to certain important technologies (dylithium crystals, etc). People need a way to adjudicate claims to rival goods, which will always exist in some capacity. No economic system can eliminate the desire for power, wealth, prestige, etc. All the federation can do is make it so that ordinary people have a standard of living great enough that they don't have to do anything to live a comfortable life.
@@stevepittman3770 Its been mentioned in canon that power for both replicators and holodecks is not infinite, and there are situations where they need to be rationed. Quark seems to rent them.
I like to think that, in the star trek future, they prefer Popperian democratic corporations to the authoritarian kind we have today, and that they have periodic elections for management teams, thereby producing policies that are less detrimental to employees and planets.
Picard's family might be operating their old vineyard as part of a kind of stewardship program doing historical preservation and education, while producing wine in an old fashioned way so people can try non-replicator wines if they were curious about the taste and process. This is similar to programs in Britain, right? If the replicators didn't require lots of farming to make base materials, maybe sifting needed elements out of the ground, then a lot of land would be opened up for habitation and the cultivation of interesting wild landscapes to explore or inhabit. If you're basically 3D printing homes and apartments, and other buildings, then there would be a lot less labor needed for construction. and without private property, intellectual property wouldn't be a thing and you would have a huge catalog of designs to choose from, consulting with AI and architects, you'd just choose a building type and design, in some democratic process, with units that can be personalized and it would start building. Surely, they would have some work requirements, maybe saying you need to work like 2 days throughout the week with extended vacations, unless you had some kind of incurable future disability that prevented you from working, and you'd just study the things you were interested in doing and then be assigned based on your skills and preferences. Then you would be able to pursue any sort of hobby or other interest or if your interest is your work then that, the rest of the week.
Private property is a relatively recent invention especially with regard to land. Before capitalism if I remember correctly it was communal. Starting with the UK where community land was declared private, most likely by the nobility, after that came taxation. This spread to the rest of the world via colonialism. Private property seems like it’d be the least hard to conceive of within the Star Trek universe. I suspect if you accept the way the socioeconomic system has been built as some natural reality like water being wet perhaps it is difficult to imagine. Society is a construction, sentient beings can make it whatever they want it to be it’s not immutable.
Controls built into the replicator? Why would the average citizen's replicator be allowed to make dangerous and destructive things? We already see in Trek that food replicators can't make phasers.
It seems like people just living wherever they feel like and also the weather control would be still really bad ecologically. Like, maybe it's fine for us, but that still seems like a nightmare for animals.
Well eventually with the advancement of tech like AI and the stabilization of fusion we as a society will figure out, we don't need money no more. I gave this alot of thought, tech won't solve the issue alone but a return to familial family unity as we all take care of one another and our neighbors as a unit.
Things will still have tiers of desirability. Not every thing can possibly be available to everyone. Some housings will be worth more than other housings. Some jobs will be more coveted than other jobs. People will have different skills and different personalities and different attractiveness and different value. Nothing said here can explain away these basic concepts which are the fundamental core of human society. Humans no longer having human desires is what needs to happen for it to work.
Off course not everything will be available to everyone and their will be still things that are desirable. But your basics need will be fulfilled to an extend that you stop to care about such things. Also your social status is no longer measured by the money you have or the monetary value of things you own or your income, that takes already away a lot of reasons why people want to have certain things in the first place.
You have a fundamental flaw in your logic though...replicators CANNOT "create the means to power themselves." due to conservation of mass. Obviously, the threshold to run a replicator is low, but not zero. Replicators can only do so much, otherwise you could just create 100 Defiants and wipe out The Dominion. Not EVERYTHING is in abundance...just the things which we currently believe are what you need to survive. For the next video, I hope that you draw the distinction that even with unlimited resources/power/etc, there is still limits on many things in society, and the competition over these limited things causes the conflicts (also see below on my argument against an argument that the ST universe is broken due to lack of progress). Even if noone owns land, would not those who had land but then gave it up have wanted to be compensated for giving up sole ownership of it? What if two people wanted to have a house on the top of Mt Everest? While there IS virtually unlimited...whatever, there is still only one of a particular thing or person. There is a finite number of first officers on the Enterprise. Shelby is gunning for Riker's chair because of the social currency in that position. Even though Riker would rather stay where he is at then take a lesser command, others think he's crazy for this because they see a "lesser command" as warranting more social currency than FOoTE. In our current world, we would think that such a universe would be pure utopia and free of conflict and pain. But if you talke d to someone in 2000BC about our current world, they would consider this world a utopia, and think that all the conflict and angst currently going on is stupid. Why be depressed when you have "everything"? The currency of 2000BC was centered around basic living goods...can you procure food and shelter? Nowadays its around money, which even a tiny amount can get you food and shelter. In the future, the currency can be social, but there will still be angst and wars and depression over it. Eventually, we would solve some of the problems that plague the ST universe, and what would be the currency then? Probably progress, because as a people, we are innately ingrained with a NEED to have or do more. It was a hedge against lean times in the past, but such an innate need could not be overcome in any reasonable stretch of time. Everybody would want more (and a society which DOESNT want more would collapse because nothing would get done), and while what we consider to be everything in the world to be happy is infinite, we will always want more...and there will always be conflict.
I don't think most people wouldn't want more which is probably a bigger issue. Progress would stagnate. Most people would be mindless eaters. The people that do want more are a smaller portion of society but they would be able to corrupt it much more easily. Progress would slow down pretty quickly. You are looking at a super dystopia.
@@briannevs2772 Tests on giving people money shows that a lot of them tend to be okay with surviving especially if it is more than just surviving like living in star trek world would be.
I love how the old argument was "There is no way this utopian future would be possible because the economics don't make sense through my purely Capitalist lens," and yet here we are. With a thorough and solid explanation with real world examples to back it up.
It's not a capitalist lens. Marx, remember, was a big fan of Smith and they came to the same conclusions on a lot of basic economic principles. Even he'd scoff at it. As much as I love Star Trek, the whole economic system of the Federation is literally nonsense - an impossibility even.
I am old enough to remember being four or five years old watching TOS at night on NBC with a 19" black and white CRT television. The continual threat of dinosaurs eating us kept small children indoors at night. I remember not having a concept of the future (what preschooler does) and believed that Star Trek was about a secret military force that was operating in deep space in the 1960s. SG1 would eventually become this concept. We were seldom shown Earth or how the various colonists and economics were seldom discussed - it was the 1960s and the red menace of Marxism/Stalanism/Maoism was ever present through the 80s. A cashless society would have sounded too much like one of those isms for it to be allowed to be discussed. My belief in original sin and the depravity of man makes it difficult to believe in utopia which is suppose why religion is supressed in Marxist societies, because to accept Star Trek's economic system required believing an evolutionary or radical cultural transformation will have to occur so people will no longer be motivated by the quest for power and stuff. It's been tried: Pol Pot killed at least a million, Stalin at least 7 million and Mao killed 30 million. Did those deaths bring about the cashless worker's utopia Marx promised? Sargon of Akkad had an interesting take on the original utopia as discussed in Thomas Moore's Utopia and where we are now and it's well worth the listen. ruclips.net/video/-THaKNzY-vE/видео.htmlsi=WzQdl7d_m2dJlEOb Thank you Rowan for an excellent and thought provoking video.
I don't see a Star Trek world of abundance, as being the same as a world without Rules. You still have a government, to make decisions, not just regarding foreign policy, as we see in the shows. But also regarding keeping social order. There is a police force, right. So I'll extrapolate, that there are also other government institutions, to make society function. And these all have to operate under specific laws. Among those laws, has to be, how land is distributed. Like you said, there is more then enough. But a situation, where you can freely say this is my land, and size it your self. Will unavoidably lead to conflict. Like I've seen many people in the comments, give as an argument for why, Star Trek won't work. What makes Unified Earth and the UFP something to strive for. Isn't the freedom to do what ever you want. Like I feel you are saying, with some of your ideas. It is the ability for every one, to have the equal opportunities, to live a fulfilling life, with every basic need met. So they can concentrate on making them selves, and the world around them better. Or "talk" with Minuet all day, in a HoloSuite. This can not happen without government and laws, that ensures, that electrical power is distributed, replicators and public structures are build (even if the physical construction, is done by robots). And that no-one else enfringes on those rights. Likewise people need to work those government jobs. But since a great way to make the world better, is working "for" the public. I don't see that as a problem, but rather something many people, would want to do. Just like today, despite the often horrible pay.
