Deep rabbit hole. I started by thinking about some basic math for the federation. How much antimatter fuel does the federation use in a year? where does it get it? How does having that much power available affect the "economics of the 24th century"?Here are some back of the envelope calculations that I've come up with.
I found a link here, that basically infers that antimatter is produced as a result of fusion reactions, at an energy loss of 24% (as it's basically stored fuel, you have to spend more energy than you get out of the fuel)
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/53183/how-is-antimatter-produced
we know that the starship enterprise burns through around 1900 Kilograms of antimatter fuel/day (about 4000 pounds).
Here, we read that the staple of the federation fleet is probably the excelsior class (a similar size to the enterprise) and that depending on estimates starfleet runs around 20k-30k. I'm going to take the lower number there. I'm going to assume that about 1/2 of starfleet is either an galaxy class or excelsior class and runs similar power requirements, and that the other half, runs about half of that, as we can assume that on average they are smaller ships with lower power requirements.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/9566/roughly-how-many-starships-are-in-starfleet
So, that gives us about 10K ships that run 1900 kilos of antimatter a day, and 10K ships that run about 950 Kilos/day. That runs the federation fleet at around 28,500,000 Kilos of antimatter per day. Since we can infer that there is an energy loss of 24% from a fusion reaction to create antimatter fuel, that means that the federation needs to run about 37,500,000 kilos of hydrogen fuel through fusion reactions, per day to fuel starfleet (and we are neglecting planetside power requirements so far)
The fuel for fusion? Deuterium. Deuterium, has a natural abundance of 1/6400 in earth's oceans. Earth's oceans has a mass of 1.385 984 6 · 10²¹ kg, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-weight-of-water-on-the-earth and the atomic weight of the hydrogen in a water molecule is 11%. From there, we can do some math, pretend that deuterium and ordinary hydrogen have the same atomic weight, (they don't, but these are back of the envelo
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I have just watched the episode of DS9 where they go back to earth and see ole pappy Sisco. But what I don't understand is why you would work so hard to run a restaurant if there is no currency or economy. Not just the Sisco restaurant as I assume the first response will be "for the love of cooking", but there must be so few service based establishments. Why would you work a gruelling job if you didn't have to? Which asks questions about the whole of society. Why do a shit job? How would society function if nobody does the shit jobs?
There's no reason to excel in anything and everything's at your finger tips. Just replicate anything you want or live out your fantasies in a holosuite. It would have been interesting if this underbelly of Federation society was presented to us.
In the Federation, we know that money is obsolete. Citizens devote their lives to improving themselves and others. People still work but do so because it brings them joy/satisfaction. Ben Sisko owns his own restaurant. The Picard family has a vineyard. No money changes hands for exchange of goods and services.
What kinds of businesses, institutions, etc. that we have in our capitalist society would still exist in the Federation. How do you think they overcome issues of scarcity around real estate?
Retail: Stores & Restaurants
Services: Designers, Painters, Architects, Pilots, Programmers, etc.
Transportation: Trading vessels, Cabs (Richard Bashir was a cab driver); Passenger ships
We know that there are trading vessels like Kassidy Yate's ship. When she traded goods, was it barter of goods between Federation and non-Federation planets?
The best way to avoid paying out a large cash settlement is to claim to be a cashless society. Even the Ferengi wouldn't stoop that low.
I delightfully came across this on RetroFuturism and it immediately reminded me of these few things I had bookmarked in my browser.
I am utterly fascinated by the idea of a 'walking' city, and I can't exactly explain why other than my distaste for staying in one place for too long.
But, how exactly would local government be organized around such a society? How would these local governments coordinate (or not) with subnational and national levels of government? Any ideas?
Not American, don't kill me, just wondering. I am probably missing something big here. What is the thing holding that country together other than an archaic sense of patriotism? Wouldn't the rednecks of Mississippi be happy to not have the hippies in New York deciding their federal laws for them, and vice versa?
