unless you are Alexander
Or Harry Kim. Or Miles.
Earth’s presence in the Federation says we survived. Environmental collapse, wars, etc. didn’t condemn us to extinction. Yes, it got ugly but we made it and we reached the stars. Star Trek gives us hope.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
What if you want to live in a gritty continuous war hellscape?
Believe it or not, also Star Trek
But what if I didn’t want any time line shenanigans at all?
Ok ok, hear me out. What if…
What if I also wanted crazy time travel shenanigans at least once a year?
Just want to point out that The Enterprise is like the nicest, most exclusive, most elite ship in the Federation. Most people living in the Star Trek universe don’t have access to replicators or holodecks or highly-trained doctors.
Like it’s basically a super cruise ship with all the bells and whistles. Even if you’re onboard, chances are you’re a lower decks crew member.
I think replicators are fairly standard, depending on which trek ofc.
Holodecks and highly trained doctors, no.
I take your point, it’s like being a billionaire today vs being a regular everyday person. So we’d be comparing their healthcare, tech and gizmos to an everyday person.
Everyday person still has like semidecent healthcare compared to a few hundred years ago and you could quite easily buy pretty good gear yourself for certain basic medical things. Basic wound care, emergency medicine, get an ultrasound and learn to read it to scan your body in a rudimentary fashion if you’d like. Get yourself some EEG. You can easily get either (but prolly rather low maybe low-mid tier) for around 100 western money units. You train yourself rudimentary but still quite advanced medicine that doctors 80 years would’ve have had no idea of. Medications you’d have a trouble getting obviously, but aside from prescription meds…
So assuming a certain bottom level of technology, but also technological availability, replicators are pretty common, you can prolly quite easily get one for yourself and then you’re pretty much off to the races. Surely there’s things it can’t build but yeah.
I’d much rather be some somewhat poor shmuck in the ST universe than a moisture farmer on Tatooine.
Also, lower decks? Fucking aces count me in. Love that shit. And I do mean both the show but also the ranks if I were on the Enterprise. I’d happily be a mid-tier NCO instead of a bridge officer. Seems more heroic yeah sure, but doing that 247 would be kinda tiring to be honest. Mid-tier NCO’s have so much more agency. And still get to guest star sometimes. Although the rate of change of the redshirts under me would probably make me have to do a lot of interviews… hmmm…
If you’re talking about earth then doctors and replicators are standard. People that don’t have replicators are unusual. Holodecks do use a lot of energy so I’m not sure how common they are, probably more like a theater would be as an amenity for a city not one on every corner. They had free teleportation on earth with some usage restrictions so the holodecks would probably be free but with like a once a week usage or limited appointments.
Well, I’m more talking about human in general. Even the more spartan settlements we see usually have a replicator and something to power it with. Sometimes Enterprise gives them as “bare necessities” almost, imo. To modern day humans, that is. Well and the one’s who were supposed to be modern day humans on some planet they had been kidnapped to. I thought it might be Voyager but now I’m not sure.
I imagine holodecks would run similarly to how library computers used to; they had a book and you could reserve an hour. On an empty day, you could do more. They’d allow you to use it as much as you want given there was no-one else queuing. Then it’d be shared equally. And it might depend on your relationship with the librarian, on just how much you annoy them.
Most of the rough living worlds and ships on the show are something like the future equivalent of Amish or adventurers. Choosing to live without the normal amenities as a lifestyle choice.
If you live on earth or another core federation world, you’ll likely have the same or similar access to services and entertainment that the crew does.
Tell that to the victims of Wolf 359.
Don’t be in Starfleet, and don’t be a scientist on a remote outpost.
Wolf 359 is one of the closest starts to our solar system.
Ok, so remote Federation scientists seem to suffer a lot in ST, but I wonder how much of that is survivor bias. I mean, we can assume redshirt casualty rates are fairly consistent across starships, although that could be a leadership issue; but what if there’s a vast population of remote research outposts and only a very tiny fraction ever gets in trouble? We just don’t know. The Federation is enormous, and covers a vast 3d volume - if there are outposts even slightly evenly distributed across the surface of that volume, we’d be looking at a large population. More researchers probably die from slipping on food spills than rogue revived eugenics war corpcicles.
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Depends on the year. Red and gold uniforms swapped.
Fun fact! Red shirts died more often in TOS because there were more of them! It’s actually the safest color shirt per capita
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That didn’t affect any of the civilians on Earth. The most they got were minor warnings that The Borg were getting close, but then they were miraculously stopped about 35 light years from Earth…
They weren’t stopped there - they made it to Earth orbit before shutting down! Then they did it again a few years later!