The argument about "unused" land gets less convincing if you think of the land rights of indigenous peoples (and how this argument was used against native Americans)
A couple of points: In a future in which humans are so evolved, there's no way we would just pick a spot of land and just ask the other humans for some sort of property rights. Some lawyer or adjudicator would be given the job of advocating for the wildlife in the area, and would also consider the ecological impact as a whole. On top of that, replicators and holodecks wouldn't be used willy-nilly, given how much energy they use. An apartment building isn't a Galaxy-class starship...or even a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. We would be somewhat concerned about using that much energy. Edit - To elaborate on my replicator/holodeck point: In my head-canon, "post-scarcity" in Star Trek's Earth (and Federation), means that no one really has to worry about their basic needs to live comfortably. It doesn't necessarily mean unlimited resources for everyone.
@@stevepittman3770 Ah, I forgot about that. Although I'm also wondering if that was one of the things that's been contradicted at some point or another...
"To elaborate on my replicator/holodeck point: In my head-canon, "post-scarcity" in Star Trek's Earth (and Federation), means that no one really has to worry about their basic needs to live comfortably. It doesn't necessarily mean unlimited resources for everyone." Okay you have thought a bit. Now take that last part and keep going. What kind of world would a star trek world be? I think you'll find that a star trek would would be a terrible dystopia.
Austria is an interesting case when it comes to housing. Paraphrased from "Some More News"; "Sixty percent of the residents of the capital, Vienna, live in some form of public housing. They're such nice places to live that even Austrian celebrities opt to live there. The Vienna City Council is actually the largest property owner in Europe, in other words, it's all owned by the people. In 1923, the socialists built 25,000 new public housing units and paid for it by taxing things like champagne, fancy restaurants, horseracing, cars, and sex work." The housing shortage has nothing to do with space to build homes. It's an artificial scarcity that is propagated by the commodification of housing as, essentially, trading chips for the wealthy. They want to keep housing scarce because that keeps it expensive, which increases their wealth. Our governments are full of wealthy property owners whose self-interests don't align with any policy that would make housing affordable for their constituents. This is an absolutely grotesque and immoral state of affairs surrounding something which should be a human right. It doesn't have to be this way. Vienna shows us that high-quality, publicly-owned housing can be made available for people if we stop catering to the interests of the very few who want to use it as a trade commodity, when it should be used to, you know, actually house people.
Or do a single land tax, as mentioned in this video. Err wait, in Star Trek they don't tax citizens. I dunno how it would work in that universe honestly.
@@sudafedup I'm sure they still regulate who can operate a Starship, but he Ship would be free. You probably still need a licenses and mandatory training and stuff, licenses and training would also be free. But you still would have to put some effort behind it.
@@cdev2117 yep, I would totally like to have my own starship and trek to where no star trek episode has gone before, The Andromeda Galaxy and beyond, to the edge of forever.
![Chino Pacas - Modo Capone (with Drake & Fuerza Regida) [Video Oficial]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zjv8TQ0gBkg/mqdefault.jpg)
See parts 1 and 2 here: ruclips.net/p/PLQoiQOFpsHdpiZ4C3EsxJyZlOJpgOxtbG&si=5KIoPX1HLS6LO-EA
What was that anime?
I'd love for you to cover zoning in general.
How would one decide what buildings get build and what purpose would they have?
Because here would the one issue i have with star trek show its ugly head : Who will get to work/expres themselves in such a society?
Is there a social credit lottery? Will society utilise the schooling system to either guide or push people to certain fields in order to full fill the zoning/workforce requirements?
Any nation state will require a certain amount of workers for a particular field how does the federation meet its work force quota's?
And how would any of that change in a state of war say the dominion war where suddely a massive requirement of shipbuilders and ships crew/officer were required?
Would there be a draft of sorts mandating people to join massive workforces in times of need?
At the end of the day, at the end of a project, a house builder can look out and say "I built that, and someone will always make use of it, and that's pretty cool." And self-satisfaction matters
In a world with aliens, starships, replicators, warp speed, phasers, Klingons, shape shifters, sentient machines and so on, the moneyless society is still the most futuristic concept.
It isn't futuristic you mean unbelievable.
@@thomgizziz
Only if you accept the world as it is today as best you can understand it today. The distant past had differences not known to everyone today, why wouldn’t the future be equally difficult and different for many to conceive of today? Society and socioeconomic systems are not static they evolve and often that evolution is technologically driven. For example, the impact of the printing press on literacy.
Modular construction would be big. Cfi replicators could build housing modules that are plugged into a frame. This would make apartments much easier to build.
We have had that since WW2 and people despise them. Remember the lesson from Betty Crocker, no one wanted a ready to bake cake mix, they wanted to add eggs so they could "feel" like they actually did something themselves. It took a while to figure that out because it's crazy but who said humans weren't crazy?
@@TheRadioAteMyTV I did not mean that they are popular just incredibly easy to build with repliators. This would also allow for a lot of customization too.
@@shanenoonan768 Yeah but so far no one wants them.
@TheRadioAteMyTV what I am saying is that in star trek they would be incredibly easy to build a replicator could create them and a tractor beam could place them it would take almost no effort.
@@TheRadioAteMyTV I think there would be people who would only use replicators for the building materials & build it themselves, but some people would just use the technology to make predesigned houses without having to lift a finger.
With holodeck technology you could design your house & walk through then change anything you don't like for example the kitchen with green cabinets or blue & not enough light change the house layout or even change the direction the house is facing then when your happy save the house design upload it to the replicators then sit back & watch as it replicates your house and all its furnishing in a day or two.
Not only are the Picards not hurting anyone, but they are actually providing a service by making wine. Seems like that would be valued and appreciated in a future society
What happens if you want to do the same? You don't get to loser because you weren't born to the correct family. Also there is no need for the picards to keep making wine they could just have a bigger house than you and you being the loser that you are you don't get to have a house. Should have been born to the right person you loser.
This whole video is cope that relies on nobody trying to get more for themselves which is a fantasy.
Except replicator wine would be identical. And those that say homemade wine is better have inadvertently removed the equity in society and quickly, capitalism is reverted.
Based on the reaction of his old crew, I'm not sure that wine is a service anyone wants....
It's possible that there is a large enough group of people on Earth and elsewhere who might want to drink and taste wine made the old fashioned way. The number doesn't have to be huge because there is no real market or negative balance sheet to drive Chateau Picard out of business.
@@Slov01 It might not necessarily mean that the Chateau Picard wine is better, you can throw a Chateau Picard wine into the replicator and replicated it over and over again. It's that the vintage has, well, a vintage. A history. Something with feeling.
They might not even be selling the wine, they might very well be giving it to other people. Maybe they're trading it to other people for other non-replicator products. Or maybe it could be the "reputation currency" that is being discussed.
Just because a desired good is unequal and scarce doesn't mean the society has reverted to capitalism.
If you want a non-replicator wine, there's plenty out there. Everyone has access to as much wine as they like in as good a quality as they like.
I notice that in conversations I had with people, part of them get morally offended at the idea of a system that takes away people's necessity to work. Like, through basic income, or, in the example of this video, a portfolio of goods that covers all their daily needs (bypassing a money system). I've always thought that when you take away people's necessity to work, other human drives kick in that push people to work. E.g., the need to be admired & respected by others; the need for self-development & self-expression; and the need for a meaningful life.
