Headscratchers / Star Trek Life In The Future

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What does everybody else on that ship do?

• It seems like they travel through space in a huge spaceship with at least a hundred people on it, and yet only the people on the bridge do anything, even when they go down to the planet. Now it's true that there need to be people to look after a ship of that size, but surely it would be easier just to have a smaller ship with less crew who are there just to be killed off every time they run into a little bit of trouble, as it seems to be their only job is cannon fodder and it seems strange that anyone in this type of Utopian society would sign up just to be cannon fodder.
  • Several episodes give the crew size as 430, which really isn't very many at all (a real world aircraft carrier has a crew complement of about 5000). The commanding officers would beam down because only they had the authority to make contact with a newly discovered planet. The cannon fodder redshirts were security guards whose job was to act as bodyguards for the main characters. (Although it does seem serving as a security guard under Kirk was more hazardous than most captains in the Federation.)
  • The vast majority of the crew are going to be maintenance and operations crews. You only need a small number of people to give orders, but that translates into hundreds of people to carry them out: e.g. the captain orders the ship to go to warp, a full maintenance crew is keeping an eye on the engine and adjusting the power levels. Giving the order to fire a torpedo means the torpedoes have to be armed and loaded, which requires supervision, and a team of people to keep them ready for use and properly looked after. Shuttles need to be fueled, repaired, cleaned after use, etc. Food, air and fuel need to be organized. People need to fill out paperwork whenever any of these resources is used up. And so on. Double that for the large science teams Federation ships carry... who in turn need their own maintenance and administrative personnel for their scientific equipment... (You'd expect the computer to do a lot of the work, but the story 1. doesn't allow shipboard AI for some reason and 2. is based on present day ship crews.)
  • There are several episodes dedicated to the lower decks of the various ships who sit at a console waiting for something to happen. Nothing is immune to decay. Fuses, lightbulbs, plasma couplings and other things need to be maintained, probably on a daily basis. That stuff isn't very glamorous but it is necessary. Scotty merely represents the leadership of the entire engineering department that is putting the ship back together after every battle.
  • The franchise as a whole does have a pretty bad case of The Main Characters Do Everything. Star Trek: Enterprise, to its credit, actually steps away from this significantly by finally including marines—MACOs, in-universe—with the crew.
  • In theory, of course, full automation would allow a ship like the Enterprise to function with a much smaller crew. There are two reasons that Starfleet sticks with semi-automation: 1) Every position on a military ship needs to have a backup - and, ideally, two backups - to allow for casualties. Note that in this film, the main cast are largely those very backups. 2) The ST universe has a lot of A.I. Is a Crapshoot instances which would lead almost any starship designer to feel that having everything run through a central computer cannot end well.
    • Assuming A.I. Is a Crapshoot were not in force, you'd also have that the Federation is a post-scarcity, post-money society which doesn't have to worry about things like budget constraints (of employing larger crews than necessary) and are probably people-oriented in their values- they employ people because it gives them a reason to do something of value to themselves.
  • On the original Enterprise much of the crew were scientific specialists to perform research projects on all of the strange new life and new civilizations they were encountering. And when Kirk needed a specialist on, say, 20th century history and technology, he could bring one along.

Marriage in the 24th Century

• WHY are pretty much all women, 200-300 years in the future, STILL automatically taking their husband's names? Does this bug the heck out of nobody but me?
  • Umm... examples? The only ones I can think of is Keiko O'Brian and Dr. Crusher (see below). Troi didn't change her name (see below), Jadzia didn't change her name (she's a Trill and she married a Klingon, so who knows what the name convention is), and in the case of most of the other married couples we meet, there's actually nothing to say for sure that the husband didn't take his wife's name.
  • Not necessarily true. In Star Trek: Voyager B'Elanna says to Tom that perhaps he should now be known as "Tom Torres" as "it's the 24th century, after all" (though for the rest of the season neither of them change their names). In Star Trek: Nemesis Picard says to Commander Riker "You have the bridge Mr. Troi" (though most likely out of humor). And in "Sub Rosa" it's implied that Beverly's family have been keeping their maiden names and Beverly was apparently the first to break it. Then again, said episode was a Transplanted Character Fic of something else best taken with a pinch of salt.
    • Betazoid culture is matrilineal; Deanna's father took her mother's surname. Will probably won't, but Deanna is unlikely to insist upon it as much as her mother would have to Ian Troi.
  • Same reason pretty much all women 200-300 years in the future still grow their hair long and wear make-up, I suppose.
  • Actually it gets worse, there are at least two TNG episodes where women are referred to as "Mrs [husband's-first-name, husband's-last-name]", granted that "Mrs William Riker" was a simulation but there was certainly nothing to imply that addressing a woman as such was culturally inappropriate for Federation humans.
  • I'm going to be That Guy here and point out that just because you find the tradition of women taking their husband's surname or someone being referred to as Mrs William Riker as wrong doesn't mean that is a majority held view. Even today - half a century after the start of this series - the amount of women who break with this tradition is still very small indeed. Women have been taking their husband's name at minimum since the 15th century, so there is also no reason to automatically assume that this will change by the 24th just because it happens to be a long way away.
  • Not all cultures have women taking the husband's name. In Latin America and Spain women kept their maiden names, that's why people in Spanish speaking countries have two last names. Same in Portuguese. In other countries like IIRC Japan the oldest family name is the one that prevails disregarding gender. So, in a similar way maybe some Anglo-Saxons in the future are keeping the tradition out of cultural connection.

Earth Standard Time Everywhere

• Why is it that no matter what planet, space station, or alien culture we're talking about, time is always referred to in Earth-centric units? Days, weeks, months, years...these units are all based on the rotation and orbit of planet Earth! So, when we're not on Earth, or dealing with species not from Earth, it makes no sense that they would use them! Prisoners talk about having done "seven years" in penal colonies in space, Vulcans talk about being several hundred years old, and the crews of the various starships talk about how many days they are away from their destinations. In an episode of Enterprise, Archer even tells Phlox to turn a lever to the "three o'clock position" - another Earth idiom, based not just on our measurements of time, but on the standard physical 12-hour clock used to measure time on Earth, that everyone on Earth is familiar with, but which Phlox's planet probably doesn't have. Granted, some of this can be handwaved by the universal translator converting alien time units into a form that humans are familiar with, or maybe the Federation uses Earth time units as the standard seeing as it's a human-based organization, but mostly, it's a mark of lazy writing. It would be nice to hear an alien race use units of time that are germane to THEIR planet for a change. Also, there's another problem: The passage of time is not constant throughout the universe! One day on earth does not equate to one day (or the equivalent of one Earth day) on another planet, or in space; the theory of relativity holds that time is not "synced" between places very far apart in the universe. This issue becomes extremely mind-boggling in Enterprise when Archer's captains logs are still being recorded using Earth's calendar rather than stardates (which, according to lore, were devised specifically to avoid this entire issue). Just because it's July 12 on Earth, doesn't mean it's July 12 in the middle of space. Lazy writing.
  • It's a human-built and human-staffed starship in addition to the fact that Most Writers Are Human, they have a priority to use the time scales created by their own species. Trying to resolve time frames for every species they encounter is not lazy writing, it's recognizing what is not needed to tell a compelling story. It can also be assumed that when meeting species unfamiliar with Earth or humans at all when they refer to any time scale it is a factor of the universal translator, it's adjusting what they mean to the closest approximation of hours, minutes and seconds.
• For that matter, how do they work out duty shifts on vessels with multiple species aboard? Not all planets have a 24-hour day cycle. Is it just that all M-class (which I interpret as Earth-like) planets have similar-length days, or is some other arrangement made?
  • Deep Space Nine used the Bajoran schedule. I'm guessing it's majority rule.
  • Starfleet might prefer a standard 24-hour day because 24 is just a really easy number to work with. Being a superior highly composite number, it's simple to use 24 for scheduling because 24 is evenly divisible by so many whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24.
• There has to be some standard (on Earth, if a planetary standard is needed, it's generally Greenwich Mean Time, which is essentially arbitrary) and Earth is as good as any - it is where Federation HQ is after all (and obviously Most Writers Are Human and Most Viewers Are Human, too). That does ignore the effect of Relativity, admittedly.
• It's almost unavoidable as using the current measure of time immediately gets the point across to the audience without bogging down the narrative with constant time unit conversions. And if they're using some new-fashioned clock then what they say is essentially gibberish unless someone asks and gets it converted in the show, but if even the Federation uses a different clock, then who would ask for a modern Earth time? How else would they know what a Standard Galactic Week is? You could assume it's roughly equivalent to an Earth week, but that would be wrong. Units of time are essentially all arbitrary, so it's just choose one to make your standard. It could be Earth time, or something entirely new. Chances are since the Federation capitol is on Earth that they decided to use Earth time for this reason. It's hard to say how much of an effect relativity would have had on the NX-01, but I am sure they took care of it, likely by means of the occasional synchronization with Earth time. We deal with relativity today the same way on a daily basis with all our major clocks from financial to GPS to our home computers synchronizing to stationary atomic clocks, but the effects of relativity at this level are too minuscule to really notice, more noticeable being the clock's own natural inaccuracies (being that it's not an atomic clock). Even in TNG they still synchronized clocks (using Federation Time Beacons). As for Phlox, though he might not have been born on Earth, he spent some time there, so it's not unlikely that he would have picked up on a few human idioms. Given the Universal Translator was relatively new tech, he probably spoke the same language as everyone else on the ship.

