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Star Trek embraced pure communism as an economic ideal. The Ferengi were obvious caricatures of capitalists, and in fact little more than gangsters. Roddenberry, while alive, never had the ship return to Earth. But his successors made plain: the Federation would have a completely creditless economy, based on the pseudo-abundance of the ubiquitous "replicators."
I myself started to create a series to pick up 17 years after Deep Space Nine left off (and fifteen years after Voyager left off). In it, the New Economy would start to creak, colonists would flock to the Gamma Quadrant, and suddenly the Federation would impose Townshend-like Acts on Gamma Quadrant colonies. With the result that the Niners and the Voyagers, facing a crisis of conscience, would lead a Gamma Quadrant War for Independence, to parallel the American War for Independence. In this scenario, the Dominion War becomes the French-Indian/Seven Years' War, with all the economic stress that war laid on the British Empire, pushing them to promulgate those Intolerable Acts to begin with.
I don't expect the rightsholders of Star Trek ever to agree to this. So I am prepared to change all the names, and even substitute an autistic savant for the self-aware android automaton ("Data") the franchise features. I believe, furthermore, that the Federation would suffer an Atlas Shrugged-style collapse, and fall under a dictatorship by the then-current clone of George Soros.
The Ferengi began less well defined, even engaged in battle with starships. That was abandoned in later episodes. See my comments here:
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
As noted, everyone wants to read themselves into the Star Trek universe. Romanticism is about conflicts of values that people choose. (See Rand's Romantic Manifesto for a full treatment.) When Ayn Rand said that she enjoyed the first James Bond movie, it was not because he was risking his life to defend Wilson and Heath.
Klingons, likewise, are a caricature of Norse viking culture; Vulcans a caricature of Roman Stoics; Romulans a more classic caesarian, rapacious Roman culture; Cardassians a Prussian-like culture; Most of the other alien races portrayed are sketchy in detail to suit the storyline.
What's striking about the ST series is that they almost never contact a truly "alien" alien culture. I suppose that's because the intent of the series was to reflect human problems in a different, entertaining venue. Still, it would have been interesting to see how the ST folk would have approached interacting with a completely non-human sentient species, with no help from a universal translator.
Books are cheaper. Feel free to write it. Fanfic is out there and it becomes profic.
As noted Roddenberry knew the works of Ayn Rand, including the Romantic Manifesto, which came out after the OS was cancelled. So, he was a trufan. But romanticism is not about politics or economics. It is about people in conflict over values.
As for the anti-capitalist mentality of Star Trek, we have been fighting it for 50 years. As I noted, they actually improved their portrayals of the Ferengi. In the Deep Space Nine episode about "The Great River" of commerce, the hero is Nog who by trades is able to get the chief engineer what he needs to fix the station. Nog, of course, is later accepted at Star Fleet academy, graduates, and fights aboard the Defiant.
The DS9 episode "Profit and Loss" is a remake of Casablanca where we discover that Quark smuggled arms to the Bajoran underground when the Cardassians held the space station.
So, no, they will never do the Galactic Atlas Shrugged, but what they do can be passable. And, again, it is not about Austrian economics. It is about conflict over values. And, yes, I agree, that there, J. J. Abrams is lacking.
Finally, if you google "Jewish Themes in Star Trek" you will see that lots of people read themselves into the narratives. It is a popular myth, like the Iliad or King Arthur.
Allow me to suggest that our words for money (pecuniary = fee; gold = yield) show that if you took the smartest merchants from a mere hundred to a dozen thousand years years ago, you would have a hard time explaining to them how Bitcoins are money. Even among us are those who claim that gold has intrinsic value.
Like you, I resist what I perceive as the non-economic side of Star Fleet. Absent money, how do they know whether to establish a mining colony or build a school? But I note that mostly, we only see Star Fleet, one institution of the Federation, not the entire Federation government and certainly not the entire society.
I once wrote: "In fact, in one episode, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard tells a man from our time that in the future, people are more concerned with improving themselves than they are with the accumulation of things. This attitude, from a man in a uniform who commands some people and obeys the orders of others, begs a few questions." here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... (See also my review of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )
And of course Captain Picard has the task of telling this "popsicle" businessman that Federal society has abolished his kind and expropriated the properties he held when he went into the Deep Freeze. That's because Federal society holds all things in common. Replicators suddenly make all things of substance have no meaning. It's all a matter of how much energy you can get, and whether the Federal government will allow it to you.
For in a society like that, one does not have rights, but only allowances.
