I think too many people assume they would be the next Immortan Joe.
I chose fully automated luxury gay space communism please!!!
Capitalism goes vroom vroom, capitalism wins
(Not really tho)
Choose Wesley
I would make the argument that even under perfectly executed communism space travel is unlikely to end up being the focus
Not at first. The first tasks would be making sure all are housed, fed, and can lead decent lives where work is meaningful and necessary.
But even while that’s going on we would have a great number of people who would be better off doing minimum work and pursuing other interests. Much of the “work” under capitalism is just detrimental to ourselves and our environment.
Space travel would become meaningful and achievable again as it would not need to find a reason to be profitable. We would free to combine our global resources, to share technology and pursue space travel for the simple pursuits of exploration and survival.
It would actually inspire many people to pursue and take an interest in Space travel when they’re not forced to live as slaves doing meaningless jobs building plastic trinkets or figuring out how to get money out of people on mindless phone games.
And the goal would not just be for some competing companies to stick flags on rocks or mine asteroids to make more useless trinkets.
So I think it would become a great focus as we’d no longer be toiling just to live another day and would be asking greater questions about our place in the universe.
Funnily enough, it was not a focus for the United Federation of Planets, seeing as having over 100 major inhabited worlds the number of colonies was relatively small and the Starfleet numbers and ships were very small.
We just see the show’s title and that is is always from the perspective of Starfleet members.
Although, from an ecological point of view, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing plants would be a good way of offloading the environmental costs of a post-scarcity society.
But nothing beats a matter replicator.
Matter replicators you would hope would bring about post scarcity and the kind of society you see in Star Trek, I have my doubts one would ever be developed without greed as a motivation though
Short of changing human nature I don’t think even with all tthat tech we’d end up being a fair society, people would hoard energy, replicator tech, political power etc (unless it’s so simple people could build them themselves I suppose)
It would be assuming we do reach post scarcity for all essential goods. There’s more than enough bored people right now that would throw away the rest of their lifespan for a few months in space to fill a intra galactic space exploration organization; give those bored people all the free education they can handle and you have a successful star fleet.
I always felt like I was born too early for Starfleet.
I seriously would offer my life to this end; exploring space like Archer might have done.
But then you wisely decided to shut your dirty mouth.
Edit: /jk
How do you see something like that and your first thought is to respond with hostility
I apologise for not including a tone indicator, I do try but I keep thinking I’m more obvious than I am. It was genuinely meant as a joke, as in “no, lalalala, go away, I don’t want to hear it”.
Ah gotcha, difficult to tell over text and a lot of people here would genuinely respond like that unprovoked
why can’t we have a nice dystopian cyberpunk future like in alita battle angel.