Everybody's Mac Guyver

• Anyone ever notice that EVERY MEMBER of Starfleet is an engineering genius? I mean, yes, the chief engineer is supposed to be awesome like that, but everyone else seems to know far more about engineering than they should. When stranded on a planet, if any member of the crew has the parts, even members of Security or Command divisions, they can assemble any device. Sometimes, they don't even have the parts, just raw materials. This is generally absurd, and bugs the heck out of me. It makes me wonder why they even need anyone in engineering other than the Chief. Just have more security guys, and when they aren't needed put them in engineering.
  • There was an episode in season one of TNG where a child who looks to be about ten years old was complaining about having to go to calculus class. I think you have your answer.
  • Basically, a normal Starfleet officer is near what we consider expert level in several sciences, engineering, combat, law enforcement, and diplomacy. When you add a specialization on top of that, you hit outright Future Badass level in that discipline. May have a slight connection to Evolutionary Levels.
    • Think about this: the Academy (as nicely shown in the most recent movie) has enough cadets around to staff approximately eight to ten ships. These cadets are drawn from the finest students on every world of the Federation. We're almost literally talking about one in a billion talents for even the lowest security officer. Out of Earth's current population, there's probably only ten people who'd be good enough for Starfleet Academy.
  • This also works the other way. In Deep Space Nine we see the main cast regularly shoot down Jem Hadar soldiers, which are supposed to be very tough. This main cast includes a Doctor, an Engineer, and a Science Officer. Admittedly, the Doctor is genetically engineered (But so are the Jem Hadar, and they also train from birth), the Engineer used to be a soldier, and the Science Officer is several hundred years old, but it should least appear that Worf, ya know, the actual Klingon Security Officer is better than these guys, yet it is rarely the case.
    • Saying colloquially that Jem'Hadar are trained "from birth" is misleading, since they reach mature adulthood in a few days. Entire generations might not equal human lifespans, making Jadzia and Bashir more experienced in combat by virtue of having lived through more fights (across many more years).
    • The main cast of Deep Space Nine may be in mostly non-combat professions, but they're still members of a military organization. And like any military organization, Starfleet obviously gives combat training to all of its recruits, not just its security officers.
    • What we don't see is that the Jem Hadar train from birth against puppies. Space puppies, but still puppies.
    • I think those are pretty big things to just count out, especially in the case of O'Brien and Jadzia. They know how to shoot a gun because of long experience, and guns are pretty equalizing now matter how good Jem'Hadar are. It still stretches my ability to accept it when Jadzia beats Klingons or Jem'Hadar in hand-to-hand though, for all that Curzon was a master of Klingon martial arts...
    • Jadzia doesn't just have old memories. It's indicated from early on that she stays in practice, and is one of the best hand-to-hand fighters on the station, and, though not quite as strong as Curzon was, still a superb athlete.
    • And IIRC O'Brien is actually a war veteran from the Cardassian War.
  • Starfleet Academy is pretty much the U.S. Naval Academy In Space. At the Naval Academy, you automatically graduate with a bachelor of science regardless of the major you choose - in fact, they advocate choosing any major you want; you'll receive all the training you need when you get your ship assignments. So it's not too hard to imagine that the curriculum at the Academy includes basic training in pretty much everything you need to run a ship. The difference is the level of depth the technology is studied. Basically, the captain and company can make the Phlebotinum run the ship, but the engineer can make it sit up and beg.
• Also consider that the impressive skills of Starfleet Engineers is lampshaded on Deep Space Nine. A Vorta states that Starfleet Engineers can make rocks into replicators.
• The Voyager episode "Good Shepherd" is a rare occasion wherein we see a Starfleet member who is really struggling with all the complicated stuff Starfleet people are supposed to do. The episode is about the problem that being stranded in the Delta Quadrant and all, the USS Voyager is lacking the usual options of dealing with under-performers and other "misfits" like her. (Like transferring them to a job somewhere more appropriate for their skill level, or even booting them out of Starfleet altogether.)

Where Did All the Religious People Go?

