Jokes on you, it’s Star Trek in the year 2025. It’s about to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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
We just get to die in the water wars instead. Yay!
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.
People always forget that Star Trek is post-apocalytic science fiction.
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.
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.
Markets aren’t capitalism
Blahblahblah the west sucks. Anyways
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.
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.
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!
That’s a shower thought if any.
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
To paraphrase Colossus from Deadpool 2 (or possibly Calvin’s dad): volcanic winter caused by things blowing up builds character.
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
So is adventure time, what’s your point
Tell that to the victims of Wolf 359.
Don’t be in Starfleet, and don’t be a scientist on a remote outpost.
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.
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…
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
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.
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Hmm I definitely need to do a reread. Do you have the text of that bit handy?
But Elon musk is a fan which kinda ruins it
I’d take his claim to have read it as seriously as anything else he says.
Great point. He probably read it as deeply as he played Path of Exile.
He might have read it, but did he understand it? He’s a fan of the Torment Nexus.
He also breathes oxygen. Whatcha gonna do now?
I will never have Oxygen again, now that I know this
Only breathe high quality fluorine, the best electron acceptor.
There is one way to resolve that where everybody who matters wins…
Ignite the atmosphere. I like how you’re thinking!
Chuds like rage against the machine too. Doesn’t make Rage any less excellent.
Star Trek. I can live on Earth free of the stress of being disabled with mental illness in a capitalist hell. The worst thing I’d have to worry about is some kind of alien invasion that gets thwarted by the crew of the Enterprise from time to time. I’d rather have to deal with the latest Doom Cruiser from Beyond the Stars now and then than have to worry about if I’ll be able to afford groceries this month.
It’s quite easy too. UBI.
Musk has a good talking point about a Star Trek future instead of skynet. But he is part of the cabal going for skynet. Just because Skynet will be programmed for US government and military supremacy in political service to its zionist oligarchy, doesn’t make skynet less of your enemy.
With the assumption I can choose who I am, I would argue that Banks’ Culture would be my choice. The Culture as a whole is much less vulnerable due to its size and scale and their technology is more advanced. Want cool space adventures? Join Contact or just go travel around in another civilization. Magic adventures? The sleep games and VR is like holodecks but on steroids. Want to live forever? No problem (although it’s frowned upon).
Agreed, but honestly either is ok. I’d prefer the Minds ruling me to humans too.
The main thing that would scare me is the Megadeath scenarios from the Idiran war.
But that seems like a pretty rare thing. Also, they seem to be a lot better at the sex and drugs thing than ST, as well as how they handle crime.
Coming after these guys is Neal Asher’s Polity. It’s like Culture “lite”, And the robots are a bit less “extra”.
Yeeeah, I’m not so sure I’d opt for the Polity in third place. It has a lot of problems, and major population centers are regularly threatened. And their AIs go rouge with alarming frequency, but that’s probably a consequence of being force-grown for war. Plus, just… Prador. As a civilian, I’d rather face xenophobic Idirans over Prador any day.
The appendix in Consider Phlebus put the Iridian war into interesting perspective.
Wasn’t it just one GSV on the Culture side basically fighting the whole war?
Statistics:
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month.
Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (\B1 .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) -
91,215,660 (\B1 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1;
Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or
sequence-position alteration) - 6.Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space… Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.It’s more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.
Don’t forget the ability to switch sex/gender freely. I think in Player of Games there is one person known for switching to female and having a kid every ten years or so. Having lots of kids also frowned upon.
Listen, if Bashir can casually turn Sisko into a klingon in an afternoon, outpatient, I’m pretty sure
becoming my fursonagender transition is nbd
Love the Culture. Also, transgenderism is amateur hour. Let’s get to trans-humanism. Fuck ‘no wrong way to have a body’; I don’t want a body at all.
Want to live forever? No problem (although it’s frowned upon)
Wow, even the most out-there sci-fi has built-in biological chauvinism and fear.
Sure, the universe is boundless and filled with energy and resources, but don’t you dare live longer than 80, that’s against Nature!
I think this is actually one of the more clever points Banks makes, although not explicitly.
Fundamentally, the Culture believes that living things (and their definition in this regard is remarkably broad) have a moral right to exist. Therefore, as a society they are not expansionist. In order to remain non-expansionist, the population must be kept stable and this has implications either in childbearing or lifespans. The average Culture human mothers about one child but that means they can’t, on average live forever. Why they choose to have children at all perhaps also boils down to the future generation’s moral right to exist, but also because they recognize that a renewing population means a renewing culture and Culture.
In this light, I believe it’s easy to see immortality as a sort of childish self-aggrandizement comparable to wanting to become the ruler of some backwards planet. Skaffen-Amtiscaw (an artificial entity and citizen of the Culture) even remarks on Zakalwe’s immortality as childish in Use of Weapons.
The Culture never appeals to nature – how could they, they are ruled by their Minds!
(Mind is a sort of very powerful artificial intelligence).
There is a lot of similarities between the Culture and Trek, they are both visions of post-scarcity humanity made impossible by the simple fact that humans could never be that nice.
Just a bunch of guilt-tripping. Expanding from the Earth, OK, expanding past x light years, childish. It’s just moralistic nonsense.
