There are no billionaires in star trek, Elon.
Lower Decks made fun of billionaires in the latest season. There was a planet that recently joined the Federation and was burning money and throwing away gold. And there were some unhappy local billionaires.
I want one of their “no money no problems” t-shirts
Sure there are. They are all short with really big erogenous ears.
People should absolutely reply with pictures of Quark and various Ferengi.
Elon names stuff after things in The Culture, but he’s Joiler Veppers
Grok really upsets me, that’s my favorite book and although I know Mike wouldn’t hate Elon I really really hope he would. That said if you limit sources and insist on making it see through your lens you’re by definition not allowing it to grok anything.
Grok is from Robert A. Heinlein. I believe the first reference is Stranger in a Strange Land. He would probably be okay with billionaires, too. He was also a promoter of competence and critical thinking, so he might have held Elon specifically in disdain.
Yes it’s my favorite book.
Mike was a billionaire, the nest had a literal pot of money that anyone could just take and do whatever.
But no he would love Elon. To grok is to understand fully, to understand is to know, to know is to love. Essentially everyone has a redeemable quality and Mike would love that part especially but also all the lesser parts and even the hard to love parts because all those other parts are part of what makes the part he truly loves.
Ah. The “he” I was referring to was Robert. It’s been over 30 years since I read that book, and forgot the protagonist’s name?
Oh Heinlein was a stanch liberation so yeah he probably would be.
Eh don’t feel bad his name is actually Valentine Michael Smith but all his friends just call him Mike and most of the book he is referred to as Mike or Michael.
Yeah, that’s the one. If I remember the overall tone, it would be in character for him to see the collection of wealth as a response to some childhood harm that it would be better for Elon to overcome, so he could be free of its binding influence. Not that his being a billionaire was bad, but him having a compulsion to hoard wealth is harmful for his well-being.
Is that last part in the book? That’s some Ra shit 🤔
The money bowl? It’s once he makes a church and the newspaper fella ( never remember his name) comes to visit. So like 3/4 ish of the book I suppose.
Ed: in case you meant the definition of grok.
Grok means “to understand”, of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, “to drink” and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. ‘Grok’ means all of these. It means ‘fear’, it means ‘love’, it means ‘hate’ — proper hate, for by the Martian ‘map’ you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you — then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate — and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.
I did mean the “to grok is to understand fully, to understand it to know, to know is to love”. That sounds like the Rule of One, the Ra book. Esoteric bs and all. But it made me curious if that’s where the book of Ra got it.
Exactly. I would have started with ending all monetary systems and starting a global post-scarcity society.
A Starfleet Captain commands the wealth of nations. I don’t think it’s fair to say Billionaires Don’t Exist so much as to say the liberal ideal Meritocracy is made manifest.
Being entrusted with large amounts of resources is very different from owning large amounts of resources.
I didn’t watch Picard. How did Geordie end up with the Enterprise?
Paramount wanted to make a shit ton of money off a property they owned, so they fucked around with established continuity to give it more mass appeal.
He’s the caretaker of the federation fleet museum. Basically a cushy retirement job for a guy who has a family and didn’t want to get shot at any more. He’s probably the only cast member that acts like an adult in Picard. 😆
So they could have undocked an historical fleet and only took their favorite ship? Seems like a tactical oversight…
Giordi has spent like 20 years putting it back together from pieces after it was destroyed, and it was still the most powerful ship in that museum by a long shot. The Galaxy class was still in active service in Picard.
Fair enough. Would have been nice to see some Nebulas and Mirandas be used as harrying vessels.
I had forgotten it got destroyed in Generations. Poor Beverly.
I’m in charge of $600 million+ worth of hardware at my job. This does not grant me monetary agency over the value of that hardware.
Commands, as in “has the responsibility for”.
Not “owns and can do whatever the fuck they want with it and be a dumbass asshole to everyone”
Various Star Fleet officers have periodically violated Federation rules and guidelines to achieve some ideological goal or moral imperative that cuts across the fleet’s stated mission. Like with anything there’s limits - Starfleet has its own police, crews can mutiny, eventually you run out of dilithium to gas up your warp drive so you can’t go rogue forever. But for a deep space galaxy class vessel, they’re regularly stuck making their own decisions under a military autocracy.