• What's up with Star Trek and religion? Other species seem to have it, but all humans have is some weak New-Agey Stuff. Even Chakotay's practice isn't for a specific tribe. We don't even know whether they are from Latin America or North America (the show gives evidence to both). It seems odd that in a culture where you or your loved ones could drop dead at any moment (hey, all those red shirts had families) and a good percentage of the population spends their time staring into the dark void of space, organized religion wouldn't have any appeal.
  • Well... the "real" answer is that Gene Roddenberry was a secular humanist and a Writer on Board.
  • What do you want them to do? Have Commander Goldman eating a bagel while reminding the captain he can't work on Saturday? For one, it can get offensive pretty easy just like my example. For two it's the 24th century. All religions that exist now still exist, but people aren't jerks about trying to force their religion's dogma on the rest of the universe anymore. Also we always see military installations, and usually when people are on duty. That's not an appropriate time to discuss religion. In fact, there have been religious humans in Trek. (a catholic in TOS, Joseph Sisko quotes from the Bible, and it's implied O'Brien's wife is a Buddhist, just off the top of my head) As a further note, some forms of Islam and Hinduism both forbid military service. That's one of the in-universe reasons that there are so few South Asian and Middle Eastern crew members on starships.
    • Let's not forget that when Joe Sisko quotes the Bible, Ben immediately says, "I've never known you to quote from the Bible." So this is hardly evidence of Joe being strongly religious. If he had quoted Hesiod, would that be evidence that he's an adherent of the Greek gods? Nor can I think of a Catholic in TOS (though there is a vaguely Christian quality to the marriage ceremony in "Balance of Terror"; perhaps you mean Dr. Ozaba in "The Empath"?) or any evidence that Keiko is a Buddhist (it's not like her personal faith in "In the Hands of the Prophets" seems anything other than scientific materialism). In fact, this Commander Goldman example reminds me that distinctly Jewish surnames are weirdly absent from Star Trek too, where, as has often been noted, Anglo-Saxon and otherwise Western European surnames are wildly overrepresented.
    • Funny you mention 'forcing dogma' since I could say the same thing about any philosophy, including atheism. There isn't any such thing as neutrality. Also, if you seriously believe that your faith or philosophy is the best, would you not want to let others know about it so they too could benefit from it? Telling those that are interested about your faith is not forcing anything. Forcing others to join anything at bayonet point to join anything, however, is a problem.
    • "would you not want to let others know about it so they too could benefit from it?" Well actually a lot of religions frown upon proselytizing. Islam, for example. And Buddhism. Yes, they both expanded at some point both due to military conquest and preaching, but both religions establish that you should not actively proselytise, only if asked you should talk about your religion. In fact the Soka Gakkai is considered weird among Buddhists because they do activelty proselytise, same case with the Hare Krishna for mainstream Hinduism, and American Wiccans for the very secretive Gardnerian Wiccans. And let's not start with religions that actually forbid sharing information and seek converts and outlaw conversions as a whole (Parsis, Druze, Yazidis). Jews have no interest in preaching either, they do accept conversion but do not seek for it, and so on. In fact the idea that you have to preach your religion is pretty much limited to Christians and for some new religious movements.
    • How do they handle things like the Cmdr. Goldman example in today's military?
  • It's also a documented fact that religious belief (on Earth anyway) is negatively correlated with widespread scientific understanding of the universe. Put simply, in Star Trek science has advanced to the point that many of the Earth religions relying on miracles and such are simply viewed as incompatible with what's known about reality. Most people simply don't believe in them anymore for this reason. Remember, Starfleet personnel are some of the best educated people around. Education is also negatively correlated with religious belief.
    • Not negatively enough, according to the Harris Poll. Yes, there is a difference, but that still left 85% of postgraduate degree recipients having some sort of religious beliefs. Most people find their religious beliefs go just fine with their education. This troper has not found that her two science degrees have harmed her (Christian) beliefs in any way, nor do most others of her religion; it seems likely the same is true of most Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other educated religious people. No, I think we can safely say this is a Writer on Board case.
    • I couldn't figure out which of the many polls listed you were referring to, but I'll take your word for it. Harris polls of Americans are just a little irrelevant because of the off the charts level of religiosity Americans demonstrate when compared to our peers. In the broader Western world, far fewer educated people believe in Christianity or other miraculous religions. Surveys of members of the Royal Academy of Sciences (UK) and the National Academy of Science (USA) show that a vast majority of the best scientists in these two countries do not believe in a god. When you consider that the humans portrayed on Star Trek would probably be the equivalent of members of the Academies, it makes perfect sense that few are religious. This troper has found that nearly all of her friends who achieve a M.S. do not remain believing Christians. Some become deists, but most become atheists or agnostics.
    • Your experience does not equal reality. Bluntly, religion is something that's not remotely disappearing. Europe had this view for a while and now seems to be uncomfortably aware it's not just the United States that seems to have an overfondness for it.
    • "Religion = Christianity" is another strictly American POV. Europeans tend not to have the cultural assumption that you can't be spiritual or Deist. If you correct the questions to allow for a range of results rather than just asking "are you a Fundie?", you'll find them to be much more balanced regardless of education level.
    • "Education is negatively correlated with religious belief"? — Learn what Jews believe about education, study Jewish and Islamic history, and see if you still think that. Not all religious belief, not even all Christian belief, is blind, mindless faith.
    • Probably the issue here is what the other troper mentioned of “Christianity = Religion” bias. With the exception of the US, most developed world is very secular with very low religiosity, cases of Europe, Japan and Russia for example. Non-religiousity, however, does not equal scientific materialism as with hardline atheists, in Japan for example spirituality is a still a very important cultural part of society, same in Russia and some European countries. You can be spiritual and non-religious. In any case, and with not disrespect for Judeo-Christian believers, truth is that an interplanetary civilization that has contact with aliens, advance scientific technology and the like would see a decrease in Christian and other Abrahamic faiths. Why? Well for starters because you already know that Evolution is real, the world wasn’t created in six days and so on, you also know that there are other civilizations and intelligent life out there so Jesus, who is an Earthling, can’t be the savior. Buddhism won’t be affect by this (in fact is anything would be re-inforce as Buddhism teaches that Buddha is only one of countless enlightened beings some of them who appear in other planets), Jews won’t be affected, nor Hindus nor Wiccans. Christians and Muslims… mmm they might have a problem as their religions outright say their human founders are the specific person send by God to the whole universe to preach and teach humanity. So yes, in a way it is realistic that certain religions decrease for the time Star Trek happens no matter how much you want to finger Roddenberry for Writer on Board. In fact is a problem that modern religions are already starting to face, some churches are already taking preventive stances on the issue like the Vatican.
  • Er, am I the only one who remembers that in Star Trek: Generations, Picard meets his (imaginary) family when they're celebrating Christmas? Or that the Hindu Festival of Lights was mentioned as one of the ship's scheduled events during "Data's Day"? Religion isn't shoved in people's faces at every turn, but it's still there.
    • This troper is an atheist and celebrates Christmas, too. Not for religious reasons but because it's nice to spend some time with the family now-and-then.
  • Real reason: Because Gene Roddenberry was a silly, silly man with an unrealistic concept of the future. As for all the new-agey/Eastern religion floating around the Trek-verse, ask yourself what kind of religious beliefs are popular in Hollywood today.
    • That can't be it, there are no Scientologists on board.
    • Okay, correction. Consider what kind of religious beliefs were popular in Hollywood back when TNG was in its hey-day.
    • You can point at Roddenberry (maybe) for lack of religion in TOS and maybe the first seasons of TNG, not the entire rest as he wasn't around. But even that is questionable as explained by Rowan J. Coleman here Roddenberry is always mistakenly equaled with JMS in Babylon 5 or George Lucas in Star Wars but he never had the same amount of creative control that they both had with their respective creations, even in TOS time. So no, Roddenberry is not to "blame" (quotes added because is not something wrong to show a religion-less future).
    • It's less a matter of direct control on Roddenberry's part so much as an institutional desire to adhere to (at least elements of) his vision of the future.
  • Gene Roddenberry had a lot of liberal beliefs he tried to imbue in his creation. While this isn't as noticeable in TOS, by TNG he had gained Protection from Editors and set about painting his vision of what humanity could, should, and would be like in the future, if only it tried. This included things like atheism, tolerance, communism, technological advancement, abundance, noninterventionism (the prime directive), and other such ideas that he liked and that he thought would be great improvements to the human race (note episodes like "Encounter at Farpoint" and "The Neutral Zone," where Roddenberry's disgust and contempt for the history and present state of humanity is contrasted with his idealism and optimism that we would one day rise above it all). Thus, no religion for the Federation in Star Trek. Mind you, this has weakened a bit since his death.
    • Shatner and others had their own opinions on it. William maintains the "God" of the Undiscovered Country was actually the Devil.
• If you were aware of beings like Q, wouldn't you question your religious beliefs?
  • Maybe, but I'd also expect our most vocal thorough-going atheists who are so sure that empiricism and rational thought (as they choose to define it) can explain everything to question their anti-religious beliefs.
    • Huh? How does that logic work, exactly? Given all the God Like Beings floating around the Trek universe with rational scientific explanations behind them, why would running in to Q make any atheist or skeptic more likely to reverse their position?
    • Feel free to scientifically explain the Q for us. If you can.
    • Yes, feel free to scientifically explain a species who's very shtick is that they operate on a level of scientific understanding that is as far beyond us as we are beyond microbes. That's a perfectly logical argument. The Q aren't gods, they just have more understanding then we do. The same is true of all beings like them. See: Sufficiently Advanced Alien
    • This is a Necker cube. Q and related beings are aliens who "may as well" be gods. Perhaps the distinction is hairsplitting. Should this make the Star Trek theists reconsider their views (the alien side of the argument "beats" the deity side), or atheists (vice versa)? Perhaps it's impossible to say by definition.
    • "The Q aren't gods, they just have more understanding then we do." That's a pretty big assumption. How do you know the Q are using anything even approaching science to do what they do? At the end of the day, "we can't explain it, therefore God did it" and "we can't explain it, therefore it must be a science we don't understand" are basically the same statement. You're making an assumption based on little more than what you prefer to believe.
    • They don't fit the traditional philosophical definition of "God". They're not all powerful. Beyond that, I don't know of any precise traditional definition of a god, so it's a matter of opinion whether you want to call them gods or not.
    • Also, there's no actual factual issue in dispute here. Whether gods or not, the Q "use science" to do what they do in that whatever they do follows the rules that any correct scientific theory would advocate. This is true of any and all possible gods/God, and whatever they do, no matter how miraculous; by definition, within the fictional universe where they exist and do those things, they fit within what a *correct* scientific theory allows. It just may not be the type of theory we're used to (though neither is quantum mechanics, which already allows for "miracles" of a sort). And the Q may not "use science" in the sense of understanding the science behind why what they do is possible, although if they're as knowledgeable as they say they are, they probably do understand. But it may not be the understanding, or any sort of technology, that allows them to do it. None of this bears in any obvious way on the question of whether "god" is the proper term for what they are.
    • "They don't fit the traditional philosophical definition of "God". They're not all powerful." That's A philosophical definition of God. Not THE philosophical definition of God. Many if not the majority of cultures on Earth did not use that definition. The Ancient Greeks, for instance, did not consider their Gods to be all-powerful. They had limits. They could be tricked. They could even be killed. Yet we still call them Gods. How are the Q any different?
    • But this is a fundamental problem that would be just as applicable to existing Earth religions, including Abrahamic ones. Remember McCoy's little breakdown over the Genesis Device? "God created the world in six days. Now, watch out, here comes Genesis! We'll do it for you in six minutes!". Every single miracle in the Bible could be matched or outdone by the Q at will. Thus raising the question of the No Such Thing as Space Jesus problem. An Atheist could readily argue that the Bible could be literally true, except that "God", was a Q or even a less powerful but still godlike being. Believers would have to fall back on non-Biblical theology regarding the creation of everything from nothing by God, because the Bible does not really explicitly state that God created what later people would call the universe. It also creates the problem of an ever-greater distance between beings like humans and any kind of being that would be beyond the likes of the Q.
  • Q fits right into a pagan-type pantheon, so an atheist of the type who denies the existence of anything remotely like pagan gods should question their beliefs. But an atheist who simply denies the traditional definition of the Abrahamic God is still safe. Q are not all-powerful, as we learn later; different Q can overpower each other. They are also clearly not infinitely good, and seem not to know everything either, at least as concerns the plans of other Q, despite claims to the contrary. On the other hand, Abrahamic theists are safe too, at least as safe as they are now; there could still be an all-powerful true God who is simply just as hands off about the actions of the Q as he is with other (sometimes annoying) powerful beings.
    • I’m pretty sure that if the existence of the pagan gods is discovered, and is discovered that they are actually living biological creatures like the Q who are just nearly all powerful god-like creatures, every single atheist would accept that as it will be scientific fact indeed. The issue with atheism is that is not blinded to science, if science proves that something is real an atheist accepts it. The reason why atheists do no believe in gods (or ghosts or yetis etc) is because they haven’t been proven to exist, an atheist would change his/her view according to scientific factuality. Now, how exactly would the prove that the pagan gods exists and are some sort of living creature questions atheism or rather re-inforces it is another matter. In any case the evidence of God as the creator of the universe is something that nor even the Q can know as if it happened it happened before the Big Bang.
  • Let's look at this perspective. For primitive civilizations, we're basically reality warpers. The primitives don't have the sufficient science to explain them, and that's why they end up dismissing us as Gods (Fundies insisting that everything is A Wizard Did It is a pretty much cancerous obstacle on science for far too long). The most iconic example of Clarke's Third Law is the tech-worship Cargo Cult. Now extend that parallel to the Federation's perspective on the Q. Sure the Q may be Reality Warpers, but the most important difference is that the Federation is actually rational enough to see them objectively for what they are (extra-terrestrials) instead of dismissing "Qdidit" and torturing and killing each other screaming "My Q is better than your Q!"
• I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I saw some Space Fundies in the episode Let He Who Is Without Sin.... They were complaining about the sinful ways of Risa or something like that.
  • They were complaining that the Federation citizens had become complacent while the Dominion was aggressively encroaching on the Alpha Quadrant. Whatever your opinions on the quality of their message, it had zero religious content whatsoever.
• I write Star Trek fanfic and myself and others on my fanfic site have written characters with religious beliefs. My theory is that they're still there; after all, Sisko's dad once quoted the Bible. They've just restructured themselves to do away with the "God made marriage for one man and one woman!", "Jesus said I can have guns!", "The path to Allah is terrorism!" soundbites and all that crap. Now, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and others are structured to being a better person, teaching about love, understanding and tolerance, which is still important if the Federation is to keep the moral high ground.
  • No offense, but it sounds like you just watered down religious beliefs into meaninglessness, particularly with the 'marriage' example. According to the Bible (since most of those using that phrase are Christian) marriage can easily be found to be defined as being between one man and one woman, not so much for those of the same gender. The fact that there is even a debate over this anywhere that once called itself Christian shows just how much (lack of) belief affects a culture. It might make more sense to say that religions are there but, with no extremely large percentage, especially when you go past Earth to include all the different cultures just within the Federation, they have less of an effect on the culture of the Federation as a whole than if the number of their numbers were larger.
  • Acceptance of same-sex marriage does not necessarily mean a loss of Christian faith. You'd be surprised at the number of Christian churches that now accept LGBT members, ordain non-celibate LGBT clergy, and perform same-sex marriages or covenants. There's even a movement within the Mennonites to allow these things. Religion evolves just like everything else.
• In many ways, Gene Roddenberry's death opened the Star Trek canon to considerable improvement on this subject, widening the theories and interpretations available.
  • We get to see the Klingon religion that comes off sounding remarkably Judeo-Christian for all that it denies its Messianic figure is a Messiah or that its Devil is a Devil.
    • If you're referring to Fek'lhr, that's definitely not the same thing. Fek'lhr is an avatar of punishment (and not considered a deity by Klingons). Whereas the Devil is the personification of evil itself. Fek'lhr is closer to Cerberus or Hades.
    • Let's not forget that Fek'lhr is explicitly presented as a cognate of Satan in "Devil's Due." One can say that's Ardra's (mis)interpretation, sure, but it's somewhat against the spirit of the thing to insist "no, definitely not all related to the Devil!"
    • Devil's Due comes long after Sins of the Father where Picard proves that he is very knowledgeable on Klingon culture. If Ardra was that far off in her interpretation of Fek'lhr, I don't see why he wouldn't have pegged it immediately and called her on it.
    • We also know that, in legend at least, Kahless defeated something called the Fek'lhri. Demons? Satanists? Either way, sounds kind of Judeo-Christian...
  • The Bajorans have their Prophets, bringing up the question of whether there's really any meaningful distinction between a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and God (or at least, gods).
  • The Dominion and its Founders took this question even further in the case of the Vorta, who considered their genetic benefactors a kind of deity. (When Odo questions whether the Vorta are genetically programmed to worship the Founders, the one in his care replies along the lines of "Well, of course; that's what gods do!")
  • Chakotay on the Voyager had his odd Native American beliefs, although he acknowledged there was a strong scientific explanation for the inner workings of most of its practices.
  • Vulcans, the Ocampa, and Talaxians all have some concept of souls and the afterlife, although Neelix has his faith rather badly shaken at one point. Also, when McCoy asked Spock about what the afterlife was like, Spock told him that basically he had no frame of reference in common with McCoy by which to explain it; if he wanted to know, he'd have to die and pay the afterlife a visit himself.
  • Even the Borg have a kind of religious reverence for the Omega Particle, though Seven of Nine indicates their idea of "worship" is to assimilate it at all costs. (They want perfection, this God particle represents perfection, and therefore they must assimilate it.)
• Evidently, the religions and religious peoples of Star Trek haven't gone anywhere. Gene Roddenberry just couldn't see them through his biases. Moreover, the series is not committed to just one point of view: the future is neither an atheist utopia, a garden of New Age synergism, nor yet a theocratic paradise; it's more like an enormous zoo in which religion has even more competing species than biology does.
• Whether someone is religious is a lot more than just whether you understand science. It has more to do with what kind of person you are and what your individual experiences have been. The Federation, or even a single starship, represents a much wider sampling of people than, say, America, so it would vary a lot, but I don't think religion is somehow extinct in the 24th century because of space exploration. One of the themes of Star Trek is that the universe is a big, big place and there are many things we can't explain, even with super-advanced technology, such as Q, the Bajoran prophets, various anomalies-of-the-week, etc. As for what we see on the show, it's likely a Federation ship takes a pretty neutral position, considering just how many religions there are, and there isn't any ship-wide celebrations or religious holidays. People are probably left to practice on their own or in independent groups and maybe there's a policy on time off.
• America has seen religiosity decline rather steadily over the decades. The number of people identifying as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise not affiliated with a religion has gone from under 5% in the 1960's to around 20% in the New Millennium. I don't know what the statistics are like in other countries, but given that the Trek writers are mostly American and infuse a lot of American culture into the Federation, it's not unreasonable to expect this trend to continue in the coming centuries.
• Between the bindi worn by Lt. Rahda in "That Which Survives" and the reference to the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day," you can make the case that, in canon, the human religion that best survives into the future is Hinduism.
• Phlox does mentions in ENT that he visit Earth and heard speeches of both the Pope and the Dalai Lama, tho this in still pre-Federation time. However, whether people like it or not, religious practice are indeed in decrease specially in the West, the US is the exception, not the rule, the only industrialized country were most people is still religious, from Europe to Russia and even Latin America religious practice and observance is reducing exponentially. You can criticize Roddenberry all you want but is truly not a stretch to think that huminity's future would be incredibly secular with most religions, if they remain, being mostly followed by non-observants much like is shown in Star Trek.
  • To be more precise, Phlox says this in "Cold Front": "I spent two weeks at a Tibetan monastery where I learned to sing chords with the high lamas. I attended Mass at Saint Peter's Square." An indication that Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism still exist, or at least their trappings survive in some form, but no reference to figures of authority like a Pope or Dalai Lama. I'll add that Kasidy Yates says "My mother would prefer for her daughter to be married by a minister," which certainly sounds Christian.
• The original Enterprise had a dedicated ship's chapel (it's used for the wedding in Balance of Terror). The simplest explanation is probably that there are still plenty of religious people around, it's just that the subject doesn't come up very often in the stories presented.
  • It even has a cross in it (albeit an odd-looking one).
• In many daily routines and activities the religious and non-religious look and act the same. This would also apply to much of what goes on in the various Star Trek series. Yes there are times they do look and act differently, but as Trek is not primarily a slice of life style of story telling, as that would slow things down, and over complicate storylines with info not relevant to the plot, most of the religious stuff happens between the scenes.