BTW, the religion of Bajor is Hinduism. The use of the title Vedic for a priest of that religion gives the clue. But the Entities that control the Wormhole strike me as more in keeping with the AEsir of Viking lore than with the Hindu gods, or whatever they were.
violation of copyright.
Why not just start from scratch, and invent your own story?
The Replicator: It would be the single most transformative technological element that is for all intents and purposed simply glossed over.
Replicator technology would completely invalidate many of the precepts of commerce as a means to alleviate scarcity and need. The transformation that even a SINGLE replicator would introduce to a planet as so overwhelming that even my creative mind cannot grasp all the implications.
In the right hands, even one replicator salvaged from say a crashed spaceship, or a time travelling accident -- changes the world forever.
Transporter technology: It like the replicator would be so unimaginable transformative, that we would be incapable of recognizing a post transporter civilization. It could exist right under our noses and we as a pre-transporter civilization could be kept ignorant of its very existence!
All the more conventional technologies like warp drive, shuttlecraft, anti-gravity, and all the weapons and medical advances are the only conventionalizations that we, in our current unenlightened state can latch onto. They are all utterly unimportant when compared to either transporter or replicator technologies with regard to their potential.
Simply put with either a single replicator or a single transporter, it is possible to accomplish anything from enlightening an entire planet into a spacefaring civilization, or to enslave or destroy an entire planetary population with equal ease.
No other Star Trek technology(1) is capable of such enormous transformations. Even the occasional flirtations with time travel, fall short of the ability to control specific outcomes, other than a restoration to the 'original' timeline.
Footnote:
(1) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clark
I am not a trekker trufan but I do know that transporters have been kicked around. Why bother with spaceships if you can beam from place to place? The only answer is, as Steve Jobs said: The journey is the reward.
But you are right in that all of the ins and outs of those two - and they are related technologies - have not been explored without contradiction. If you have answers, perhaps you could write a story and create "a world where..."
There is no magical energy other than matter or radiation to convert to other matter or radiation. Thus any replicator would need a supply of matter which would include photons and other forms of radiation.
Perhaps the greatest common error is the belief that measurements and other concepts are reifiable. Mass, energy, momentum, time, temperature, climate, politics, concepts, etc., are measurements or descriptions of matter acting or in relation to other matter and not any kind of matter and end up as mental content and not as actual existing stuff in objective reality.
Can you recommend readings in metaphysics?
As for metaphysic (Greek for "after physics" but better meaning proto-physics "before physics"), there is not much to be said other than the Objectivist view of the three axioms and there implications. After those the empiricism of the scientific method should rule for epistemology's rules as to what is and how knowledge is obtained, hypothesizing by deduction and induction until experience makes knowledge apparent. It should also be an empirical science.
E.g., does just the possible existence of something having identity, say, of a galaxy seen at 12 billion light years have any sense of knowable when 12 billion years in the future, ifs now, nothing is possible to know about it since there is no way to know where it is at present or whether it even still exists. Would that be unknowable if it really still exists? Objectivism would say it would have to be knowable since unknowable would imply knowledge to know that. There are many cases where one can only speculate about the existence of objects but not about any knowledge about their present identities or whether they still exist at present.
Objectivism's distinction between the metaphysical and man made, in my view, is just to give man some extra-natural existence, when, like all natural existents, rational animals are completely natural but like many other living things can have an awareness of objective reality and even ability to modify reality in a nondeterministic way
I agree with your claim that an electron and positron can annihilate to produce two photons. And, as you say, those those photons can be recombined to produce an electron and a positron. Hence, energy can be transformed into matter. That is how the Star Trek replicator works. It gets energy from the warp-drive engines. I accept your claim that a starship can also reprocess scrap matter via the replicators. But it does not need to keep a cargo bay of matter just for the replicators.
That is what you claimed above when you said that all that exists is matter. What we call "energy" "mass" "time" etc., etc., are just attributes of matter or relationships between matters. That is the strong materialist view of metaphysics that some Objectivists assert. Energy is not a "thing" just as Nothing is not a special kind of Something.
This would make an interesting topic of its own under Philosophy.
"The Truth about Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy", (2005).
He is very anti-mysticism in philosophy and says:
" ... Philosophy is the love of knowledge, not superstition. I contend, however, that much of what passes for philosophy is in fact mysticism. ... Philosophy, when understood as something other than a general and favorable disposition toward knowledge, that is, when viewed as a specific project and the source of a privileged sort of knowledge, is just this sort of mysticism."
I enjoy Star Trek, but have always found the liberalism annoying. The no-money system is a complete joke. Sure replicators can make things, but how are you going to pay people to work? Never mind, in a totally Communist system, you just tell them TO work.