Except in places where they have actually done it and not just thought about it, as certain as heavy things do NOT fall at a faster rate than lighter things - like thought, people do in fact become very lazy, obese and then heavily depressed when given an ongoing amount of unworked for money, be it from tax payers or family members.
A simple rule of nature long known that applies to all animals, even the human ones - DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS.
@@TheRadioAteMyTV So, if we would get you on a system that provides you with a full income for like, the next 2 years, for which you wouldn't have to work, you could see this happening to you? You would quit your job (because you wouldn't have to work to get a monthly income), or any sort of volunteer work, get very lazy and obese and then heavily depressed? I'm not trying to mock you! I'm just honestly curious whether you'd see yourself slipping in the sort of downward spiral you describe.
@@TheRadioAteMyTVwhat places ?
@@TheRadioAteMyTV Depression, boredom, tend to be drivers for change. Feeding animals makes them aggressive, and most animals are faster and stronger than humans, so that's dangerous for people to do, it does not make the animals depressed.
And if you are correct about it being a certainty, which you are not, the wealthy would donate their children's inheritance rather than have their children become lazy, obese, and depressed. Of course people that have much more wealth and free time than every one around them tend to be isolated, which can cause depression. But should everyone share in such abundance, that would no longer be a problem. And finally, places that have done that only do it short term, and I have yet to see a study where it was worse for those people, in fact every study I've seen suggests the opposite. The only people it may be worse for are business owners that treat workers like crap, they'll have a harder time finding people willing to work for them.
@@roofdogblues7400 There are a sizeable number of rich people who do not give their children anything after they die for this very reason. So too, the amount rich kids who are not forced to work are widely known to be on chemical mood adjusters either legally or not.
Your studies of places that have done it must not include the US, where the results have regularly shown it doesn't have positive effect on the subjects except in tiny numbers and widespread worsening conditions for the rest.
I just had a terrible thought: a future where HOAs run everything. Maybe that's how the mirror universe started.
That would be star trek in reality for you.
Star Trek HOA : Rise of the SJW
@@taiwansivispacemparabellum9546 More like Rise of the Conformist Busybodies With 'Property Values' for an excuse.
Sounds terrible🤣
I'm sorry, but your joke made me think, what is a HOA?
I don't see something like the terrible examples, I've primarily heard of from the US, ever pop up in the Star Trek universe. At least not on earth.
A HOA is in it's essence, a group of people, who live close to each other. They band together, to help each other, take care of common tasks. Primarily concerned with money, and avoiding/solving internal disputes, in the neighborhood.
So since in Star Trek, land is abundant, you are not forced to live close to other people. If you do, and you dont get along with your neighbors, you move, and build a similar house, to the one you had.
You are not locket in place, for possibly years. Because neither of you have the resources to move, before you get your house sold.
Since money is not a factor, you don't need to agree with neighbors, whether to pay for a new playground, or a yearly steet BBQ. You just build a neighbourhood HoloSuite.
Money, and the perception of money, is in it self, a giant contributor to conflict in any setting. Also with your neighbors. Even if you are not forced to socialise with them, in say a HOA.
In my country (Denmark). We have something similar to, what I understand as a North American HOA. But I don't think I've ever heard any examples as bad, as the ones, I'm sure you're joke is based on.
But then again, most of the tasks that I understand, that a HOA does in the US. Is here taken care of by government, or local municipality. What most Danish HOA's does, is mostly social gatherings. So the amount of money, that you pay into it, the "volunteer" work you do, and the power of the Danish HOA is extremely limited, comparatively.
And I'm not sure, that you can even be forced to be a member.
Also, here, there are stringent rules/laws for, how you donduct any kind community/club. To make sure, that they follow some specific democratic procedures, especially regarding finances. And there are effective, and fair ways, in which a "club" can be forced to abolish, or restructure. E.g. based on member complaints.
I don't think most single family homes here, are connected to a HOA.
Whether because of some of the above. Or because we don't have the same concept of suburbs, with cul de sac's, as in North America, Idk.
But our version seems more like something that could exist and function, in a world of abundance.
But then again, in our current "world limitations", Denmark is closer to the ideals of the Federation, then the US, on pretty much every metric🙄
@@soul0360 In America, "Homeowners' associations' tend to be about busybodies and developers and real estate interests trying to control what everything looks and sounds like in a neighborhood and that everyone conforms in the name of 'Property Values.' They tend to be the opposite of 'Social Justice Warriors,' they tend to want extreme gentrified conformism. Don't try to fix your own car or wave a rainbow flag or fail to align your trash bins perfectly or else.......
Nice video.
“Remove the need to be connected to a grid” in an advanced sci-fi world kinda circles back around to “wizards crap on the floor and then vanish the evidence”😅
This is really all a discussion about being more open minded to what 'work' means. When you spend so much of your life in some dreary 9-5 in can seems like the non-work bits of life are what make it worthwhile. But ultimately I believe that we all need to feel that what we do matters to other people, that we are contributing.
we need a Star Trek villain who is like ferengi Ayn Rand. her story should end on a comfortable federation colony in her custom dream home luxury council flat/villa, having failed utterly in her goals.
maybe something more like Kahn, where a Randian super soldier was frozen in the past and thaws out to try and impose a libertarian utopia on Earth
My best friend and I have marathon discussions about the next stage of economic development is and what AI/automation replacing the workforce means. I've had to show him these videos because he couldn't (and still struggles) with wrapping his head around what a scarcity-less economy looks like. I have to frequently remind my of what Ursula LeGuin said "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings."
This video isn't going to fix things. If you have unlimited resources and are greedy then what would be stopping you from making a house for yourself the size of a city? You could use a different room every night and thus what argument do you have to try and take that house away from that person?
Picard has a house way bigger than he needs why does he get that and others don't? People aren't magically going to stop comparing themselves or being greedy. You have to just ignore and hand waive away every problem with your utopia. You still would end up forcing people to live where they don't want to and in conditions they are against.
Everybody doesn't get what they want because some people would still want things that are way beyond what they can use and just a fraction of the population doing that would make serious issues. You are pretending that greed or even trying to keep up with jones family would go away. It wouldn't. If people weren't running away to new places... you know they don't do that on earth, they tend to congregate in cities. And if you want to live in the city and it is full then what do you do?
You are playing pretend and your friend is living in reality and you can't accept that your ideas could ever have any exceptions or drawbacks. I know I think like you do sometimes but I know that I'm playing make believe.
@@thomgizzizYou are the one playing make believe if you don’t think that your paradigm leads to anything other than complete human annihilation. And very quickly. This is something that only those who choose to do it, will do it. Which won’t be forced onto anyone.
@@thomgizziz This is one of the most bizarre and myopic comments i've ever seen
Who gets to tell someone they can't make themselves a house the size of a city? A regulatory apparatus conceived by a peoples' government such as the Federation, with common sense policies such as: "One guy can't claim 500 square miles for his own house".
Sorry if that treads on your freedom to establish a kingdom of one at the expense of 12 million other citizens, but in post-capitalism we don't build society around the needs of psychopaths
@@thomgizzizThat's a poor example for your argument.
It's predicated on 1 person being able to physically build a city sized mega-structure on their own.
You're also bestowing some kind of exclusive pre-eminence on to that single individual, weighing their desire as somehow equal to the entire collective of everyone else, rather than how it actually is, only equal to the man who wants a vineyard on the same land, the woman that wants an art school on that land, the alien that wants a habit module for their people to live comfortably.
It's all conflict resolution; Civil Society organisations; and Civic government administrations.
@@the_Kutonarch I have unlimited ability to create robots and make more replicators. I could have a whole city built in literally a day.
So how much can the collective decide to restrict you? Why are some people going to be more unrestricted? If I want to live on the beach but all the beach property is full doesn't that make the beach property more valuable and I might trade a lot of things to get it?
We already have way more than enough and could be in a post scarcity soceity for the essentials to live and we have "It's all conflict resolution; Civil Society organisations; and Civic government administrations." so why aren't we living like star trek?