Religion Part II: Nontheistic Religions and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens?

• An interesting question regarding religion arises when one considers nontheistic religions such as Buddhism, which in the present-day real world has roughly one billion adherents on Earth. For those faiths that do not take a firm stance one way or the other on the existence of a Creator deity, what is the impact of the scientifically-proven existence of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and documented instances of individuals and entire species having Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence on these religions?
  • Buddhism would seem like the most obvious religious beneficiary of the discoveries made by Starfleet. Essentially, it has been demonstrated many times that it is possible to achieve a higher state of being, and even to transcend the physical body entirely. The rather Buddhist-like Organians calmly noted that none of their race had died in a long time, and they demonstrated Psychic Powers great enough to put a stop to a Federation-Klingon interstellar war and impose a peace treaty on both sides. They are virtually poster children for Buddhist philosophy and theology.
  • Vulcans, interestingly enough, also have a religion, which also has a definite Asian/Buddhist flavor to it. They are known to meditate, pray and practice observances in temples, although they no longer appear to venerate any particular deities.
  • But how does this fit with Federation law about No Transhumanism Allowed, when the explicit goal of a number of religions is to transcend biological humanity? Does the Federation permit the concept as an abstract theology, but legally oppose any efforts to actually ascend, since it is known to be possible to do so?
    • That's not what the Federation law is. The Federation bans genetic engineering to create superior beings with superior ambition. You want to correct congenital birth defects or whatever with whatever technology is available (except wholesale genetic enhancement of the entire organism), even if that results in some superior abilities (Geordi's VISOR)? Great, go ahead. You want to try and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence through sheer force of will? Knock yourself out. You want to wait a jillion years until your species evolves into Energy Beings? Enjoy the ride.

Religion Part III: Evolution is God?

Commander William Riker: If there is a cosmic plan, is it not the height of hubris to think that we can, or should, interfere?

TNG: "Pen Pals"

• There seems to be a very strong belief in Goal-Oriented Evolution amongst Federation people, in particular humans. In addition to their No Transhumanism Allowed policy, on various occasions when the Prime Directive is under debate the arguments frequently end up turning towards the notion of a "cosmic plan" or that Evolution is a purpose-driven force whose decisions should not be questioned. By that argument, isn't Evolution therefore a "God"? And if so then how is this reconciled with the well-known fact that Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, including ones such as the Q who could legitimately claim godhood, routinely intervene in the multiverse with a casualness that clearly demonstrates their disdain for the idea behind the Prime Directive? Does this mean that Evolution and the "cosmic plan" are above even omnipotent beings such as the Q? Are the Federation closet theists without even realizing it?
  • Not really. It's less Goal-Oriented Evolution, though Star Trek is pretty bad about that on the whole, but more that the watchwords of the Prime Directive is "interfere in the natural development of a culture." If a sapient species is evolving themselves into a dead-end where they will become extinct. . . well, sucks for them, but their die-off will allow new creatures claim that vacuum. By interfering and keeping that on-the-road-to-extinction species alive, no new species can evolve to take their place, just like if some starship had swooped in and stopped a certain asteroid from hitting Earth some 65 million years ago. And if the forces of nature on a given planet have selected a specific species for extinction, or the species has somehow selected itself for extinction, just about anything you can do to correct the "problem" is a stopgap measure, because that species no longer has what it takes to survive its environment, and will die off one way or another. And in the case of a sapient species, the question gets even thornier: Is this crisis the kick in the pants they need to decide, as a species, to do what they need to do to survive, or will they refuse to fix what's wrong (with themselves or their planet) and go the way of the dinosaur? That's their decision to make.

Lily-White Starfleet?

• The biggest question of them all: where are all the ethnicities? This becomes a major head against wall moment for this troper, because the timeline of the Star Trek universes includes several major wars, including a nuclear World War III that supposedly killed 600 million people. It would be fair to assume that most of these casualties occurred in the world's most powerful nations, namely, the United States, Europe, Russia, and China. So why do white people still make up 90% of Starfleet? The world population has always been overwhelmingly non-white, so any world government/military would reflect that one-fifth of the the world population is Chinese, one-fifth Indian, one-fifth African, and two-fifths various other ethnicities. Starfleet also seems to prefer rather Anglo names for its ships. Star Trek in all its incarnations has been noted for being progressive for showing different ethnicities, and has gotten better at doing so over time, but it always bugs this troper how it appears all non-white populations are minorities in the future.
  • Cause the Americas won the third world war or at least survived it best. India, the middle east, and Asia got nuked to hell and back, Khan was in India, suggesting the wars were against him. At least that's Fanon attempts to explain it, and why all non whites tend to be Americans still. Some suggestions of discrimination in Starfleet as well as the preferred cadets are all from the Western Hemisphere. Only three major human crew members are suggested from being from Earth and not from the Americas, Picard, Uhura and Malcolm. Possibly, some Fanon has held, parts of Asia and so forth are still more or less uninhabitable. (Chekov is Russian, and Worf is a non-human Russian.)
    • Most humans should be African, then. If Asia got wiped out, that would make Africa the most populous continent. Discrimination in Starfleet, you say?
    • Geordi LaForge is an African, not an African-American. Miles O'Brien is Irish, and Dr. Bashir is most likely of Middle Eastern descent. Presumably a fair amount of the humans aren't Americans but just sound like they have American (or English) accents due to the Universal Translator.
    • Uhura is also African.
    • If I were required to make a canon explanation, I'd have a bio-engineered plague that responded poorly to cold— probably have it originate in Russia— as part of the response to the wars that gave us Khan. That would explain the lack of Africa, South America, Australia, etc— if you also assume that the Universal Translators remove accents and the only reason Picard, Scotty, O'Brien, Bashir and such have accents (while Keiko, who's Japanese, doesn't) is because they're speaking Federation standard. Most of the rest of the world being royally screwed would also explain why so much happens in San Fran. (Would you base your Space Fleet there? It's crowded as heck NOW!)
  • Another demographic oddity: Japanese are hugely overrepresented in Starfleet compared to Chinese. On Earth today, there are 10 times as many Chinese as Japanese, yet virtually every major Asian character in Trek is Japanese: Sulu in TOS, Keiko in TNG and Deep Space Nine, and Hoshi in ENT. The only exception, Harry Kim in VOY, is Korean. I don't recall seeing a single character in any Trek series with a Chinese surname, except for some Academy instructor in an early season ep of TNG.
    • While Cory is not a Chinese name, Dr. Cory in the TOS episode, "Whom Gods Destroy" is played by Keye Luke, who is Chinese.
    • It possibly has to do with China being decimated by World War III. Maybe the population loss was so much that they really are proportionally represented in Starfleet? Or Japan imposed their culture on China during WWIII, liked they tried to do in WWII, so some people of Chinese descent ended up with Japanese names?
    • Along those same lines, it's also noteworthy that the eastern half of the United States is almost never mentioned in Trek, and cities like New York and Washington DC don't seem to exist. Characters from North America usually hail from the rural midwest or the west coast, and the Earth government's based in San Francisco. It may be that the nuclear war was fought between China and the U.S., and both mainland China and the eastern U.S. were hit so hard that their populations fell permanently behind everyone else.
    • Well, Archer's from (upstate) New York, Trip's from Florida, and McCoy's from Atlanta, Georgia, so it's not like the eastern U.S. is totally unrepresented.
  • Given that regions such as China and India are so densely populated, it could be that those ethnic groups were among the first populations to migrate en masse to colony worlds. Their colonies would therefore be the longest-established human settlements outside our solar system, which would make them the best-defended and most-civilized ... hence, the least likely planets to require a visit from an exploratory vessel like the Enterprise. They do exist, we just don't see episodes about them.
• It should be noted that as a television series, the casting of all the Star Trek series is dependent on the average population makeup of the city in which it's produced, so what appears on screen is not indicative of the population of Earth, but the population of LA-based Paramount Studio's casting calls. So for all we know the crew of the Enterprise should be more, er... brown than normally shown, but when you make a casting call for extras and only caucasians show up, are you really going to hold up production until you've found more extras of the appropriate ethnic makeup?
  • Err... is there any actual evidence that "only Caucasians showed up" to casting calls for extras? May have been truer in the 1960s, but from the '80s onward?
    • Also, the names of ships and planets in Star Trek are still Anglo- and Euro-centric, which has nothing to do with filming location.
    • It's a show made by Americans for an American audience. Ships have Anglo and Euro centric names because the core audience for the show at the time of it's production did... In America.
    • The evidence that only caucasians showed up for the casting calls...is the fact that the extras they hired were almost entirely caucasian. The only other explanation is intentional discrimination. If you have any evidence of that, please feel free to share it with the rest of us.
    • I suppose the question is, considering that the series is supposed to depict the future of all humanity, whether it would have behooved the casting people, including those casting the extras, to specifically seek out a diverse group of men and women?
    • (ahem) There's a little thing called "practicality" that makes that difficult. A scifi tv show needs to save as much money as possible for sets, props, and special effects. They couldn't afford to be that choosy with their extras. It's easy for you to say what they should have done when you don't have to manage their budget.
    • I find just about every part of this post puzzling, not the least the presence of "(ahem)." Ahem what? Do you think that non-white people get paid more as extras? — in Hollywood, extras are virtually always paid union scale. Or is it that you think L.A. is such a monoracial city that they'd have to, say, import non-white people in from faraway and exotic parts of the world at great expense so they can walk around in the background of scenes? Or that the budget for extras is more than a drop in the bucket for a show that cost at least $1.3 million an episode? Why would it be impractical to find non-white extras? Perhaps I am not understanding: are you seriously saying "they had to cast white people because that's all they could afford"? Because as a defense for lack of diversity, that is a pretty weak one.
    • "Ahem what?" What do you mean "what?" What's not to get? I was trying to politely say that I thought your response (assuming you are the same troper I was responding to; if not I apologize) was naive. Firstly, Hollywood may be more diverse than most cities but the acting industry isn't. The profession was and is still dominated by white actors. So right from the start your choice of extras is limited. Secondly, because extras are often cast after everything else has been finalized, you have a very slim window to vet them, hire them, and drill them for their stage business before shooting begins. If you can't find a diverse enough group of extras you have to delay the shoot, which throws off the entire production schedule and can quickly snowball into an ungodly snow-boulder of costs. You might think Trek's $1.3 million per episode budget would allow them the luxury to do that, but in fact it's the opposite. The reason Trek had such a large budget was because they needed it for the new and expensive special effects they would be using almost every episode, not to mention the costumes, alien prosthetics, props, and sets. It's not like a family sitcom where no special effects are necessary, you can buy the wardrobe at the local thrift store, and your set can be a repaint from some other show. In Trek, 99% of what you see on screen had to be custom made for the show. They had to save money anywhere they could, so any expense that wasn't strictly necessary was on the chopping block. And for most episodes it wasn't strictly necessary to go on a scavenger hunt for as many racially diverse extras as they could find, so they just hired whoever was available. And apparently most of the ones available were white. Unfortunate, but there it is.
    • For the record, typing "ahem" actually makes something less polite, not more. This all makes it sound like you think extras are hired off the street, rather than through large, well-established casting agencies. I suspect that if we examined the pool of L.A. extras, we would find that there would a sufficient number of non-white people willing to work — provided you think to ask. My guess is that nobody asked, simply because this was an element of the production sufficiently uncoupled from those making creative decisions.
    • "For the record, typing "ahem" actually makes something less polite, not more." No, it's a way for the other person to save face. I could have been a lot more insulting but I chose not to be, because it seemed clear that the mistake was an innocent one. And extras often are hired off the street. Especially for newer shows that haven't yet proven their staying power. What you "suspect" about the situation and what actually is are two different things. You really overestimate how represented minorities were in the acting industry in the 80s and early 90s (or even today). Sure, it would have been possible for them to have cast a more "even" racial balance of extras for the show. And who knows? Maybe if they asked a casting agency for exactly X number of minority extras by next Friday the agency would have said "Oh sure! We just happen to have X minority extras available right now." Or maybe they wouldn't. Maybe the agency wouldn't be able to muster up that many on short notice, forcing them to delay the shoot until the right number of extras can be found. That's the problem. It's all a gamble. A gamble that, in the grand scheme of things, really isn't worth taking. Did the apparent deficit of non-white extras somehow negate Star Trek's message of tolerance and coexistence? Is the moral of the show somehow rendered invalid just because there aren't enough black people milling around in the background? And as a troper below points out, if we really get down to it the most realistic thing would be for almost all the human characters (including the main actors) to be racially ambiguous. If this truly is a post-racial future, shouldn't the races be so blended as to be almost indistinguishable?
    • "Did the apparent deficit of non-white extras somehow negate Star Trek's message of tolerance and coexistence? Is the moral of the show somehow rendered invalid just because there aren't enough black people milling around in the background?" Yes and no. File it under Unfortunate Implications — the kind of thing that certainly isn't intentional and no one in particular is to blame, and indeed may have real-world protection concerns behind it, but it still ends up reflecting societal values in a way that is, well, unfortunate (except for the implication that non-white = black, although a great many Americans seem to like to forget that other racial minorities exist). Here's why: there is a tendency in Euro-American society to treat whiteness as a kind of default. Black people are black people, Native people are Native people, etc. but white people are simply people and are presumed to be able to represent humanity seemingly through lacking race (check out Richard Dyer's book White for a good primer on this). Star Trek, while certainly deserving respect for advances in depictions of minorities, still mostly abides by this; as you note, even Star Trek's purportedly post racial future ends up mostly being a white one. For a related point, see this study of the overrepresentation of British Isles names for Star Trek characters. Star Trek is most certainly not unique in this regard, but it seems possible to suggest that it did less to correct it than it might have. That's all I am saying here.
  • As SF Debris pointed out in his review of TNG's "Code of Honor", it is entirely possible to cast an entire planet filled with black people, so they certainly could be more ethnically diverse if they wanted to.
    • The casting people for that episode likely searched specifically for black actors to populate the planet. And it was only for one episode. The rest of the time they probably sent out a generic call for actors with no racial requirement. It just so happened that the majority of the actors who responded to those calls were white.
    • Frankly, short of an actual archival investigation of what these calls for extras actually said, this line of discussion quickly becomes unproductive.
    • Also considering the reception of that episode and the apparent intent of the person who made it I'm not really sure it's a good example of diversity casting.
    • The point being made is that one could have a large number of non-white extras, that it's not infeasible for a production to get them. That's hardly a defence of anything about "Code of Honor."
• Another problem with human races on the series is that, realistically, in Star Trek's post-racial future, we should see many more people who would appear racially traceless to our eyes, the results of centuries worth of mixing. Hard to cast, obviously. Also, surnames will be a less reliable predictor of outward appearance (a point Arthur C. Clarke makes in 3001: The Final Odyssey with, for instance, a character of outwardly Japanese appearance named Indra Wallace. Of course, it's not easy to cast post-racial — much easier to cast multi-racial.
• Star Trek: Discovery says hi.
• This is a rather ironic question considering that the original Star Trek went far out of its way, far beyond what any other '60s TV shows did, to show a multi-ethnic crew, and was rightly praised at the time for doing so.
  • That does not exempt all of Star Trek from criticism along racial lines forever.
• The extra casts are actually fairly diverse. Maybe you're just focusing really hard on the white people. Might say more about you than Star Trek, just so y'know.
• Well, this is actually a subject we have some first-hand accounts of. David Gerrold, for instance, talked about this exact issue in The World Of Star Trek. Per his account, on the first season of TOS, Roddenberry specifically ensured their background extras were as diverse as possible. But as time went by, the casting agency stopped making the effort, and by Season 3, the new producers didn't care. So you can actually see the Enterprise get whiter in the third season, and yes, it was because the casting agency was racist. Probably not consciously, but that's how systemic racism works. Also, LA had a population of millions in the mid-60s, of course there were thousands of non-white actors looking for work. People being under-represented on television was never because they were under-represented in the industry.