The Starfleet Admiralty Problem is a chronic plotline in the series, with admirals routinely engaged in all sorts of corrupt practices and villainous endeavors. Every captain from Kirk to Freeman has to deal with their share of higher ranking officers fucking around and being dumb assholes. Hell, Kirk himself is demoted from Admiral to Captain for going rogue in The Voyage Home.
Yes this is called individual freedom. And people are apt to serve their own interests occasionally. The overall point is that there are consequences to those actions. And every one of those rogue admirals discovered what those consequences were. None of them got off scot-free to ride off into the distance with their ill-gotten gains.
That’s why we need Wobblies from Space
There’s been billionaires since the Orion were introduced and it’s not like there aren’t wealthy businesses owners in the federation. It’s just post scarcity in large part so the difference between the wealthiest person and the poorest isn’t so stark.
When you take into account Natasha Yar’s childhood where she grew up in poverty having to hide from rape gangs then is it even really post-scarcity?
Or is it just post-scarcity for Starfleet and certain parts of the Federation?
Turkana IV (Natasha Yar’s planet) started off as a federation colony after all. And became a dystopia even while still a member of it. So if the Federation is considered a post-scarcity society then why didn’t Turkana IV benefit from that?
Inside the federation it’s very very close to post scarcity but it’s not quite perfect. Outside the federation like we see in the delta quadrant it’s 100% not and a overall story line for like 4 seasons was them getting chased around with everyone trying to steal replicator technology.
Don’t worry. When there’s a point of saturation. We won’t be able to leave earth orbit because of space junk.
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Fucking poser. Like if the imbecile wanted moneyless, post scarcity society. He just wants warp drives, phasers, and oppression.
Warp drive? Fast transport for large masses of people? Sounds communist. We should bore tunnels for slow cars beneath Las Vegas instead.
Fast transport for large masses of goods and services seems more likely in his mind.
Somebody show this clown TNG The Most Toys, the one where the emotionless android feels a surge of hate and blasts the space billionaire that enslaved him.
RIKER: Mister O’Brien says the weapon was in a state of discharge.
DATA: Perhaps something occurred during transport, Commander.
And then he gets away with it because Riker hates billionaires too 😎👌
The transporter chief would be the only one who could have told Riker for certain otherwise, and well… The chief on duty was certainly no friend to billionaires.
A good union man.
O’Brien fucking rules
And now I know how he got on Sisko’s radar. Perfect man for the job.
Star Trek is Woke! Oh yeah. The whole idea of sci-fi is exploring ethical dilemmas in the real world, but using advanced technology as a metaphor. MAGA isn’t smart enough to see through the ruse.
Elon’s caught in a liminal space between Wine Mom Liberal and Extremely Divorced Chud. He remembers people being excited about Star Trek, but he only grasps the “pew pew space lasers!” part, not the “ethical dilemma of the Kobayashi Maru” part.
If he’d been fully MAGA’d, he would be raving about Bringing Christ’s Holy Message Beyond the Stars or doing Heinlein callbacks to Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Instead, he’s still got this latent impulse to convince whatever dregs of the 1960s Space Race liberals left at NASA that he’s still cool.
Star Trek always has been woke. If anything, I think the wokeness in nu-trek went down and got replaced with empty populist showoff
We’re obviously in the Terran universe
We’re actually still on track for the prime Star Trek universe. Things got really, really bad before humanity got its shit together. That last part is how you know it’s fiction.
Things regularly get bad and then good again. The Star Trek lore is modeled on the Hoover Great Depression giving way to a New Deal and Great Society.
The fact that it was written in the 1960s, when that monumental economic transformation was just wrapping up, isn’t a coincidence.
Places like Texas and Florida were being transformed from agricultural backwaters to the forefront of interplanetary travel. The distance spanned between 1929 and 1969 is borderline magical.
I think the point where the universes diverge is when we decide how cool goatees are.
I say it’s not too late to start the Bell riots.
If you mean Earthlike, yes, we are on Earth (Latin name Terra)
They mean the Terran Empire https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Terran_Empire
What a fucking tonedef two-bit cleptoclown.