Humans aren't machines and you can't make them act like you wish they would. You are way off base here to the point of being delusional.
Here's my question: if 24th century me wants to "buy" a real bottle of Chateau Picard, how do I do that? Can I just wander over to the vinyard and help myself to a bottle, or do I have to knock on the door and ask? What if I want a case of wine, is that cool? I'd like to sample some of the rare vintages please. And what if they don't like my face, can they trespass me from the premises if I've done nothing other than ask for alcohol?
First, you would need to ask for one, and if you are worried about the lack of money to pay for it problem, this is where ether A) you offer something you make in exchange in a barter, b) leverage social clout as a reason to receive the bottle as part of an event or service being performed, c) if you did want to break it down to 'i just want to buy it' latinum is still a monetary substitute in star treck, it is used by capitalistic societies in the universe because it's a non-replicatable substance.
I would imagine it could be just that simple. Either get in touch with the vineyard ahead of time or politely knock on the door and ask nicely if you might sample some wine.
It may be that you "pay" for your bottle or case of wine by helping out with the chores, or through other mutual agreement between yourself and the Picards.
As the winery and all its contents are private property, you can't simply show up and take stuff whenever you want no more than we can do so today. Likewise if they ask you to leave they have every right to do so, ditto on barring you from the premises if you want to act like a beligerant ass.
Presuming you minded your manners and you still left empty-handed, you troop back to your hotel room and ask the computer to track down the distributors of Chateau Picard to get in touch and see if they have a bottle or a case you can have.
All that done and you still don't have your wine? Go to the replicator and tell it to make you a bottle, specify real alcohol instead of synthehol and then you sit down and crack 'er open.
I never realised how different building houses works in US and where I live until I saw your video.
Here, houses very often are not built by developers. Instead, you buy land and then pay a construction company to put a house onto it.
Of course, there also are investors building homes here, especially apartments. But for houses it's way less common.
In the Star Trek future, it should be very simple to get some land and plan your own house with the computer. You wouldn't even need an architect since the computer would do all the calculations for you. Then, robots and replicators simply would build it.
It depends on how urbanized an area is. Rural areas are commonly developed by the eventual homeowner, either doing the work themselves or hiring a private contractor. But suburbs and megacorp developers are the majority of new build
Unless you live in a third world country or in a very very small town you are literally just ignorant to what is going on around you.
I would argue that you might still want an architect, just to makes sure your design have accounted for everything.
That was a damn fine segway to the ad. Bravo
Hopefully in the next video you can discuss the people who hold less creative/passionate/industrious jobs, like janitor, waiter, or plasma conduit scrubbers. What’s their motivation? (Before they were replaced by holographs and synths)
Menial labor jobs would be automated.
We see a miniature version of construction in both Voyager and Enterprise. In voyager a team of designers and engineers work together to build an advanced shuttle craft. Then in Enterprise a repair station is visited that uses entirely automation and replicators to repair the ship in short order.
So no you don't. You see people on the ship in voyager doing things in not the best possible way.
Enterprise that was an alien station that was trying to steal people.
What a tease for the next episode! Well played!
Today on Star Trek we’re gonna be talking about the exiting world of home ownership 🤩
If you still feel cramped on Earth, there's a passing mention of an Atlantis Project that will create a new continent, presumably where you could live.
Considering that humanity is suggested to be more evolved, I'd imagine that a whole honor system for society would work well for them in all things, especially for land use. Everyone cooperates to make sure everyone has a life that is fulfilling and rich in experience.
Humanity hasn't evolved in the past 5000 years we have written records, sure we have more tech but we act the same and it seems we probably haven't evolved in the past 200,000 years and still act the same as people from long ago. So pray tell how are we going to "evolve" in hundreds of years? Evolution doesn't really work on that scale?
What happens when everybody doesn't cooperate and a few people take advantage of the situation? You can see it in our modern day. If everybody did what they were supposed to there would be fewer problems but a small percentage of the population is corrupt and look what happens.
You can't even cooperate with your family and friends and you have problems there, so how are you going to be cooperating with strangers that don't care about you and they are there to "get theirs"?
Wow, didn’t expect to be jumpscared with a photo from my city in a Star Trek video!
in Star Trek's case as seen in Voyager, the lack of profit motive leads to the enslavement of the holograms. EI EMH mark I cleaning out engine cores and other dangerous jobs to humans, in the context of that episode, something they wouldn't choose to do. when humans are all too busy bettering themselves, technologies and AI slavery seems to be their solution.
And those programs generally don't exist when they are shut off. The 'person' it creates ends when the program is reset. That's why on voyager, when the medical program begins wanting for more it does need to be acomindated. In theory he could have been reset, but that goes against their principles. A different culture might have just hit the reset every time it starts asking for something.
For most of history the answer to "who bulds the houses" is whoever it is who is going to live in the house. With replicators and robots around that sound be a lot easier than ever
Those who work in construction business are rewarded with extra holodeck time, with special access to Playboy themed programs.
It's that simple.
That means that there is functionally a currency system. Just a less fungible one. If holodeck time is artificially or practically scarce, it's a resource that is being used as an incentive in the same way money is now.
@@JamesRoyceDawson This is explored somewhat in Voyager, where people will trade holodeck time (and rations) for favors, etc. There isnt a COMPLETE overabundance of everything in Star Trek (only certain people could work alongside Picard), so there is currency, but its largely social.
So payment.
@@briannevs2772 Rations... if things are rationed then you are back to an economy. That means picard's land can be traded for things and if you have more land or a bigger house you are now wealthier than others and can trade things to get things so you have more MONEY. If being higher ranked means your rations go up you now have class and wealth disparities. Some people will be able to make more advantageous trades and make more profit and become more wealthy and powerful than other people. The whole system is now back to what people like to call capitalism but is really just human nature, we try to get the most out of our time and effort.
You are so short sighted that you think about how you want things to work or how you wish they would work and you pretend that is how it will play out. That is really bad for any decisions you make and it also makes you look slow.
@@briannevs2772 Well, especially aboard starships.... and on Voyager in particular they often had to ration due to their unique circumstances. Also on DS9 the station's largely full of people doing somewhat more conventional commerce.
A restaurant that doesn't need to make a profit doesn't need every customer who walks in the door. To someone who has worked in restaurants, this is... interesting. 🙂
In an episode of DS9, Sisko mentions that at one point he almost took a job helping to build orbital habitats. So even though we never see them and don't know what forms they would take, we know they probably exist.
You still must designate land for backup agriculture and environmental stability. And there is a planetwide power grid as replicators actually are not generators.
As I said in Part 1, replicators can create the means to power themselves.
@@RowanJColeman If that were true...then anyone with enough replicators could have enough power to control the universe. Have one replicator build another, and multiply it out until youve made 50 billion replicators with 500 billion quantum torpedos. This (along with the conservation of mass) shows that replicators themselves are not a infinite generator.
I cant think of anywhere in ST where they have said that a replicator can generate its own power. Replicators are obviously a finite resource (Voyager's replicators are down? Why didnt we park 200 in a separate cargo bay and have them replicate a new Delta Flyer?) which require other resources (otherwise, if you had a downed shuttle on a planet with a working replicator, you wouldnt need rescue because then you'd say "Computer, replicate me a new shuttlecraft") which are finite.
@@RowanJColeman That literally makes no sense. The laws of thermodynamics are still in effect in star trek. You can't create energy out of thin air, that would probably destroy the universe.
Replicators would work on the principle of E=MC2 so they would take as much energy plus a bit extra to run the electronics to create something as antimatter would release so no they can't just replicate antimatter and power itself.
@@thomgizziz A better idea would be that due to advanced technology and the ubiquity of fusion power, a replicator and an attached micro-fusion cell can be run off atmospheric hydrogen. On earth, we need various heavier isotopes or elements, but in star trek, they could probably just use protium-protium fusion. If you don't have air, just add water. There. It's not infinite energy but in this case, energy that is literally too cheap to meter.