Working Day and Night?

• Why do Starfleet ships and installations have a day/night cycle? It makes little enough sense on ships, where hostile aliens or spatial anomalies could show up at any time; it makes no sense whatsoever for Deep Space Nine, which is permanently attached to a planet, and therefore in constant contact with local authorities (which don't sleep - planets are round), as well as managing dozens if not hundreds of ships docking and departing all the time. Even worse, in that situation why would Quark of all people ever want to close the bar and turn away paying customers?
  • Because people have a day/night cycle built into their genes and tend to go a little Janeway if the environment doesn't reflect that. All the essential tasks are covered, but non-essential stuff is only run during day-shift (or if there is a crisis).
  • As for Quark, three possible reasons. First is that even in the future a public establishment needs downtime to clear up, run maintenance, etc. There is a lot more to running a bar than just serving booze and a lot of this stuff can't be done unless you clear the customers out. Also remember Deep Space Nine and inhabitants has a day/night cycle so there will be a period where even Morn has gone home and it isn't cost effective to keep paying staff to work when wages would cost more than income. If you run a cost-benefit analysis it works out cheaper to close down for a few hours to do the back of shop properly and let the staff sleep than just try and keep running. Second, Deep Space Nine has to work under Bajoran laws and there is probably a licensing restriction about how long bars can stay open that Odo loves to enforce to the second. Third, even Quark needs to sleep and he isn't willing to trust any of his underlings not to try and screw him on the finances if he leaves them in charge.
  • People who live and/or work far enough north or south on Earth and experience 24 hour days or nights (depending on the time of year), and even those who experience days or nights that are 20 plus hours long, can experience negative effects due to the sun always being there or not. There are various ways to deal with that.

The Future's Into Retro?

• Other than a few isolated examples, why does pop culture in the Trek universe seem to have completely stopped after the Sixties? Tom Paris is the self-proclaimed expert on the 20th century, yet we get the impression that if someone were to ask his opinion of Pearl Jam (which existed and was quite popular when the show was created), he'd have no idea what they were talking about. As far as literature goes, it's even worse; we almost never see anyone reading anything written after about 100 years ago (from the viewer's perspective). In three or four centuries, not one writer's managed to produce a novel that's considered a classic? That would be like us in the 21st century disregarding everything written after early 1700's.
  • Things went down hill so bad that we had literal warlords with control over most of the earth by the early 90s. By 2024, folks have been caged up long enough to trigger the Bell Riots. The music never was created, and the things that may have become classic were overpowered by the influx of alien lit. Or the writers just aren't that creative.
    • I'm gonna have to go with option 2. If indeed everything after our (the viewers') present got destroyed in the turmoil of the early 21st century, then how did anything before our present survive? And if indeed "alien lit" supplanted everything, then why are people still so in love with Charles Dickens?
  • There's enough novels from the many printings over the years that some survived the destruction so they were reproduced.
  • Thanks to expanded copyright law, overly-aggressive DRM and inadvertent EMP blasts in the Eugenics Wars, all post-1920's pop culture, music, film, and literature are locked behind an inoperative region coded Content Scrambling System.
    • Of course, one of the real-world explanations is that because of copyright law, they often had to use public domain stuff in the first place when they didn't make things up. In addition, the reason that the only "old" music used was classical and jazz because because the creators considered it universal where as rock music would make the show dated.

Boldly Going Where No Waiter's Gone Before

• Why do restaurants and bars still need wait staffs? Why don't they just put food replicators at everybody's tables? It's not like Quark, Whoopi Goldberg, Neelix and Sisko's father need jobs, right? Nobody does. Because they don't use money, right?
  • I always considered the entire "They Don't Use Money in the Future" to be a load of hogwash, so in my eyes they do need jobs.
  • Neelix they needed him because they had to cut down on replicator usage. As for Sisko's father there's a theory here that doing stuff like having a restaurant earns you prestige or something. For Quark, I think people go there for entertainment as well. For Whoopi, I got nothing.
    • You don't see why someone would want to develop a relationship with a bartender? I love my favorite bartenders, I'd miss them so much if I stopped drinking there or they quit or whatever, and they don't have a tenth of Guinan's insightfulness.
  • I always thought Sisko's father had a restaurant just because he enjoyed cooking and serving people. As for the waiters i've got nuffin. Actually what do humans do in a world where we don't need money and everything is handed to you on a replicated plate?
    • Captain Picard said in First Contact, "we work to better ourselves". Draw from that what you will.
  • Whoopi was a morale officer, someone who you could talk to about your problems or whatever and someone who wasn't required to answer to anyone (so she wouldn't have to tell your secrets if she was ordered to). Also she was immortal, had lived for a long time, was present in events in the past that the Enterprise crew was part of, and also knows a lot of unwritten information on species and et cetera. Besides, when you go to a bar or restaurant, you're actually not buying the food (well, you ARE, but), what you're buying is the ambiance, the freedom from having to clean up after yourself, the possible chance of meeting someone new or interesting, and the chance to try food that you wouldn't be able to cook, or in this case, food that you wouldn't think to replicate on your own. If everyone didn't find a point for having social interaction over dinner where they didn't have to clean up the mess, we'd probably just see everyone as incredibly anti-social shut-ins who just eat replicated gruel in their quarters.
    • "Whoopi was a morale officer, someone who you could talk to about your problems or whatever and someone who wasn't required to answer to anyone (so she wouldn't have to tell your secrets if she was ordered to)." WOW. That's an...interesting angle to take. Now I'm wondering even more why anyone listens to Counselor Troi if she can be ordered to violate doctor-patient confidentiality by anyone who outranks her.
  • Or maybe, just like everyone else in the Federation, they were waiting table/tending bar because they wanted to. Hell, if you've got replicators and holodecks, you only ever do something because you want to.
  • Replicators just generate a whole MESS of problems - the only things that are of any value are the random things that are unreplicatable. This is presumably why Deep Space Nine dedicated an episode or two to playfully skirting around the issue of the nebulous economic mechanics... but of course, one gets to thinking that if you can replicate just about anything in a starship... and get to making a really, really big replicator, shouldn't it become possible to just put in the materials, hit the button and create a ship in a minute or two?
    • The Technical Manuals make note on this. The DS9 TM states the largest replicator that Starfleet has was only 50m x 70m or so. Big enough for parts, but not enough for whole starships. The TNG manual does one better and states, "If you could replicate a starship, you wouldn't need to." Replication is energy intensive, and if you have the wherewithal to replicate something that big and complicated, then you have the technology and energy budget that lets you play in the "godlike races" end of the pool.
  • Deep Space Nine had the wormhole mined with Rom's cloaked self-replicating mines... Assuming that these mines can maintain their number indefinitely... isn't this a big ol' conservation of mass violation? Should these mines run amok, couldn't they fill the universe?!
    • The mines require an input of matter and energy to replicate. These come from the ships the mines blow up. Every ship destroyed adds its own mass to the mine field and some of that is converted to energy to fuel the mines. If it take 20 mines to blow up the ship, and the ship adds enough mass and energy to create 30 mines, the field grows by 10 mines. In theory, yes, they could run amok and eat everything. In practice, it would take dozens or hundreds of fleets to expand the mine field enough to reach the point where it would be able to reach and blow up even a tiny astronomical body and therefore become a potential threat to the local system, let alone the galaxy or universe. It is more likely that the mines just break even when blowing up a ship, so that the field doesn't much shrink. it is even possible that the minefield was shrinking with each hit, making few mines that it took to blow up. But as they were cloaked, there was no way to know that was the case.
  • On the subject of the restaurants... if there was a replicator at every table, then that would completely defeat the purpose of having a restaurant, because people go to restaurants because they want non-replicated food. Quark still tens bar because the drinks he serves are real, not replicated, and you still need a bar tender to mix them. Same thing for Guinan. And honestly, for places that use a mix of replicators and real food like Quark's and Ten Forward, it just eats up more power to have a replicator at every table than to have a half dozen and some waiters.
  • As for why people do it, other than 'because they want to' (since one might suppose that being a waiter is only the ideal job of a select few people) jobs in the service industry might be a way to earn passage into space, exploration, etc. without necessarily joining Starfleet. Since we only see civilian ships every once in a blue moon, one gets the impression that anyone who wants to leave their planet and isn't a genius-level Starfleet recruit has to get creative about it.
    • Also, I'd imagine there's a higher work-life balance for someone with a lower level job. Someone with the aptitude and ambition can be a revered Starfleet captain, but they'll have to put off any hope of a personal life 'till after retirement. Alternately, someone who wants to spend more time with their family or pursue their outside interests could take a job like being a waiter and, though they don't get the prestige and power, they only have to work at a nearby restaurant for a few hours a day. It's much the same reason people choose different jobs today, except money doesn't factor into it anymore.
• As for having a waiter job or running a business, why not? It gets you out of the house. Cabin fever is a bitch.
• Why be a waiter? Because in this society where money isn't important anymore, what matters is your skill and your ability. Waiting tables at one of the most popular and successful Cajun restaurants in the city is a perfect way to learn the trade so that, when you are ready, you can go open your own restaurant, having learned at the hands of the master.
• Several times in DS9 cooked meals were described as "better than that replicated stuff". Replicated things might be good, but it could not be the same quality as if it was made "the old fashioned way". I guess you could apply the same thing to the replicating starships idea, will they have the same sort of stress tolerance a traditionally built ship have? So yeah, people go to restaurants because they want to eat something good.