According to "pure communism" people are naturally individualistic enough that they just choose to do many different things. In fact, that is one of the alleged fallacies in communist utopia, that the strict division of labor is gone: you can have one trade on Tuesday morning, and pursue a different craft on Wednesday afternoon, not being ground down by repetitive labor like a cheap machine. But of course, that's communist thinking...
To me, it's hard to reconcile that to an Ayn Randian ideal society... but then again, entertainment and philosophy would, at times, make strange bedfellows.
On a similar note, in the Romantic Manifesto Rand is quite clear that it is not the purpose of fiction to be didactic. As long as the plot, theme, and plot-theme are integrated and the characters act in conflict over values, you have good art. Roddenberry read The Romantic Manifesto between the closing of the Original Series and the launch of Next Generation.
Just as furious hand-waving can explain away paradoxes with warp drive in an Einsteinian universe, I can justify this, almost Objectively...
In "The Neutral Zone" (Season 1) Captain Picard tells Richard Offenhouse that we are more concerned with improving ourselves. He did not say that money is an archaic relic of a bygone capitalist era. Also, Offenhouse is optimistic if he expected a 200-year bull market. Very few firms are around from 200 years ago. (You can google them.)
By comparison, if we reanimated a 19th century farmer or an Ice Age hunter, how would we explain our lack of interest in the things they considered fundamental and unquestionable. Adam Smith had a hard time accepting joint stock companies. He would never have gone for Bitcoins.
It comes pretty close in that episode. In other episodes, however, the show favors capitalism, so I just write it off as this just being a bad episode. The Neutral Zone comes off as preachy, even if it had been preaching something I agree with, it really hits you with a two-by-four. I heard it described as being like a Michael Moore documentary about paint drying.
I do appreciate defenses of the episode, just as I like reading interpretations that try to make Turnabout Intruder anything other than what it appears to be.
I thought that William Shatner did a good job of acting like a woman, but, actually, he usually does anyway.
What I got from the episode the last time I watched it just a few months ago was the command presence that Kirk had which Dr. Lester did not. She repeated an order. Also, while Kirk does call up on the communicator "Kirk to Enterprise" he often just expects people to recognize his voice. Dr. Lester was not in the habit of either.
I do note now that "Lester" is a man's name. She was not Dr. Janice Garcia or something. Also, "Lester" has "less" in it, just as Jack London's Sea Wolf was named "larceny."
The difference is Dagny runs a railroad successfully. She has her chain kink without it standing in the way of her getting what she wants. Dr. Lester, OTOH, can't get things done. She tries to get her way dishonestly, and ends up a whining/crying mess throwing a tantrum. She's closer to a Rand villain.
I like to think Kirk is just choosing not to argue the point at the beginning when Lester says she couldn't be as successful as Kirk because of sexism. When she says it's not fair, he says, "no it isn't" instead of "oh no, I got here on my merits, and you didn't because of our own failings." This is the same way he doesn't gloat or seek retribution when he wins at the end of the episode. Unlike Lester, Kirk is not trying to prove anything to anyone.
"Dr. Lester was not in the habit of either. "
Shatner did a great job of conveying that he was a stranger to this job, and doing a routine task of calling the ship, which we'd seen dozens of times before, was new to the character.
"I do note now that "Lester" is a man's name."
I wonder why they did that.
"Also, "Lester" has "less" in it,"
I wonder if it's supposed to bring to mind the word fester, because of her festering resentment.
Thanks Mike!
I can clearly see why Spock would be Ayn Rand's favorite character.
Rand discussed two paintings, one of a junkyard, the other of a great city at night. The junkyard was the better of the two for its romantic style.
Romantic fiction is more than a rubber stamp of what Ayn Rand wrote. She enjoyed popular literature that without knowing her personal approval of certain works, fans of her works would condemn. Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith is just one example.
ion before deciding what I like; there are certain
Dickensian novels which I like very much, because of the pleasure they give me personally.
And I do believe seen everything with Mr. Spock in it.
I suddenly see the latest Spock as not having the same depth.
Perfect strangers call me on the phone and lie all the time. So I hang up on them.
Jan
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Gr...
"It's my money, Jake! If you want to bid at the auction, use your own money."
"I'm Human, I don't have any money."
"It's not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement."
"Hey, watch it. There's nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity."
"What does that mean exactly?"
"It means... it means we don't need money!"
"Well, if you don't need money, then you certainly don't need mine!"`
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/In...