@@Scriptedviolince No. The amount of energy that is needed here isn't just a large amount it is astronomic. Replicators work at best by taking bulk matter of some sort and then breaking apart the atoms to be the atoms we need and then combining them together and the amount of energy needed to make a baseball would be weeks of that fusion reaction at best and at worst it is more energy hungry than turning energy directly into matter.
The other way to do it is converting energy into matter which means we use E=MC2 and that means at the very very low end you will need to use up 100lbs of fusion material for every pound of thing that you make. Creating something from nothing isn't magic and you cant cheat the laws of physics even in Star Trek because they talk about the laws of thermodynamics being real and valid there.
"Well if you don't need money, then you certainly don't need mine."
An interesting idea that's never brought up in Star Trek but might play into the "owning land" issue is the notion that the Federation or local government has some kind of "you need to provide some type of service that the rest of the community approves of" mandate in order to retain ownership of the land. Both the Picard family and Joseph Sisko are providing tangible services and are therefore able to maintain their land use. I know this might come off as uncomfortable in light of Roddenberry's intentions as there is an implicit threat to citizens in such a mandate, but one thing I should point out that you might actually bring up in the next video is that the Federation is shown consistently kicking people off of land, including their own citizens (especially their own citizens). This implies that all land is "owned" or at the very least regulated by the governing bodies and not individuals in Federation law.
I think there would be all sorts of volunteers, and people would have a passion for construction, for example. I think people would also do different things in different stages of their lives. Not just one career but as many as they want.
Construction may become such an artform that non-replicated hand crafted homes may be desirable to some where they would find artisans to built or become apart of the building team.
Some people also do things like be criminals or they have jobs but are corrupt because they want more. You have to control those types of people and people that exhibit some of those qualities. Things aren't going to be nice and happy with everybody singing and holding hands. You have to think about the unintended consequences not your idealized fantasy of how you'd like things to go.
@@ArchOfWinter Why would they do that for you and not for themselves? If they are highly desirable how would you convince them to do the work for you and not for somebody else? Maybe you can trade them something that is desirable. Now we have barter and guess what money is? It is just an intermediary for bartering. Now, given some time, you again have something that will be traded as money and a whole economy with some people ending up with more value than others. Now you have wealth stratification that leads to class stratification. How are you going to stop that from happening?
@@thomgizziz Contractors today get to pick and choose which projects and customers they want to pursue. You are also injecting 21st Century capitalist culture into the Federation era in which the culture has drastically changed.
Virtually anything can be replicated. There's nothing stopping there from being orbital replicators that could beam down a home to someone's specifications.
Not all human societies have been based on or allowed rapacious individual need for acquisition of things.
old money: keeps their estates
everyone else: why would you even _want_ to own land?
Because it still has value. You are thinking about a fantasy utopia where there are no unintended consequences and nothing is desirable. There are going to be people that have houses in every major city in prime locations. What do you do if you want to live in those prime locations that many many other people want to live?
The only reason you think this way is because you aren't really doing a lot of actual thinking.
@@thomgizziz I was criticizing the thesis of the video. So your last paragraph was a bit of an own goal in that regard.
"Fundamentally Broken" what an awesome phrase to close with.🤣 Canon contradicts itself far too often. Canon, such as it is, is the work of hundreds of different writers working with a 'rulebook' that has evolved over time. It's been said that I found all 3 parts of this series to be informative & thought provoking. I have long wondered how flexible Federation membership is with the degree of autonomy that member worlds are allowed to have. Here in the USA, State level laws vary far more than should be allowed to differ from the national consensus. I look forward to the next installment.
Any discussion of the economics of Star Trek makes me want to hum the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme.”
Replicators have to be the prerequisite for a future like this, abundance makes things boring, if you can get something so easily, you want to learn how to do things yourself.
Great video Rowan. Im really enjoying this series. Im hoping in the next part you might posit why you think Raffi has a trailer instead of a nice house. Also on your tease of the system being broken my mind went to turkana 4 and nimbus 3.
Never noticed the Bong(?) musician at 1:26😵💫😆
I don't like how he's touching them lolol
I hope I haven’t misunderstood something (I’ve watched the other videos in this series, but am only part-way through this one), but would another incentive for people to build houses be to increase their social status? Building more and better houses would make the builders ‘wealthier’ in a world where social currency exists, as building good houses for people is seen as a good thing and something worthy of high regard.
Great video! So thoughtful 😊
I feel like personal property can still exists in form of holding an uninhabited property because people recognize the sentimental value others may hold to it. With housing needs, available space, infrastructure, and commute time being so flexible, not having a particular property wouldn't be that big of an issue. Without the immediate demand and needs of housing like modern time, homes can be left vacant for their owners to return to even as little as once a year or even longer. The only time I can see where vacant property may be disputed for ownership may be those of historic or artistic significant that isn't currently owned by family attached to those association.
What is in use? If I use it once a year should somebody be able to take it from me? What about once every other year? What about periodically? If I were to use it one a year and then I plan on using it but don't for 40 years and then use it again? What happens if I want places in 100 cities? What happens if there is no more room where I want to live? You are in a fantasy where you don't think about all the issues or you hand waive them away because you assume them to be minor, they are minor to you but not to the people that have to deal with the issues.
@@thomgizziz I literally said that people wouldn't be needing to take property away. The video literally said room and space won't be as much of a fixed problem.
You say I'm in a fantasy, but we are talking about a post scarcity society with tech that can pretty much create anything out of anything. So yes, it is fantasy to us in the modern day.
@@ArchOfWinter Room and space would literally be a problem. It is a problem now with people wanting to live places they can afford but there is no room think what happens when everybody can "afford" it. Then at some point if the population gets large enough or people get greedy enough there will literally be no more places to build or live. What will you do then.
The other major problem is if I hold desirable property I now have wealth that can be traded for more than others have.
It isn't a fantasy in just the modern day it is a fantasy period. Their society isn't post scarcity, it is post basic needs but there is still scarcity. The energy also isn't infinite it has to come from somewhere.
@@thomgizziz Seriously, did you even watch the video? Room and space isn't a problem in the described future because location of convenience isn't a problem on the vastness that is planet Earth and even beyond with transporter and warp tech.
Sure there will be people who must have specific criteria of a specific city or even street, but for most people, since the commute is just a few seconds of beaming away, then anywhere with a general vibe would be good for them. "Desirability" wouldn't be one specific street address or even a city center.
And my initial comment about sentimental or emotional value about a property is purely personal. That desirability doesn't exists for other people so other people won't have the demand for that particular property. Said property wouldn't be 'wealth' since most home would more or less have the same practical value to anyone else. So holding onto a vacant property wouldn't be seen as exploitative since there is no 'wealth' to increase nor would it drive up the 'cost' of nearby homes.
Not everyone would have enough sentimental value for a home that they decide to keep after they move either. It's not like everyone will hoard every home they ever lived in. So some people holding onto vacant property wouldn't be as big of a deal.
Here is a real world example. In IRL Japan, home prices depreciate, even in high demand areas. There are also many vacant homes and properties willing to be sold at a low price, but some won't ever sell because of sentimental value like childhood home or grandparent's home. They aren't driving up the rent or prices of nearby homes because of it. There is no exploitation of others and there is no wealth to trade since homes doesn't retain any monetary value. The only reason why some address are more desirable is the real life factors of convenience like proximity to public transits or shops.
nice one great job as usual
what i find hard to belive about startrek society is
1- The fact people still do thing for only social rewards, mostly because what would most likely happen is that people who do nothing with their lives would tend to make social groups, and the ones who do stuff out of pure pleasure would also form groups, over time creating some kind of social bubbles.
2- The fact that by the 24th century we essentialy become a post-scarcity civilization, for you see, unless replicators break the rules of thermodynamics and create matter from nothing (which would mean the federation could at any point in time create a second big bang) the replicators still need matter to transmutate with, meaning we would still need stuff, only in a much grander scale, but by all means we wouldn't be a post-scarcity society.