Bet he’s hoping for the mermaid right there.
Voyager’s ship’s doc is really active on social media. He’s the Ship’s Emergency Command Officer we always needed, a Charles in Charge for the future.
I just realized that’s who is replying here lmao don’t mind me, I’m a moron!
Bob Picardo is? I’ll have to give him a follow, thanks!
Yeah, he’s been in a lot of stuff.
He does know that Star Trek is post-apocalyptic, right?
I don’t agree.
I know you’re prolly referring to the WWIII, but it’s never talked about much differently than WWII or WWI, if you don’t account for the intensity of war changing. Like we consider WWI and WWII rather similar and for people living in a Utopia 200 years from now, a third WW about 100 years apart isn’t that different.
I don’t recall anyone ever saying the world ended during WWIII. Sure, First Contact, humanity has a definite post-apocalyptic vibe, but eh.
I guess you’re technically not that wrong, but I wouldn’t personally use that as I don’t think anyone refers to the world having ended in the 21st century.
And the main setting is definitely utopian to the point chat we’ve never really gotten that many stories set on the Earth of that time, because it’s kinda hard to write. Sure we can somehow explain how everything is equal but Picard still owns a massive vineyard with workers and is clearly well-off ans and it can’t all just be from the merits hes gotten as an adult?
In Star Trek doesn’t WW3 also include the Eugenics Wars where Khan Noonian Singh came to power?
The memory alpha wiki page for the Eugenics War lists the result of the war as: “Earth is devastated” and mentions humanity almost being thrown back to the Dark Ages.
There’s also this quote:
This is Earth in our 21st century. Before everything went wrong. Our conflict… started with a fight for freedoms. We called it the Second Civil War, then the Eugenics War, and finally just World War III. This was our last day. The day the world we knew ceased to exist. What began as an eruption in one nation, ended in eradication of 600,000 species of animals and plants, and 30% of Earth’s population. Global suicide… - Christopher Pike
The memory alpha page for 21st century also says this in the very first paragraph:
After World War III devastated large parts of Earth placing Humanity in near-extinction
And this in the timeline:
2053 - World War III ends with a nuclear holocaust resulting in the deaths of some six hundred million Humans. Earth begins its long journey towards recovery.
There’s also a whole page about the “Post-Atomic Horror”, which was the era that Q recreated for his court room when he was judging Picard as a representative of humanity in the first episode of TNG.
Sounds pretty post-apocalyptic to me.
The Black Plague did away with roughly half of Europe’s population, but was that counted as the world having ended? No. Did people at the time think so? Probably yeah.
Sounds pretty post-apocalyptic to me.
It’s a post-scarcity meritocratic society brimming with life and good values and which posses near godlike technology and interstellar travel.
Put that sentence in front of someone and I dare say a majority will not describe it as “post-apocalyptic”.
Yes, there have been wars, and 21-22nd was probably worse globally, but to someone living in 1913 Western Europe, it may have felt that the world was ending. But I’m sure just because Europe was devastated you don’t consider yourself to live in a post-apocalyptic Europe, do you?
It’s more a descriptor of the setting than going by any actual canonical facts. Kinda how “Outlander” is technically classified as science fiction even though it’s basically 100% historical drama.
I think if someone didn’t know what ST was and you told them “post-apocalyptic”, they might be a little disappointed.
I didn’t say “world ending”. Only you are referring to the world ending. The term being used by me and others here is “post-apocalyptic” and you seem to be conflating that with only meaning the world literally ending, but the term is not as simplistic as that.
Meaning of post-apocalyptic according to Oxford:
Following a large-scale disaster in which civilization has been destroyed or has regressed to a more primitive level
When I hear “post-apocalyptic” I think of things like society having effectively collapsed or regressed as the result of a nuclear holocaust or some other cataclysmic event and whoever is left is struggling to rebuild with factions fighting over the scraps. The world hasn’t ended in this scenario, it has regressed.
Nuclear holocaust and almost pushing human civilisation back to the dark ages while factions fight over what is left is exactly what is described as having happened during the time period following Star Treks WW3.