I mean, yes, USA is probably economically stronger this way, but wouldn't everyone be a lot happier if they just make their own rules.
Thanks.
Like suppose a society joins the federation, then a fascistic leader takes over and abolishes democracy.
Can they be kicked out?
This always bothered me. It’s obviously clear why someone would work or live on a star ship without a monetary incentive. But why would someone perform such a physically intensive job as waiter or bus boy without pay to serve strangers food who don’t pay for it?
Edit: The most believable explanations:
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people work to apprentice with Joe and become a master chef.
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joe has dirt on the workers and is blackmailing them.
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joe and his employees are changelings working to infiltrate earth.
Have there been societies in the past that have deliberately drowned sacrificial victims like the "drowned priests" for the "drowned god"? If so, what societies practiced them, and what was the theological context to the ritualistic drownings?
Hi everyone this is my first post so bear with me.
Hypothesis: The post nuclear horror seen in Encounter at Farpoint led to a human culture intolerant of differences because of a reversion to "barbarism". Coupled to the large number of mutants created by radiation (killed by Colonel West as mentioned in Enterprise) humanity became less tolerant of difference. This changed somewhat after first contact with aliens but some values are still less accepting. This is why TOS shows a relatively sexist starfleet (fewer female captains) and why there are hardly any openly gay people in trek in general.
What do you guys think?
Edit I just realised that this is also one of the major differences between the mirror university and the prime reality. Bisexuality in characters as a sign of decadence.
The Romulans do have a reputation as a xenophobic close to fascist society but watching the show again I am the opinion that this might be true for their deep state in form of the Tal Shiar but not at all for their average citizens or military personnel and even parts of the government.
In Voyager Eye of the Needle Captain R'Mor is showing great emphaty by risking his career for the crew of the Voyager by hiding information from his government.
Orum, the Romulan on Voyager Unity was not only able to work with a group of aliens he was even able to lead them mostly peacefully in a very hard situation.
Bochra, the Romulan in TNG The Enemy learned to trust Geordy despite his life time conditioning to distrust the Federation and his citizens. He even had a good word for Geordy in front of Tomalak.
Admiral Alidar Jarok sacrifices his career in TNG The Defector to prevent a war between the Federation and the Romulans.
In TOS Balance of Terror the commander of the Romulan ship is saying to Kirk: "You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend."
The re-unification group shown in TNG Unification II looked open minded to aliens and especially the kid was very curious about Spock and Picard.
The Romulans accepted Sela as commander and even Shinzon first as commander and than as Praetor.
In Nemesis the Romulan viceroy looked appaled as he heard that Shinzons goal is to destroy Earth.
The Romulans in TNG Birthright founded families with their Klingon prisoners on equal basis.
The Romulan commander in TNG The Chase looked at the discovery of the same origin in a positive way and saw this as hope for a future with a lasting peace.
The most Romulans we have seen in DS9 were while reserved not aggressive against the Federation.
So I don't think the general bad reputation of the Romulans is justified.
I guess the title is pretty self-explanatory, but it really has my neurotic mind in a twist these days to think about the future of secular humanism in a world post-On the Origin of Species. I've come to acknowledge the non-existence of free will and the inevitable baggage that arrives alongside it, but I'm worried that my position on life could leave me feeling aloof and drift-less when it comes to things such as effective altruism. If my desire to do good stems not from my own volition, but from some deep-seeded code that compels me to help, then I struggle to effectively articulate my reasoning for becoming an altruist (or convincing others to become one, for that matter). My melancholy moping is not caused by the fact that empathy and ethics simply exist as structures and chemicals in my brain (rather than Cartesian-dualist souls floating above me). Rather, I feel aimless due to the fact that some of my positions of life, such as veganism, seem hard(er) to justify to other people within the framework of empathy being "just" a tool of evolutionary social contracts. Thoughts on this?
