Star Trek Social Club
r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
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New to Star Trek and wondering where to start?
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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 11-28 | LD 5x07 | "Fully Dilated" |
| 12-05 | LD 5x08 | "Upper Decks" |
| 12-12 | LD 5x09 | "Fissure Quest" |
| 12-19 | LD 5x10 | "The New Next Generation" |
| 01-24 | Film | "Section 31" |
In Production
Strange New Worlds (TBA)
Section 31 (2025-01-24)
Starfleet Academy (TBA)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
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Because the scarce resource at Quark's isn't the food or drinks, it's the atmosphere and the experience, i.e things the replicator cannot provide. Quark controls the holodecks too, but even if he didn't the scarce resource would be authentic (not replicated) food and experiences. It's been shown pretty regularly on the shows that some people prefer non-replicated food, non-synthohol drinks, and real people. It doesn't really matter in that context if those are technically indistinguishable from the real thing (but even in canon there is a measureable difference between them and some things the replicators can't do).
I don't really believe there could ever be a post-scarcity world in which we don't create new scarcities to demand.
Hot take: The Expanse (mostly referring to the books here) handled a post-scarcity technocracy much more believably.
Again, the Ferengi are a bad example since they aren't part of the federation. But my point was simply that this stuff wasn't thought through. Why do the Ferengi exist? Because the writers wanted some capitalists to use as a contrast to the Federation.
I firmly believe that ST's worldbuilding mostly handwaves the questions of economics and scarcity, at least within the Federation. The writers didn't want to come up with good reasons for these things that actually make sense when you think about them.
It's a great franchise, but we shouldn't try to apply real-world economic ideas to it when that was so clearly not at the front of the writers minds when they created it.