Given that, a society more realistic in the federation, from my point of view, would be one more like the movie Wall-E, where people leave all "hard" work to machines and just chill in social circles dong essentialy nothing, because, why would you expend time building a nice house when you can spend more time in your social circle, or you can even do it in a holodeck, doing escentialy 3d modeling to the most extreme, of course some exceptions might pop up once in a while, but it'll be that, exceptions, not the norm.
One thing to note is that i think a post-scarcity civilization is indeed possible, a good example could be the culture, from Ian M. Banks, in which society is not run by humans, but by sentient AI, where the AI essentialy does everything, but also teaches and guides the humans and other species into doing stuff to the point that playing and working are considered the same thing.
Yay finally
Edit: A cliffhanger. How dare you! 😁👍
Most people don't understand just how _big_ earth is
One number I've seen was that earth could easily house 54 billion people and still remain green
The problem has never been lack of resources. Never.
The problem is how the resources we do have are distributed
The older I get, the less I believe in Roddenberry's future coming to pass and see things becoming more akin to Mega City One. The last 5 years in particular.
That's mostly the fault of squabbling elites who can't concieve of a world where they're not in charge. If the rest of us made the decision, we'd have been living in utopia decades ago.
I think it will resemble DUNE or 40K
I feel as though there has to be some kind of regulation about where and how housing is built. Not to accommodate people, but the environment.
If someone can just pick a spot and build a house in the middle of nowhere, what's stopping them from paving over a habitat or something, even on accident
I would love to live in a society like this (minus the Borg and Klingons and Romulans and Cardassians, etc).
But you can bet that most people would just sit at home and play video games all day.
I certainly wouldn't risk my life flying around the galaxy in a spaceship what with all the deadly anomalies and aliens everywhere you turn!
You might not, but there are definitely people who would. The beauty of such a system is you can do whatever you want or even nothing at all if that's what you prefer. I would definitely prefer to sit at home with a nice book than to go fighting space aliens or whatever personally.
Many other areas of work in the Star Trek society besides space exploration 🙂
Speak for yourself, I'm running moonshine from the ethanol nebulas around Sagitarius A*
@@quentinking4351 Cool! But don't trust those Ferengi if you trade with them! They'll sell their grandmas for a bar of latinum!
But there is an innate need for humans not only to rest on their laurels, but to get more of something. Sure, a small number of people would just sit home and play video games, but what ELSE would you want to do? If you COULD do most anything, you would WANT to do more than what you are currently doing.
I fantasize about being an earth bender in ATLA and just traveling around the countryside using my powers to secretly make stone or clay houses. I even make the pots and dishes the new occupant may need.
Certainly when it comes to say homebuilding, there really are plenty of people who actually love that sort of thing and might well have 'I'm a builder' as a big part of their identity. And there's always DIY people, who'd be much helped by the ability to replicate the tricky parts or such. (A few self-sealing stem bolts would come in pretty handy on what I'm building now in fact. :) (I mean, if you think starships are cool. imagine the *tools.* Holographic levels, a 'here hold this' tractor beam thingie, levitating toolboxes, phaser sanders or something maybe, who knows. :) )
I see a lot of commenters kind of not-getting it that you don't need scarcity and capitalism to get things done. I really find that most people who imagine they/people would be particularly prone to excess of one kind or another for long are ...repressed or 'starving' in one way or another. (Then blame 'human nature' for the effects of problematic *systems.* ) That's still treating, say, money or food or other things as an external locus of control, whether you have a lot or not. An evolved society such as Star Trek posits would have little such 'learned helplessness,' I'd say.
Ya that's exactly what I want. A future where everyone lives in government housing.
Reputation being currency huh.
Social credit scores incoming.
Reminds me of the Creative modes of Sandbox games- all this possibility in combining base/living items, features and decor, and no one to indulge in it…
That was always a failure in game design for me- I’m one player who can’t possibly indulge in all that I’d create.
I’d like to think in Star Trek the freedom of video game Creative Modes combines with engagement with whoever would like to take your creation for a spin.
Whether structural, architectural, vessel, or pilotable.
Arrgg.... This is what I get for starting to write my comment before the video ends. The following are some issues that jumped out at me, but then the very end the video acknowledges that what it said isn't true. I'm still posting it because these are issues that need to be addressed in future videos in the series.
====
This entire video is hand-waving to try to make something seem plausible that clearly isn't. For example, people will want to live in a penthouse or on a beach, which will create scarcity. You can't try to paper that over by saying everyone will live in a holodeck. For one thing, authenticity and scarcity matters. The fact that something is rare and is the real thing will be a large part of its value. If given the choice between actually living on the beach or living your entire home life in a holodeck, most people will choose to live on the real beach.
Also there is absolutely no indication that holodecks are anything but highly specialized and rare devices that are used in places like high end star ships, where crews can be on deployment for extended periods of time. For example, Riker had never been in one before he got to the Enterprise, so they are definitely not something everyone owns and lives in.
This video also contradicts itself on land ownership. It says that land ownership would continue through inheritance, but it also says land would be free for anyone to use as they see fit. Both can't be true, since just about all land is currently owned by someone, who would pass that land down to their decedents.
Huh? The video says that land that's not in use could be used. People have to check about availability. Chateau Picard is not available. How is that not understood? When the shift occurred to the moneyless economy, people weren't stripped of their homes.
Yes, there may be scarcity of some property, but that doesn't mean that there aren't non-monetary means of allocation.
@@ScoobySnacksYum Because people would inherit land, all land would be in use, so it is a pointless exercise to ask. What land today isn't owned by someone so that you could just walk up and take it? Outside of Bir Tawil, a small strip of land in Africa, there is none.
I would imagine there's some sort of land use department, that a record of someone using a particular chunk of land, so no one could force you off it.
I assume compact and reliable fusion generators are a thing, for powering the house.
There would be craftsmen. and women , who replicate wood and materials, for the joy of building by hand.... maybe building a house as a gift for family or friends.
I would guess robots do a lot of the grunt work required to keep up any city...
Whats stopping people from building anywhere and everywhere? there are rules and regulations around where you can build, for example it might ruin the environment or might ruin the view of the area, or rules around preserving a historic look to cities
Interested to see how the universe is fundamentally broken.
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i think the problem with the difference in the depiction and how it should be depicted is a lack of imagination of the writers. another problem, particularly within NuTrek is that the writers/producers fundamentally wanted to make dark/gritty scifi and shoehorned it into StarTrek.
Oooh... A cliffhanger!
Kirk: "Mr. Scott, how'd you solve that insurmountable engineering problem?" Scott: "I used communism, sir!"
Economy is based on resources and Wealth is based on a subjective view of social status and personal welfare,
Money is just grease for an overly frictious machine
Chateaux Picard is a great deal of work, if it were to fall into disrepair and go unproductive in a system where people go and do as they please, I don’t see any friction in the Picards moving on to what pleases them and being displaced by someone with a fresh interest in wine or a socially acceptable redevelopment plan
The JJ trek enterprise construction always bothered me. I know it’s off topic, but those ships seem designed to only be built in space. It would seemingly be difficult to construct the ship’s design in gravity as opposed to in space, where the weight of the saucer section and nacelle pylons would not be an issue….
Please do the Expanse! It will change your life
Of course Star Trek is fundamentally broken as a setting. The magic space elves came down and fixed everything.... In Star Trek, no matter what anyone in or out of universe argues, it All comes down to the fact that humanity got Lucky and so, there's no real lesson to be learned or way to build That specific future for ourselves. Who knows what's out there? And also, Bones is right Teleportation is murder and I Don't want that future anyway.. so yeah... Great video Rowan! Love the channel
Minecraft houses, but with replicators in real life
Talk about a cliff hangar...
The universe is broken.... byeeee 😂😂😂
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They were also trying to raise the sea floor in that episode Picard got into a muddy fistfight. Why would they do that? I have no idea. Building space doesn’t seem to be a concern. Because they could I guess.