Okay, but what happens if you are adamantly against living in any kind of universe that is Woke?
You could try joining up with the Klingons.
Klingons are Tankies.
In that case there’s always the other Federation.
The Culture. Which is all of the above plus friendly superintelligent AI to run it for us.
Ding ding ding. The Culture is Star Trek ++.
Gene manipulation that’s so effective you can just will yourself to change sexes, get stoned, be performance-enhanced, whatever
You never have to work if you don’t want to.
It’s so utopian most of the stories have to take place outside it, because paradise gets boring.
And that’s why it’s the best place to live.
Oh absolutely, The Culture would be my answer too.
This was my thought as well. Star Trek still has people dying of old age. I’m pretty sure the culture let’s you go as long as you want.
It’s a bit taboo, but I believe permitted. “Typical” lifespans are on the order of a few hundred years.
Don’t recall it being taboo, just that people eventually get bored and end it out of ennui, in universe. Granted it’s been ages since my last readthrough.
I’m in the middle of my first! In Use of Weapons, they talk about how the character Zakalwe (not culture) has chosen to be modified to a fixed age, and how contrary that decision is the cultures philosophies.
IIRC they think it’s weird, but importantly they still do it. He’s an agent so there’s Special Circumstances but they still value the choice to do it more than they do sticking to norms.
Hmm I definitely need to do a reread. Do you have the text of that bit handy?
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Jokes on you, it’s Star Trek in the year 2025. It’s about to get a lot worse before it gets better.
For short-term wins I’d go with Neal Asher’s “Polity” civilization as at some point in the 20th Century, the AI just decides to take over and become benevolent rulers.
No societal collapse required.
But also a higher risk of enslavement by giant sentient crabs. Your call.
Haven’t read any of those in an age. I liked it! Sentient wasps was fun, but a billion-year-old malevolent pseudo-virus that rapidly turned you into a military agent of an ancient and hugely destructive race was… less so.
We missed the eugenics wars of the 1990s and the nuclear wars of the 2020s so far, and the 2024 Bell Riots in San Francisco. I do agree it will get worse, but not to the degree seen in The Star Trek Universe.
That would cause an actual class war where the slave class (not the owner class) revolts against the owner class
This reminds me of “You find yourself in your favorite fictional universe, what would you do first?”
On one end of the spectrum is Star Trek.
On the other end, Warhammer 40K.League of Peoples?
usually peaceful interstellar community
Uhhh…
Somehow, Palpatine escaped the holodeck…
You mean Moriarty
Oh no, did the holodeck break and turn all the holograms real and evil? That’s the second time this stardate
Ok, new TNG plot idea - to provoke war with the Klingon Empire, Romulan hackers infiltrate the Federation’s central update servers, programming Klingon commandos to pour out of holodecks all over the fleet, take over vessels, and attack Earth. The Enterprise is spared because Wesley disabled auto-update to troubleshoot the Moriarty problem and forgot to turn it back on.
I’d watch it
Better than section 31.
Obligatory “shut up Westley”
My boring dayjob is to sit in front of the holodeck and shoot anything weird that comes out.
And on the opposite side we have “I’d rather be human trafficed into a nazi concentration camp than spend even 5 minutes in the universe of Warhammer 40K.”
I’m sorry, like, I would choose 5 minutes in Warhammer 40K versus the Nazi death camps.
My overweight native ass would be tortured to death over the period of several months, whereas five minutes in Warhammer 40k, like maybe I catch a stray bullet, maybe I get gang raped by orcs, but more than likely I survive, and I’m relatively unharmed.
What about 5 mins with a Drukhari?
Based on what I know, 99% of humans live in hive worlds and will never see conflict. The stories, the wars? Galaxy wide - like just looking at a map of the galaxy and how long space travel takes? Not just the warp traitors, but orks and Nids with their “proper” propulsion? The worst most humans will face is Darktide-style incursions of rot under a hive, and even then the upper levels may not even be aware of such.
The far and wide galaxy of Warhammer may certainly not be good, as theres settings like Star Trek where no matter where you go youre rocking a good time - but idk the worst most humans have to deal with is god-aweful mismanagement and ineffective government of the hive, maybe a Mechanicus comes to town and calls people “pre-servitors” for awhile and then fucks off back to Mars. The cities are beautiful when they’re not on fire. Chances of being born to a mundane non-hellscape and living and dying with nothing happening are pretty good tbh
I get the impression that most humans in 40k are fairly comfortable. It’s no utopia like Star Trek, but on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, they’re looking for love and belonging. Their physiological and safety needs are met. Sure war exists in the 40k universe, but for most humans it’s a very distant thing.