I don’t think you’re expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It’s set against a rather different set of background conditions.
If you knew anything about The Culture, you’d know it’s not that simple.
Attitudes individual citizens have towards death are varied (and have varied throughout the Culture’s history). While many, if not most, citizens make some use of backup technology, many others do not, preferring instead to risk death without the possibility of recovery (for example when engaging in extreme sports). These citizens are sometimes called “disposables”, and are described in Look to Windward. Taking into account such accidents, voluntary euthanasia for emotional reasons, or choices like sublimation (abandoning physical reality), the average lifespan of humans is said in Excession to be around 350 to 400 years. Some citizens choose to forgo death altogether, although this is rarely done and is viewed as an eccentricity. Other options instead of death include conversion of an individual’s consciousness into an AI, joining of a group mind (which can include biological and non-biological consciousnesses), or subliming (usually in association with a group mind).
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Death
I want optional mortality, but am also comfortable with death, and I can imagine situations of survival where I would prefer death.
If you knew anything about The Culture, you’d know it’s not that simple…
OR
“There’s even more to it than that!” [putdown intro not necessary]
I think my reply was still a de-escalation from the attitude in the post to which I was replying. But, noted that I could be better.
Think of the power consumption needed to power holodecks 24/7 so nerds can fuck wood elves or whatever their kink is.
Lucky we have these McGuffin Crystals lying around for nearly limitless clean energy
“Gay space communism” is my new favorite description for Star Trek.
“Fully automated luxury gay space communism” is the full phrase fyi
Tbh Trek isn’t very gay, it seems like most people are straight/gender conforming by default. There are only a few gay characters. Compare it to the Culture, where trying out new sexes and sexualities is so normalized that there’s one character who’s explicitly mentioned to be cishet and another character remarks it’s weird that he’s never explored his sexuality at all or tried changing his sex.
Monkey paw: you live in the mirror universe
Pro: All the hotties are wearing midriff exposing uniforms
No, don’t live on Earth in Star Trek.
As the functional capital of the federation and HQ of starfleet, its like living in DC comics Metropolis. Every damned alien race capable of plotting has a secret plot on Earth. Whether its some weird parasitic bugs taking over the admiralty, the borg, the romulans, the Dominion, or the upstart of the week, the casualty/injury rate has to be pretty horrific.
Mars is theoretically ideal, but get targeted because of the massive public shipyards, so it has a time limit of being good.
Jupiter, however, has less well known shipyards and all those moons to explore. It never gets outright attacked or destroyed, even the Borg just go past it. Jupiter is the place to be.
You want an m class planet, not just a dome. There are tons of nice planets that were early colonies that are fully developed now.
My general idea would be to be somewhere important enough that your quality of life is closer to TNG or Earth than DS9, without being in the constant danger and risk that TNG and Earth provide.
Heck, if you’re the people type you could probably get a place on Risa and make a living out of hanging out in a bar and telling the tourists where they can get the best Bolian food on the planet. That’s a perfectly sensible life trajectory in the Federation.
You forgot when aliens travelled across the galaxy to delete Florida from Earth.
Risa.
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.
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
What about 5 mins with a Drukhari?
It’s all fun and games until they literally atomize your entire body, assemble totally different atoms in a totally different place so they take on your former shape and call that “beaming.”
I really appreciate the direction Enterprise took with this. The whole crew was just terrified to use the damn thing. To be fair, it was new and relatively unproven technology, but the same central “just let the computer atomize you what could go wrong” flaw holds.
$0.02: It was great foreshadowing from episode 1 that they’re gonna need it to get out of jam, and it’s not guaranteed to even work. But the writers undid all that by letting the crew overcome technological and scientific inferiority way too fast. They could have made something far more compelling by having a crew that could make a go of it with zero conveniences. The show run could have ended with giving way to the next generation of explorers, who now have far more advanced tech than the NX-01 ever had; a much more compelling arc, IMO. It also robs T’pol of some of the gravity behind choosing to do something so reckless as to cruise the quadrant under such dangerous circumstances.
Enterprise doesn’t get a lot of love, but I really enjoyed it and was sad when it got cut short.
The problem with Enterprise is that it was kind sold as Star Trek before the transporters, before the shields, before the replicators, etc., but what we got instead was:
TransportersTransporters, but only if we really need to.Raise the shieldsPolarise the hull plating.ReplicatorProtein resequencer.Tractor beamGrappling hook.
They didn’t actually write a story about what it was like without these things, just what it was like with slightly shittier versions of these things.
Agree, that was well thought out. Also I loved how Toshi got a jarring feeling when the ship went into warp and it gave her the heebie jeebies. It totally made sense that some people would be aware of that, especially somebody whose “different” brain workings enabled her to parse meaning out of unfamiliar languages.
I thought they should have also made the Vulcan mind meld mysterious and weird at first - it’s been so long I don’t remember how they handled that, but in my own ideas for a retro series before Enterprise came out I thought the Vulcans would sort of keep the mind meld private and personal. The first time it would be used in an episode - reluctantly, in an emergency - it would really spook the crew. They would wonder, “Can they read our minds? Are they controlling us?” It would create a lot of tension and the Vulcans would have to rebuild trust.
Well, except for the Borg and all that stuff.
I think I would want one where there was no big bad.