Imagine its the weekend and you use your transporter just so you can continue to poop at work
Current corporation heads and the ultra rich will never let replicators come to fruition.
The mystery is preferable to any explanation.
I offer PROMETHEUS as prime example of how to destroy .
When Gene Roddenberry was pitching his ideas for Star Trek he shared a very bad habit with Irwin Allen - when pressured by distributors and sponsors, Roddenberry would throw out ideas off the top of his head, usually cliché concepts popular with '60's hippie culture. The cashless society is an idea as old as the United States. Our history is filled with Utopia: freedom from the need for money as all assets are shared equally. Just like the 17th century protestant community of the Shakers. Roddenberry in 1965 throws out a casual cliché that even I knew, of at age 8.
I think the most likely explanation of the Star Trek economy is that a wide variety of goods are post scarcity, but some goods remain "rival" or "scarce" by definition.
1) There can only be so much beachfront property. Or so many houses near "important" places.
2) People's time is scarce. Being able to trade time for some fungible good that can be exchanged for other peoples time is a completely reasonable thing.
3) It's unclear what role "intellectual property" has in the federation. I suspect that there is a strong social incentive towards giving away ones discoveries, but its not clear this is compelled.
Hence, we need something like the Federation Credit to settle who will control "rival" or "scarce" goods. It's just that such goods aren't necessary to live what we might call a modern first world life of leisure, even if you don't have a beachfront villa.
Re:beachfront property - yeah, on Earth, but there are thousands of planets like Earth out there, with billions of miles of coastline. And with a holodeck you can turn any tiny apartment into your own sprawling palatial estate on whatever beachfront property you like, tailored to exactly how you want it. Or even have it procedurally generate some totally new beach no one has ever seen before every day until the end of time or whatever.
@@stevepittman3770 Who wants a fake coastline when you can have a REAL one on the homeworld of the humans? In the ST world, having A thing is not the goal...its having THE REAL thing. You want the thing that noone else does.
"People's time is scarce. Being able to trade time for some fungible good that can be exchanged for other peoples time is a completely reasonable thing."
You literally just brought back so called "capitalism". Not all people are going to value their time the same and not all people's time will be worth the same amount. So when you "trade time" with other people it will take more of your time than some other people's time. So now people have jobs and those jobs are paid at different "time rates" aka money. So you still have an economy and some people will still want power and wealth and so you get corruption. These new corrupt individuals will have a much easier time of causing problems because most of society will have given up on the competition part so they will only have to dominate a small part of society to control more.
Things in your fantasy world are now much much worse than they are now. Not only are things easier to corrupt people have much less incentive to invent things and put work in.
@@thomgizziz Yes, I think that the federation is still "capitalist". It's just capitalist with a large UBI brought about by cheap energy and replicators.
Yes, accomplished scientists or artists or whatever are going to have more people who want their time than they have time to give. They will have to ration their time.
The same goes for certain goods in the federation that are not infinite. It's clear that while energy is cheap, it's not infinite. They can't replicate whole starships, and there seem to be some scarce resources that can't be replicated and are perhaps key to certain important technologies (dylithium crystals, etc).
People need a way to adjudicate claims to rival goods, which will always exist in some capacity.
No economic system can eliminate the desire for power, wealth, prestige, etc. All the federation can do is make it so that ordinary people have a standard of living great enough that they don't have to do anything to live a comfortable life.
@@stevepittman3770 Its been mentioned in canon that power for both replicators and holodecks is not infinite, and there are situations where they need to be rationed. Quark seems to rent them.
Who is doing the heavy lifting ? Prisoners?
"Who would build the buildings?"
Someone who stakes their reputation on engineering. Is it not that simple?
I like to think that, in the star trek future, they prefer Popperian democratic corporations to the authoritarian kind we have today, and that they have periodic elections for management teams, thereby producing policies that are less detrimental to employees and planets.
Picard's family might be operating their old vineyard as part of a kind of stewardship program doing historical preservation and education, while producing wine in an old fashioned way so people can try non-replicator wines if they were curious about the taste and process. This is similar to programs in Britain, right?
If the replicators didn't require lots of farming to make base materials, maybe sifting needed elements out of the ground, then a lot of land would be opened up for habitation and the cultivation of interesting wild landscapes to explore or inhabit.
If you're basically 3D printing homes and apartments, and other buildings, then there would be a lot less labor needed for construction. and without private property, intellectual property wouldn't be a thing and you would have a huge catalog of designs to choose from, consulting with AI and architects, you'd just choose a building type and design, in some democratic process, with units that can be personalized and it would start building.
Surely, they would have some work requirements, maybe saying you need to work like 2 days throughout the week with extended vacations, unless you had some kind of incurable future disability that prevented you from working, and you'd just study the things you were interested in doing and then be assigned based on your skills and preferences. Then you would be able to pursue any sort of hobby or other interest or if your interest is your work then that, the rest of the week.
If there are no taxes, then how are sewage, hospitals, school, refuse collection, etc, funded?
Social currency. Your wealth is based upon your achievements maybe?
Private property is a relatively recent invention especially with regard to land. Before capitalism if I remember correctly it was communal. Starting with the UK where community land was declared private, most likely by the nobility, after that came taxation. This spread to the rest of the world via colonialism. Private property seems like it’d be the least hard to conceive of within the Star Trek universe. I suspect if you accept the way the socioeconomic system has been built as some natural reality like water being wet perhaps it is difficult to imagine. Society is a construction, sentient beings can make it whatever they want it to be it’s not immutable.
What would stop someone with a replicator turning areas into minecraft projects all over the place?
Controls built into the replicator? Why would the average citizen's replicator be allowed to make dangerous and destructive things? We already see in Trek that food replicators can't make phasers.
He ignores human nature and the entire history of mankind.
@@ScoobySnacksYum People find ways.
I can imagine a slave labour of synths or holos doing the development side
It seems like people just living wherever they feel like and also the weather control would be still really bad ecologically. Like, maybe it's fine for us, but that still seems like a nightmare for animals.
Well eventually with the advancement of tech like AI and the stabilization of fusion we as a society will figure out, we don't need money no more. I gave this alot of thought, tech won't solve the issue alone but a return to familial family unity as we all take care of one another and our neighbors as a unit.
Will you review The Orville Season 3?
Things will still have tiers of desirability. Not every thing can possibly be available to everyone. Some housings will be worth more than other housings. Some jobs will be more coveted than other jobs. People will have different skills and different personalities and different attractiveness and different value. Nothing said here can explain away these basic concepts which are the fundamental core of human society. Humans no longer having human desires is what needs to happen for it to work.
Off course not everything will be available to everyone and their will be still things that are desirable. But your basics need will be fulfilled to an extend that you stop to care about such things. Also your social status is no longer measured by the money you have or the monetary value of things you own or your income, that takes already away a lot of reasons why people want to have certain things in the first place.
What was that anime?
Psycho-Pass
You have a fundamental flaw in your logic though...replicators CANNOT "create the means to power themselves." due to conservation of mass. Obviously, the threshold to run a replicator is low, but not zero. Replicators can only do so much, otherwise you could just create 100 Defiants and wipe out The Dominion. Not EVERYTHING is in abundance...just the things which we currently believe are what you need to survive.
For the next video, I hope that you draw the distinction that even with unlimited resources/power/etc, there is still limits on many things in society, and the competition over these limited things causes the conflicts (also see below on my argument against an argument that the ST universe is broken due to lack of progress).
Even if noone owns land, would not those who had land but then gave it up have wanted to be compensated for giving up sole ownership of it? What if two people wanted to have a house on the top of Mt Everest? While there IS virtually unlimited...whatever, there is still only one of a particular thing or person.
There is a finite number of first officers on the Enterprise. Shelby is gunning for Riker's chair because of the social currency in that position. Even though Riker would rather stay where he is at then take a lesser command, others think he's crazy for this because they see a "lesser command" as warranting more social currency than FOoTE.