Single Parents

This doesn't really bug me per se, but it does strike me as odd. Just about every child character who's got a remotely prominent role is being raised by a single parent. The reasons for this vary and are all unrelated, but it does seem an unlikely coincidence, especially since we're given every indication that the nuclear family is still the norm.

To review:

• David Marcus: Raised only by his mother, who went out of her way to keep him from his father until he was an adult. (Which gives us the Fridge Horror of realizing that while Kirk was warping around the galaxy earning our respect and admiration, he was arguably a deadbeat dad, though it's not exactly like he was receiving and ignoring repeated requests from Carol for child support, or anything.)
  • As I understand it "deadbeat dad" usually refers to fathers who stiff the mother of their child on child support. There's no evidence that Kirk did anything other than keep a distance on Carol's request. Absentee father certainly applies...

• Wesley Crusher: Raised only by his mother. His father died when he was very young.

• Alexander: Raised only by his mother at first; she pulled a Carol Marcus on Worf for a few years, then introduced father and son. No sooner had this happened than she died, meaning that the poor kid only had a couple of days of knowing both his parents.

• Lal: Okay, she was a special case.

• Jake Sisko: Raised only by his father. His mother died. He was old enough to remember her, but she didn't come anywhere close to seeing him as an adult.
  • Also, he gets the Alexander treatment, in that his dad finally marries Kasidy Yates (making her Jake's stepmother), only to be whisked off to a higher plane of existence a short time later. Given the events in "The Visitor" and the final shot of the series, the future doesn't look too happy for poor Jake Sisko.
    • The future shown in "The Visitor" was an alternate timeline created by the accident. When Ben Sisko returned to his own time, that Jake Sisko's life was overwritten with whatever he would have done without having a father trapped in a temporal bungee cord.
    • True, but Jake at the end of the series was only a few years older than he was in that episode (the beginning part, anyway), and the situation was very similar. The point being that "The Visitor" showed the level of obsession Jake was capable of to bring his father back, and the fact that that future didn't actually happen still doesn't mean that Jake isn't the type of person that'd become obsessed about it again, especially since we've seen it in him already.
    • In "The Visitor," Ben was removed from Jake's life by an accident that Jake hadn't thought to try to reverse until Ben started coming back from the "dead." Yes, he could technically be considered KIA until he returns, but presumably Kasidy will pass the word along to Jake that this is supposed to be a good thing and that he'll be back in due time. Besides, Ben points out that the Prophets could very well deposit him back yesterday. Since they barely have a concept of time, they'd probably let Ben guide them in what time to send him back to, and he'd select the very next day, or next week.

• Nog: Raised only by his father. No one seemed to notice that his mother was absent. I can only remember one instance of any of the Ferengi characters (or any of the non-Ferengi characters, for that matter) even mentioning her: Rom frets that Leeta will grow tired of him, as Nog's mother had. From that I assumed she'd left Rom for being a loser, which, given how emphatically Ferengi men hold all the cards in their marriages, is really saying something. I suppose that explains why Rom kept Nog, though: Fathers are probably the default custodial parents in cases of divorce.
  • It's actually established in one episode — I don't remember if it's the same one where Rom is worried about Leeta — that Ferengi marriages are five-year contracts and that Nog's mother (and Rom's father-in-law) opted not to renew it. On account of Rom's being a loser.

• Molly and Kirayoshi O'Brien: As of the end of Deep Space Nine they're being raised in a two-parent household. That makes them unique among the kids, though.

• Naomi Wildman: Raised only by her mother. Presumably would be in a two-parent household had Samantha Wildman not been on a ship whose three-hour tour turned into a fateful trip.

• Icheb: Was raised by both his parents, but only if your definition of "raised" is "infected with a cybernetic STD and abandoned at the Borg's doorstep; miraculously survived, returned to them, and then they tried to do it again."

• New Coke Kirk: Raised by his mother. Father died on the day he was born. The real Kirk was raised by both parents, but we only know this because the real Spock pointed it out by way of contrast with New Coke Kirk.

Also common for adult characters: Of the TNG regular cast members other than Wesley (see above), Worf, Beverly, and Tasha Yar were orphans; Riker and Troi each lost one parent in childhood; and Data was abandoned by his parents when the Crystalline Entity struck. Geordi's parents both survived into his adulthood, though he lost his mother during the show's run; and Picard's parents were both dead before the show started, though we don't know when they died. His father apparently lived long enough to try to talk him out of joining Starfleet. Over on Deep Space Nine, Sisko's mother left him and his father after the Prophets stopped possessing her. Kira's mother faked her death when she became Dukat's concubine, and her father died when she was young though not quite a child anymore. O'Brien and Bashir had both parents still living during their Starfleet careers. Quark's father died when he was and adult, Worf I already mentioned, Jadzia's parents we never heard of, Ezri's family was apparently led by a single mother, Jake I mentioned above, and Odo . . . We don't know how the Founders reproduce, but whoever was responsible for bringing up new Founders decided he'd be fine just floating around on his own. On VGR, Janeway's father died when she was fourteen, Belanna's father walked out on her, and Seven's parents were assimilated when she was little (as was she). On ENT, Archer's father died when he was twelve. T'Pol's father died before the show started, though we don't know how old she was. Everyone else seemed to have a complete set.

On TOS, Kirk and Spock were both raised by both their parents, and I don't think they ever mentioned the parents of the other five. We know McCoy's father died when Bones was a young man. We also know Bones had a daughter, and when we first met New Coke McCoy, he's complaining that he's going through a tough divorce, which means we're probably looking at yet another broken home for his girl.

• From a writer's point, it creates more drama and opens up more potential storylines (Deceased parent comes back, last parent dies, etc). But logically, you are watching a series about military ships floating around in space and poking their noses in every last nook with a "Oh hello, I see you are being wiped out by an insanely dangerous threat, you want to join our society and we'll save you" theme on going. What do you expect when nearly every action episode contains the line "Casualties being reported from decks X through Y"?
• Oh, it's not just Star Trek. I defy you to find any movie or series where some main character hasn't lost a parent tragically to cancer or mugging-gone-wrong or alien invasion. Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, and Batman are all missing both of their parents. There are a few reasons for this trope: first of all, like mentioned in the previous point, nothing makes better filler episode than a tear-jerking episode where a character angsts about their absent parents. Second, (and this particularly applies when it's a kid missing his parents,) no parents means no one to fret and keep the main character home, rather than out risking their life fighting the Monster of the Week. On the flip side, the character him/herself is more easily able to plunge headfirst into danger without stopping to consider, "What will my mother do if I die?" Now, this trope isn't actually all that much of a stretch; a 2010 American survey showed that 1 in 7 Americans lose a parent or sibling before the age of 20, and a lot of the angsty issues we see in our favorite book, movie, and tv characters seem pretty consistent with other findings of the survey. Granted, this is often a trait associated with Mary Sues. But the beauty about this trope is that, when it's used in most tv, movies, and books, it's handled very tastefully and realistically, and usually enhances the character and the story.

Where has all the writing gone?

