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Eh, popular sci-fi is zero sci.

Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.

The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.

ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.



> Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.

The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent; it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity. Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's a lot of indication to the contrary.

Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.




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