In our current world, we would think that such a universe would be pure utopia and free of conflict and pain. But if you talke d to someone in 2000BC about our current world, they would consider this world a utopia, and think that all the conflict and angst currently going on is stupid. Why be depressed when you have "everything"?
The currency of 2000BC was centered around basic living goods...can you procure food and shelter? Nowadays its around money, which even a tiny amount can get you food and shelter. In the future, the currency can be social, but there will still be angst and wars and depression over it. Eventually, we would solve some of the problems that plague the ST universe, and what would be the currency then? Probably progress, because as a people, we are innately ingrained with a NEED to have or do more. It was a hedge against lean times in the past, but such an innate need could not be overcome in any reasonable stretch of time. Everybody would want more (and a society which DOESNT want more would collapse because nothing would get done), and while what we consider to be everything in the world to be happy is infinite, we will always want more...and there will always be conflict.
I don't think most people wouldn't want more which is probably a bigger issue. Progress would stagnate. Most people would be mindless eaters. The people that do want more are a smaller portion of society but they would be able to corrupt it much more easily. Progress would slow down pretty quickly. You are looking at a super dystopia.
@@thomgizziz There's more to living than only surviving.
@@briannevs2772 Tests on giving people money shows that a lot of them tend to be okay with surviving especially if it is more than just surviving like living in star trek world would be.
I love how the old argument was "There is no way this utopian future would be possible because the economics don't make sense through my purely Capitalist lens," and yet here we are. With a thorough and solid explanation with real world examples to back it up.
It's not a capitalist lens. Marx, remember, was a big fan of Smith and they came to the same conclusions on a lot of basic economic principles. Even he'd scoff at it. As much as I love Star Trek, the whole economic system of the Federation is literally nonsense - an impossibility even.
I am old enough to remember being four or five years old watching TOS at night on NBC with a 19" black and white CRT television. The continual threat of dinosaurs eating us kept small children indoors at night.
I remember not having a concept of the future (what preschooler does) and believed that Star Trek was about a secret military force that was operating in deep space in the 1960s. SG1 would eventually become this concept.
We were seldom shown Earth or how the various colonists and economics were seldom discussed - it was the 1960s and the red menace of Marxism/Stalanism/Maoism was ever present through the 80s. A cashless society would have sounded too much like one of those isms for it to be allowed to be discussed.
My belief in original sin and the depravity of man makes it difficult to believe in utopia which is suppose why religion is supressed in Marxist societies, because to accept Star Trek's economic system required believing an evolutionary or radical cultural transformation will have to occur so people will no longer be motivated by the quest for power and stuff. It's been tried: Pol Pot killed at least a million, Stalin at least 7 million and Mao killed 30 million. Did those deaths bring about the cashless worker's utopia Marx promised?
Sargon of Akkad had an interesting take on the original utopia as discussed in Thomas Moore's Utopia and where we are now and it's well worth the listen.
ruclips.net/video/-THaKNzY-vE/видео.htmlsi=WzQdl7d_m2dJlEOb
Thank you Rowan for an excellent and thought provoking video.
What anime was that shown at 9:30?
Psycho-Pass. A very good cyberpunk series.
The Ferengi have kept capitalism, and they have replicators. It's the government that decides and enforces the need for money.
I don't see a Star Trek world of abundance, as being the same as a world without Rules.
You still have a government, to make decisions, not just regarding foreign policy, as we see in the shows. But also regarding keeping social order.
There is a police force, right. So I'll extrapolate, that there are also other government institutions, to make society function. And these all have to operate under specific laws.
Among those laws, has to be, how land is distributed.
Like you said, there is more then enough. But a situation, where you can freely say this is my land, and size it your self. Will unavoidably lead to conflict. Like I've seen many people in the comments, give as an argument for why, Star Trek won't work.
What makes Unified Earth and the UFP something to strive for. Isn't the freedom to do what ever you want. Like I feel you are saying, with some of your ideas.
It is the ability for every one, to have the equal opportunities, to live a fulfilling life, with every basic need met. So they can concentrate on making them selves, and the world around them better. Or "talk" with Minuet all day, in a HoloSuite.
This can not happen without government and laws, that ensures, that electrical power is distributed, replicators and public structures are build (even if the physical construction, is done by robots). And that no-one else enfringes on those rights.
Likewise people need to work those government jobs. But since a great way to make the world better, is working "for" the public. I don't see that as a problem, but rather something many people, would want to do. Just like today, despite the often horrible pay.
The argument about "unused" land gets less convincing if you think of the land rights of indigenous peoples (and how this argument was used against native Americans)
If ufo's exist. Who builds them? And is it a world like Star Trek l? Or paid for.
Maybe the truth is that it was all a TV show and the guy who made it had no damn explanation!
A couple of points: In a future in which humans are so evolved, there's no way we would just pick a spot of land and just ask the other humans for some sort of property rights. Some lawyer or adjudicator would be given the job of advocating for the wildlife in the area, and would also consider the ecological impact as a whole. On top of that, replicators and holodecks wouldn't be used willy-nilly, given how much energy they use. An apartment building isn't a Galaxy-class starship...or even a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. We would be somewhat concerned about using that much energy.
Edit - To elaborate on my replicator/holodeck point: In my head-canon, "post-scarcity" in Star Trek's Earth (and Federation), means that no one really has to worry about their basic needs to live comfortably. It doesn't necessarily mean unlimited resources for everyone.
Some solid points!
As mentioned in a previous video replicators can produce the means to power themselves, so who cares how much power you use?
@@stevepittman3770 Ah, I forgot about that. Although I'm also wondering if that was one of the things that's been contradicted at some point or another...
@@stevepittman3770so replicators are perpetual energy machines that violate the laws of thermodynamics?
"To elaborate on my replicator/holodeck point: In my head-canon, "post-scarcity" in Star Trek's Earth (and Federation), means that no one really has to worry about their basic needs to live comfortably. It doesn't necessarily mean unlimited resources for everyone."
Okay you have thought a bit. Now take that last part and keep going. What kind of world would a star trek world be? I think you'll find that a star trek would would be a terrible dystopia.
Austria is an interesting case when it comes to housing. Paraphrased from "Some More News";
"Sixty percent of the residents of the capital, Vienna, live in some form of public housing. They're such nice places to live that even Austrian celebrities opt to live there. The Vienna City Council is actually the largest property owner in Europe, in other words, it's all owned by the people. In 1923, the socialists built 25,000 new public housing units and paid for it by taxing things like champagne, fancy restaurants, horseracing, cars, and sex work."
The housing shortage has nothing to do with space to build homes. It's an artificial scarcity that is propagated by the commodification of housing as, essentially, trading chips for the wealthy. They want to keep housing scarce because that keeps it expensive, which increases their wealth. Our governments are full of wealthy property owners whose self-interests don't align with any policy that would make housing affordable for their constituents.
This is an absolutely grotesque and immoral state of affairs surrounding something which should be a human right. It doesn't have to be this way. Vienna shows us that high-quality, publicly-owned housing can be made available for people if we stop catering to the interests of the very few who want to use it as a trade commodity, when it should be used to, you know, actually house people.
Or do a single land tax, as mentioned in this video.
Err wait, in Star Trek they don't tax citizens. I dunno how it would work in that universe honestly.
If there's no money involved then why don't everyone have their own starship?
They could if they wanted to.
@@RowanJColeman So... They don't like... Regulate who can or can't have a starship?
Okay, hmm...let's say everyone could own (and operate) a Airbus e.g. would you really want to own one? I mean REALLY want to own one? And if yes why?
@@sudafedup I'm sure they still regulate who can operate a Starship, but he Ship would be free. You probably still need a licenses and mandatory training and stuff, licenses and training would also be free. But you still would have to put some effort behind it.
@@cdev2117 yep, I would totally like to have my own starship and trek to where no star trek episode has gone before, The Andromeda Galaxy and beyond, to the edge of forever.
No tesseract technology? Pfft!
Serving food satisfies people in the future, eh?
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