• At least in TOS, it seems that there is next to no written text. No labels to any of the (numerous! Very, very numerous!!) switches and levers on all the ship. No keyboards. No labels to doors, nor on the uniforms. How in the bloody hell does everyone know what key to press? Okay, I can understand that the more experienced crew members know their stuff by heart - but there are bound to be newbies somewhere in starfleet. How does one write a book, or a poem, or a love letter?
  • Handwritten letters are very uncommon in the 24th century. One episode of Voyager has Chakotay writing a letter to himself about an alien woman he fell in love with whom—because of her physiology and her race's deliberate tampering with the ship's computer—he will soon be unable to remember. He's visibly struggling with writing since it's something he's likely never done before, not to mention the "pencil" is the size and shape of a D cell battery.
  • Even typing seems to have gone by the wayside later on; Scotty had no trouble operating a keyboard and mouse on late 1980s Earth (once he remembered the mouse is for pointing, not entering voice commands), but when the Voyager crew traveled back to the 1990s on Earth, none of them could do any better with a keyboard than to use the hunt-and-peck method. Apparently, the future is almost entirely composed of touch screens and voice transcription.
    • That creates an oddity in Voyager's "Future's End," where Chakotway remarks to Janeway "You never learned to type," which in itself would imply that some people in the future know how to type but some don't. Janeway replies, "Turn of the millennium technology wasn't a required course at the Academy. It's like stone knives and bearskins," referencing Spock in "City on the Edge of Forever." But if typing is a feature of turn of the millennium technology, why is Scotty so good at it in the 23rd century? Just a retro hobby?
    • Typing is by far the most efficient method of entering information into a computer that we currently have (and that is ever shown on Star Trek as well) - you can augment it with various predictive systems but by itself it's still whole orders of magnitude faster than dictation or graphical input. It wasn't a required course for commanders because Janeway isn't required to do large amounts of programming and designing in her day job, and only needs to operate existing computer systems. She's probably exhibiting the management-stereotype of taking a highly disparaging attitude towards skills she doesn't fully understand. Scotty, on the other hand, will likely have used it quite a lot since he's an engineer, and programming with voice input and an LCARS terminal would be painful at best (more likely, flat-out impossible).
    • Nice though but everything about Janeway's statement indicates that typing is a lost art. If people still do it as a matter of course, even in other lines of work, why would anyone refer to it as "turn of the millennium technology"?
    • Janeway may not have to do much programming and designing as a Captain, but what does she do when she has to make a report? And she wasn't always a Captain. Once upon a time she was a science officer. Back then she probably had even more reports to write about all the science! she did. And part of that science may even have included some programming and designing.
    • Trek has a long, long tradition of showing people primarily making audio logs. In fact at least once it's shown the computer screen doing speech-to-text along with the recording. So Janeway probably narrates her reports aloud and then goes back and does simple editing on any bits that need tweaking afterwards.
• Most English keyboards are Qwerty by default, which is an artifact from the typewriter era and unergonomic. Starfleet-era typists probably use Dvorak or something, so when they go back in time they have to hunt and peck on the unfamiliar layout. (Doesn't explain Scotty, but maybe he just likes Qwerty for some reason.) Also, voice recognition (and thus dictation) is loads better in the future than it is today, so typing and writing by hand then might be similar to fountain pens and calligraphy now. It's a nice way to write, but only people who are into it will go to the trouble of learning it.
  • Whether Dvorak is superior to Qwerty is still a matter of debate. But even if Starfleet does use it, then why don't we ever see it? Never are we shown anything like a keyboard layout, whether Qwerty or Dvorak. It's possible Starfleet uses some sort of Stenotype system but that's pure speculation on my part. And if that's what they do, then it makes the complete absence of pen and paper writing even more glaring. Stenotype is hard to learn and doesn't accommodate hunt-and-peck typing, so anyone not trained to use it would have a tough time writing anything.
  • Watching that scene in IV again, Scotty seems to be hunting and pecking as well - just really quickly. It's exactly like watching somebody who's been using keyboards long enough to be familiar with them, but who never took a formal typing class. This seems perfectly in character for him.
• Things like computer code in the future have probably become so long and complex that programs are no longer human-readable. In all likelihood they use software to write software. The programming that went into Data and Lore, as an example, would have taken a small army of programmers years to produce at best. Yet somehow Dr. Soong managed to fit that in along with designing the positronic brain and all the other novel aspects of his androids' bodies...doing the work himself! So user interfaces have very likely become very oriented towards executing processes, rather than text entry. Likewise, things like officer logs are invariably dictated verbally (although speech-to-text software may transcribe them as well).
• Also one thing some people seem to be forgetting is that "typing" has a different meaning in a professional connotation than in a casual one... professional level typing is expected to adhere to certain standards that more casual use isn't. So most of the characters probably can type a fair bit on a touchscreen keyboard but haven't taken specific classes using a mechanical one, which would be where actual speed typing would come in. Besides, this is likely a Small Reference Pools issue... people who make entries on sites like TV Tropes are more likely to do a significant amount of typing than most people, who even if they do it in their jobs probably only do it in short bursts. While some amount of typing ability became pretty common as the internet first really came into vogue, I would imagine its commonality has dropped like a rock as most casual internet users have moved to using the internet entirely on smartphones or tablets... or, if you like, PADDs.

Power Perversion Potential & Star Trek Sex Crimes.

To be sure, we know Captain James T. Kirk did some serious womanizing in his time, but managed not to leave too many illegitimate children behind thanks to those monthly contraceptive injections that (although rarely mentioned) are apparently standard issue for the fleet. Consider, however, two issues:

• Both biologically and culturally speaking, the Federation and more importantly the entire Milky Way is teeming with diversity. Star Trek: Voyager in particular managed to show some really bizarre races that matured backwards (that little kid is actually 96 years old and has grandkids), aged exceedingly rapidly (the Ocampa, with their 9-year lifespan, look and act 12 years old by the time they're 6 months old), and achieved sexual maturity and started whole families by age 3 (the Breen, according to the Doctor). What must the Federation's age-of-consent laws be like, and how are they keeping some major perverts from engaging in sex tourism?
  • Maybe they just define the age of consent per species? Though I'd love to know whose job it is to assign ages of consent to newly discovered species.
  • One can imagine the species itself might have some laws concerning that subject. What really starts raising questions is hybrids. In Star Trek: Voyager: "Before And After" for instance, Kes marries Tom Paris and has a girl named Linnis Paris. A few years later, Tom's friend Harry Kim marries Linnis and they have a son named Andrew. It's not clear how much the hybridization with humans slowed the maturity rate and increased the lifespan of the part-Ocampa children, but presumably (this being shown as having happened only a few years into the future), they still grew up amazingly fast. All the same, had this alternate timeline not been erased, Tom and Harry would each have had a lot of explaining to do when they got home.
  [Hypothetical situation]
  Owen Paris: You married a five-year-old!?
  Tom Paris: Oh, come on, Dad, it's not like I robbed the cradle! She looked thirty. She was at her adult height. She was quick learner, and she'd had a boyfriend before. We were even able to have a daughter.
  Owen Paris: Next thing you'll be telling me is you married her off when she was five too!
  Tom Paris: Yeah. To Harry Kim. They had a son named Andrew, and he married Naomi Wildman when she was ten. Come on, Dad! Give it a rest already. We were all adults. Ask Admiral Janeway; she presided over our marriages. I think she's as qualified as anyone to say whether they were legal.
  Owen Paris: Hmph! Well I still think the Voyager was a ship of perverts!
• Even leaving that aside, just imagine what kinds of perversion must be possible using holodecks. Is any spectacularly perverted use of the holodeck illegal, and if so, how does the Federation (or the Romulan Star Empire or the Dominion or anyone else, really) enforce these laws?
  • Probably nothing short of creating an actual AI to do the deed with is illegal. There would be no victims after all.
  • It is weird, though. Consider the present: You go to work, chat with your colleagues, then you go home and play GTA IV, where you run around stealing cars, beating, stabbing and shooting people willy-nilly. That's fine, but is there some cutoff point where the illusion is so close to reality that it becomes creepy? How do you work an eight-hour shift next to a guy if you know that come quittin' time, he's heading straight to the holodeck to beat people to death with a golf club for two hours? I think we know it's not illegal to do so, as we see Worf's training program several times.
  • Some of the pornography that exists now is pretty creepy for this very reason, though that's not really the issue. The biggest problem with people being able to play out their most twisted sexual fantasies with holograms is that certain fantasies (especially sadistic and rapacious ones) do require some elaborate AI programming (to ensure that the program puts up some real resistance to being tortured and raped), and that every single instance of a sophisticated hologram's becoming sentient, self-aware, and capable of free will has come from being thrust into some kind of situation that forced the holographic being to seek out self-improvement. What's to stop somebody's holographic rape slave from getting inventive enough to realize that physical resistance, cries of pain, and feelings of self-loathing are exactly what the rapist wants, and that one can best punish him by submitting and spoiling his fantasy? The day a holographic rape slave says "Fine, have it your way, sicko!" is likely to be a great day for the Federation's photonics' rights lawyers and a total nightmare for everyone else.
    • Surely though if you just restart the program each time you are finished as opposed to saving it there would be no danger of your hologram ever thinking of itself as a real woman. One interesting example is when Quark is asked by a client to try and create a sex-hologram of Kira and it does require the person in question being scanned by a Tricorder or by the Holodeck itself so there are some safeguards present to prevent having sex with anyone you like (which as Barclay proved are immediately invalidated if you happen to be using a public Deck.) Copyright law is extremely lax in the Federation; in real life it would probably be extremely illegal to reproduce the likeness of someone real without written permission which I imagine would be an insane boost to the adult entertainment industry. As for a Grand Theft Auto style program I would argue this would be covered by Values Dissonance; the original game was extremely controversial and was accused of many many moral corruptions whereas These days the majority of the hatred is from a few musty old senators. GTA 25 Holodeck Edition would probably be no different.
    • Even so, what is the nature of a holodeck character- are they capable of self-awareness or independent thought, or are they just computer programs which merely simulate intelligence very well? This is bound to present moral dilemmas in-universe.
  • Could well be that the holodeck is seen as a way of cathartically indulging in your fantasies and urges which you would not dare indulge in in Real Life. Some people justify porn pretty much this way now, same with violent games. Consider the fairly mild example of Riker's "I'll be on Holodeck Four" scene right after he refuses to "take advantage" of the empath who's promised to some alien dignitary. (Never mind that she was making the advances on him and there was no real issue of it from her POV.) It's implied he's quite willing to indulge in the fantasy of what would have happened if he was prepared to consent. Whether it could not in fact have the opposite effect in some senses remains to be seen.
  • It could also well be that there are in-built protections, similar to the safety protocols, which prevent illegal use of the holodeck.
• It's a Free-Love Future, so people are a little desensitized to this kind of stuff. Which is why nobody noticed the Traveler nearly ravishing Wesley in Main Engineering. Picard is regularly subject to sexual harassment by a legally-recognized Federation ambassador (might be diplomatic immunity) who happens to be a telepath and should know that he's just not that into her. Riker tried to hook up with an alien whose "gender" entry in the records would have to be listed as "not applicable". But considering that the question of whether or not Data was a "person" finally had to be decided by a JAG after decades in Starfleet, one can assume that the Federation handles this sexual stuff via case law and precedent rather than fixed statutes.

Risa: Planet of Danger

• For a place renowned for being peaceful and relaxing, a lot seems to go on in Risa, and, curiously, to and from Risa. There's the Tandaran operatives, the buried super weapon, the pesky Essentialists, and the Ktarians brainwashing Starfleet officers with their evil games. And then there's the Romulans abducting Geordi on the way to Risa ("The Mind's Eye"), and the Dominion doing the same to Ambassador Krajensky ("The Adversary"). The Risian tourist board must be in constant damage control mode.
  • That's hardly going to make a dent in Risian tourism. There are likely millions of people who go to Risa every year and have nothing bad happen to them. It's more a function of being a high profile individual traveling to Risa alone than it is about Risa being an inherently unsafe destination.
  • In addition, each of Risa's reputations could come from it being a favorite vacation spot for criminals as well as more legitimate customers, sort of the way Saint Paul in Minnesota used to be. Risa would still have plenty of criminals, but mostly only rich crime lords who are on vacation; muggers and other poverty-stricken petty criminals like the ones who tried to rob Tucker and Reed actually would be pretty rare, though one still might have to watch out for the occasional con artist or embezzler. (However, most con artists and embezzlers are on vacation too, and can't be bothered to ply their trade.)

Doesn't anybody know how to do salvage?