Maybe if you lived a full lifetime in a 40k universe there would be at least one disaster you had to deal with, that would be pretty awful. But, 5 minutes would be a piece of cake.
I think you underestimate how bad the mismanagement is.
You picked a ration off a corpse to feed your malnourished child? You’ve been sentenced to death for theft, to be carried out tomorrow. You have 20 words to appeal. The appeal will be processed in 6-9 months. If youre lucky enough that a planet-threatening disaster is occurring, you might have the sentence suspended so you get the opportunity to die on the front lines of said disaster.
Letting the emporer’s rations go to waste would probably result in the same outcome.
I will one-up Star Trek and say I want to live within The Culture. Nothing yet beats The Culture. The Federation looks conservative, backward, and low-tech in comparison.
People always forget that Star Trek is post-apocalytic science fiction.
Like how it’s writers were channeling the ideology (not practice, mind you) of post war USA.
That’s a shower thought if any.
Aliens, holodecks, and regularly breaking the laws of physics? Kid stuff.
Humans actually learning from their mistakes? Now that’s what takes a leap of imagination.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Because look at how many times the world ended and people went on buying and selling.
Bubonic Plague? People selling and buying. Locked in a concentration camp? Someone knows how to get you what you want.
On the contrary. It’s a quote mocking the extent to which the exploitative system of capitalism has entrenched itself in the minds of people, to such a degree that they cannot even consider that a better alternative might exist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
By the way, buying and selling things isn’t generally considered to be capitalism. Capitalism is about controlling private property for the generation of profit.
Markets aren’t capitalism
Blahblahblah the west sucks. Anyways
I mean, economic theory does generally suck though. Regardless of school, who wants to look at graphs about money numbers all day, everyday, and get underpaid for that shit?
Buying and selling is not capitalism. You are conflating capitalism and trade.
Capitalism is when private capital owns the means of production.
Trade is when people buy and sell things to each other.
I mean technically we live in a post apocalyptic era too.
It’s that it was before humans were around.
The most recent apocalypse could arguably be 536 AD, when most of the world couldn’t see the sun for 18 months.
Eh, not enough mass extinction. Needs more giant meteorites or extreme and sudden climate change.
Well hey, at least we might get to see one of those! Don’t forget your 3D glasses too
Personally, I’m excited
To paraphrase Colossus from Deadpool 2 (or possibly Calvin’s dad): volcanic winter caused by things blowing up builds character.
In our defense, it is VERY post-apocalyptic, like 400 years or so depending on where you tag in.
It’s not like the bombs dropped yesterday and all of a sudden they have holodecks and microwaves that make food out of raw materials and transporters and warp drives.
If you consider our technology in 1625 versus today, Having that kind of tech in 2425 seems perfectly reasonable.
In our defense, it is VERY post-apocalyptic, like 400 years or so depending on where you tag in.
According to Star Trek canon, all the apocalyptic stuff lasts for about a century, tops. The Eugenics Wars started in 1992 (pre-retcon to make them happen further in the future), the nuclear exchange happened no later than 2053, the Vulcans showed up in 2063, and Earth society appeared to be completely recovered by 2121 (the time of Enterprise).
Then let’s hope they get dropped off at the right time.
Fun fact: according to Star Trek canon, we’re about to be living through the worst of the apocalyptic period starting about right now. The Bell Riots (unrest in California regarding “sanctuary” districts – sound familiar?) would’ve happened last year, and the Second World War/WWIII is due to start next year.
So is adventure time, what’s your point
Are we not post-apocalyptic in the eyes of the romans?
Yeah but they didn’t have weapons that could flash-vaporize entire cities while setting thousands of square miles of everything on radioactive fire. Honestly theirs was probably worse.
Archimedes: Hold my wine.
Oh God my eyes!
Rome took centuries to decline, hardly an apocalypse.
That’s because it’s in the subgenre of “post-post-apocalyptic.” Think Nausicaä, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Planet of the Apes. The apocalypse happened so long ago that it’s more of a history lesson than an ongoing concern
If you want to live in a fictional universe, you should mention when.
I want to live in the world of Land of the Lustrous, but waaay in the past before human civilization collapsed