Judge Dredd, for example, is another universe that is most definitely considered by most to be post-apocalyptic even though Earth still has a massive population living in continent sized mega cities. Judge Dredd is set during a time period where humans are experiencing societal collapse a few decades after a nuclear holocaust. This is similar to how i imagine Earth is in Star Trek immediately following WW3 during the time period known as the Post-Atomic Horror. And we are shown a snippet of that collapsing society by Q during Encounter at Farpoint.
Comparing this kind of scenario with our WW1 or WW2 doesn’t work because neither of those wars set back human civilisation. Even considering the devastation and human loss, human civilisation experienced massive growth spurts in technological expansion both during and immediately after those conflicts. Humanity went forward, not backward.
Comparing it to the Black Plague also doesn’t work because, while devastating to the population, society did not collapse. The Black Plague did not result in any countries being wiped out or collapsing.
I think this debate is more semantics than anything. Human civilisation in the Star Trek universe has experienced a global apocalyptic event resulting in all of Human civilisation being pushed backwards significantly. This is not the same as a devastating event confined to certain regions like both real WW’s (even as massive as they were) and the Black Plague. The shows take place after these apocalyptic events, therefore the shows are post-apocalyptic, but the shows themselves are also set so far beyond that time period they themselves could also be considered post-post-apocalyptic as humanity has recovered by that point.
It’s a post-scarcity meritocratic society brimming with life and good values and which posses near godlike technology and interstellar travel.
Exactly, but we also learn from Picard in the first episode of TNG, during the encounter with Q, that humanity has achieved this level of society as a direct result of learning from the horrors of WW3 so that they don’t repeat the same mistakes. That post-scarcity society evolved from a post-apocalyptic society. Therefore the show can be considered both post-apocalyptic and as you describe. The two descriptions are intertwined and both valid. Just because the underlying post-apocalyptic side of the shows theme isn’t apparent at first glance doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It serves as the origin story of the post-scarcity society on the display in the show.
Tldr (edit I did actually read) it’s subjective, yes. Descriptors of genres aren’t objective facts. Entirely my point. Well elaborated.
But I’m pointing out that if some random teen came up to you to ask for suggestions of “post-apocalyptic shows”, I’m pretty sure you know they would be disappointed when watching Picard having tea and discussing philosophy when all they wanted to was half-naked people in leather duking it out in a blood-dome, you know?
I’d that Dredd is considered that post-apocalyptic by people’s who don’t really know the canon. More like dystopian future. But hey, like I said, subjective terms. Use them how you think best.
I’d agree calling ST “post-dystopian”, perhaps. And I’m not arguing that people diegetically would not have thought “the world to have ended”, but again, subjective, imo.
Picard’a vineyard has been in the family for generations as seen in TNG when he visits his brother.
But the world went through a terrible fate in between (where we are now) and the post-scarcity world they live in now.
See any episode where the Q is involved. Literally the first episode of TNG covers how barbaric humans were during this period. Putting them on trial. Living in domes because the atmosphere is toxic is definitely post- apocalyptical…
Q’s argument is that humanity is and always has been equally barbaric, an argument which he supports by showing troops from both WWIII and WWII.
And talking about plain brutality, I think WWI might’ve been even worse, especially for some of the battles.
Tldr define “apocalypse”
Edit but also yeah I know it’s been in the family for centuries. That’s kinda my point.? If there’s still inheritance and exceedingly rich people, then… eh. Well there’s a reason we don’t get a lot of stories from modern day earth.
first step is getting all of thr planets fractured governments/clans/tribes to coalesce into a united world free of prejudices and power madness
Second step: Ensure all are provided for regardless of nationality, work status, etc
Third step: Ensure all have the right to speak out, to join in the process of decision making, the freedom of movement, etc
TIL holograms can seriously burn you.
For anyone who takes this serious:
There have been a lot of talks about a MTI (“Mars Technology Institute”) to develop strategies to deal with living on mars. Idk whether it ever made progress though.
Elon Musk’s Step 1) Create an entire generation of indentured servants whose debt would be generational to pay for the trip to Mars.
This ain’t your daddy’s star trek.