• Granted, Kirk, Picard, and Sisko wouldn't have much reason to go picking through debris fields for spare parts most of the time, since they're in Federation space with plenty of places for ships to stop and refuel and lots of friendly neighbors. With Archer and Janeway, however, I couldn't help wondering why it never occurred to them to send their entire crew on salvaging expeditions whenever they came across a destroyed or disabled ship with no clear claimants in sight. In Archer's time, humanity might have gotten Warp 7 a lot sooner had it occurred to anyone to swipe one of those "classified" warp coils from, say, a disabled Vulcan ship that had lost its entire crew to Trellium-D poisoning. As for Janeway, the debris field from one Borg cube Species 8472 has lately splattered would surely provide a wealth of useful materials. If that's too risky, any other destroyed ships she finds might have a few spare kilos of Gallicite for refitting the warp coils, extra photon torpedoes to restock her supply, or even a spare slip-stream device to help speed up her journey home. Come on, doesn't anyone know the value of salvage and surplus anymore?
  • This kind of thing happening offscreen probably would explain why Voyager (the ship) never really had the supply problems it should have.
  • It was especially glaring in the episode "Collective", where Voyager runs into an entire, intact, Borg cube whose whole crew of drones had been killed, leaving behind only a handful of half-assimilated drone kids, all of whom had been deliberately disconnected by the Collective itself. This thing was a gigantic technological gold mine! All the more so because it was intact and they had a former Borg drone who knew exactly how to access all of its systems, including the stuff the kids could not get into. Voyager needs to get home? The secret of Borg transwarp technology was built right into that cube, along with advanced shields, weapons and who only knows what else. Heck, it was so big that they could have reasonably parked Voyager inside of the cube and flown around the galaxy in it!
    • Well, it was mostly intact; the propulsion systems did get damaged with all the fighting, and the transwarp coil may well have already been out of commission. Even before the Voyager crew found out it had only five pre-teen-to-teenage kids left to run it, the exterior showed the cube was already in pretty rough shape. Also, the episode "Dark Frontier" in which Janeway and her crew did go scavenging for a Borg transwarp coil with some success (getting some 20,000 light years out of it before it gave out) reveals that the Borg do have some auto-destruct safeguards built into a lot of their technology to keep people like Janeway from just stealing it; this cube may well have self-destructed soon after she and Seven rescued the kids. On the other hand, an intriguing detail of "Collective" is that it ends with a time skip of unspecified length between scenes (the kids abandoning ship and Janeway noting in her log that now Voyager has some very troubled children aboard), and there's plenty more off-screen time between it and the next episode as well. During this time, it seems very probable that the Voyager's crew did go ahead and scour whatever was left of that cube (or its debris field) for anything of value they could carry. Since Seven established earlier that the Borg had cut off this cube and wouldn't be coming back to salvage it any time soon—if at all—Janeway and her crew could certainly afford to take their time picking it clean.
  • The Voyager's meeting with the Borg does seem to mark the end of most of their supply troubles; Janeway, for one, never seems to have much trouble getting her coffee after "Scorpion" (except when they've got much bigger problems, such as during "Year of Hell"), and we also stop hearing so much about those replicator credits, suggesting the rationing was over by that point.

Tanning decks are everywhere.

• Is there ever any explanation for how the white human characters aren't ultra-pale after something like five years in space? I know they go down to planets with suns often but it isn't something they do every day and when they do they are often inside.
  • Haven't you seen Data? Really though, it's probably something that it's actually Future Space Lighting From The Future that looks like fluorescent lights, but actually is a much closer mimic of actual light from the Sun... although, is it the light from the sun or the radiation from it that causes melanin production?
  • lol. It's the radiation I believe. Which makes me wonder why no Trek villain has tried to push the "turn up the radiation" button, (which probably would be helpful if a species needed more of it than most areas have)to poison or burn the crew. Knowing how terrible the fail safes are in Star Fleet it shouldn't be too hard.

Therapy

• The Federation, along with non-Federation races have encountered numerous anomalies in space, countless new life forms, beings that inhabit someone's body or communicate telepathically in a manner that causes stress to humanoids, need I go on. Knowing that, why is the Federation from TNG on so willing to write off anything odd someone may be going through as a mental problem? True, it's still likely that people get stressed, depressed, etc, but even foregoing therapy there's also wonderful future medicine to combat such conditions. Furthermore, how many times was Barclay really in trouble? The one time he was actually suffering a mental disorder was his holodeck addiction- all other times it was something genuine.

My point is, there have been so many DOCUMENTED instances of crewmen being taken over, seeing things because of telepathy, time travel, etc, PLUS the freaking Q, that merely writing off anything strange as something that can be treated by the ship's counselor is the dumbest thing they could do, and is the dumbest thing because they continue to do it and never learn even after the 50th time some hallucinating crewman does so because of a mysterious alien being.

I'm not saying to get rid of the mental health program, but any such claims should be checked beyond merely a trip to a therapist, even if it's merely having the ship's computer compare the counselor's patient notes to ship's sensors to see if any oddities in behavior could relate to some unknown sensor blip. Writing off the possibility of an outside influence(some of which have proven to be major) in favor of a mental disorder, especially after so many instances proved to be something possibly threatening, is stupid.

And for the love of all things holy, after the 10th or so time Barclay's paranoia proved to be right, LISTEN TO THE MAN!

• The real reason is going to be because it's a writing cliché. The off-screen reason could be that all those anomalies make a lot of people paranoid and we just don't get the scenes where people are wrong. The final conclusion could be that they just need to accept that Barclay's paranoia is healthy and should be trained in all Starfleet Officers. Minus the stammering.

In the future, we'll have no pop music?

• Most of the times when music is played in Star Trek, it tends to be classical music or some other type of art music (such as Klingon opera). In The Next Generation we also hear jazz a few times, since Riker plays the trombone. But we almost never hear pop music of any sort. The only occasions I can think of where pop is played, it's pop music of the 20th century: Vic Fontaine singing crooner tunes in Deep Space Nine, and Kirk listening to the Beastie Boys in the new movies. Are we supposed to think that pop music doesn't exist in the future anymore, so if people want to listen to it, they have to turn to songs that are 300 or 400 years old?
  • The obvious Doylist answer is that the show doesn't want to pay the licensing fees for copyrighted music.
    • Maybe the question was a bit unclear, but I wasn't asking why Star Trek doesn't use licensed pop music from our era, I was wondering why we never hear any of pop music from its own era. Obviously such music would have to be written for the show (just like Klingon opera and other pieces of pieces of original 23rd/24th century music are), so it wouldn't require any extra licensing fees.
    • We never hear 24th century pop music to keep the show from being too dated. Classical music has lasted hundreds of years, so it's logical to expect it to last for longer. But, we do not know what, if any, modern styles of music are going to be around 300+ years from now. It's safer to go with what they KNOW is likely to last.
    • Trek is already notorious for the No New Fashions in the Future trope, with TOS characters showcasing fashions readily recognizable as being from The '60s. Future Spandex and '80s Hair were glaring on TNG. Even DS9, VOY and ENT were not beyond this. So just trying to insert other pop culture elements would have made a known problem worse.
    • Apparently they had no problem suggesting that 1950s crooner music and the Beastie Boys would still be remembered and listened to 300 years into the future, though.
  • I wonder if it's possible that language and cultural differences between species means that most popular music—or even art in general—is mostly regional; even more so than it is today. Universal translators can turn any language into the one you speak, but the can't make the verses rhyme. And then there are culture's differences. Who's to say that one culture's top forty even meets another culture's definition of music? I'd imagine even biological differences could be a factor: AC/DC and Led Zeppelin^*God I'm old. could probably kill a Ferengi. We don't hear a lot of pop music, because it's considered impolite to all but the stuffiest old music aloud in the cosmopolitan environment of a Federation starship.
  • We did get 23rd Century pop music in "The Way To Eden", and Doyle-ist answer is that that episode was so badly received that they never did it again. Watsonian explanation is that it is there, but we just never get to hear it, although there was (non-Klingon) music at Dax's bachelorette party in DS9's "You Are Cordially Invited" which was apparently contemporary 24thC party music.
  • We do do very occasionally (like Jono listening to Talarian electronica in "Suddenly Human," allowing Picard to sneer at this "music" in sitcom dad fashion).

Why is nearly everyone a Fan Of The Past?

• Think about the depictions of entertainment we see in Federation society, at least in the TNG era. Picard's love of Dixon Hill, Data's fondness for Sherlock Holmes, Sisko's baseball, Bashir's James Bond pastiche, Janeway's regency era holoromances, Tom Paris and Captain Proton. For a society that likes to claim it has outgrown the flaws of the past humans in the 24th century spend a remarkable amount of time looking backwards if they want to relax. Where is the contemporary fiction, art or music?
  • Good question, and the writers actually seem to agree:
  • From "The Die is Cast":
  Bashir: Modern playwrights have become obsessed with writing human interpretations of alien theatrical works while ignoring completely our own unique cultural heritage in hopes of...
  • Same reason we do in the present time. Why are we so obsessed with westerns, costume-dramas and other period works, Shakespeare plays etc. despite the fact that these eras often contained values (including things like slavery and genocide as perfectly acceptable policies) we find abhorrent, yet choose to overlook? It could well be that, in the absence of a capitalist entertainment industry, the constant drive towards new trends and novelty is much less pronounced and culture a lot more timeless than it is now.
  • Also, quite possibly because it helps a present-day audience relate to the characters if they are into things we would find familiar. Contemporary works from 400 years in the future would seem pretty alien.
  • When music features in the original series, it also sounds pretty strange.
  • Selection bias may also be at work, in the case of TOS and TNG. Who is most likely to seek a posting to a vessel with a name as deeply weighted with history in their Verse as Enterprise? Someone who's a Fan of the Past, that's who.
  • In between our time and the Federation's, there was a nuclear war. Presumably, a lot of cultural artifacts and recordings were lost in the devastation. Maybe all these recreations of past works have, for the characters, a shine of novelty because surviving copies of these works are only now being rediscovered.

Hallowwhat?

• In "Catspaw," McCoy casually mentions Halloween as if it's an understandable cultural reference point. In "The Big Goodbye," Picard reacts as if he's never heard the word. Did Halloween become obscure between the 23rd and 24th centuries, or is the difference between the American and French upbringings that makes the discrepancy?
  • Speaking as a European it is barely celebrated here. And when it is, it is considered entirely a children's thing for the most part. Adults are expected to have grown out of it.
  • Speaking as a Latin American, here is quite the opposite, only adults (who celebrated Halloween in the 80s when it was popular among children) celebrated it mostly by going to bars in customes. Is no longer common among children partly because is too dangerous for them, or because some religious groups have much more influence here, or because some nationalist groups reject it as "foreign", either way, same result; is dying out.

I Want to Be a Federation Janitor When I Grow Up!

• Okay fine: the Federation doesn't use money. Are you telling me that jobs like sanitation worker, janitor, pest control and other unglamorous non-military jobs are either done by volunteers or are completely automated? Targ droppings!
  • Why shouldn't they be completely automated? They have teleporters that can move anything halfway around the planet in the blink of an eye, and machines that can manufacture everything from food to electronics out of thin air. And antimatter-based power sources. They can pretty much do anything. Sanitation for an entire continent could be five technicians sitting in a room with a big computer panel somewhere, programming a transporter network to beam the contents of every trash can in every driveway into a giant direct-matter-to-energy incinerator each evening. And they'd have plenty of time left afterwards to go off to the opera and pursue other wholesome and personal-growth-supporting activities... or to go make out with holographic hotties. :P In addition, they don't necessarily have no money. Credits are occasionally mentioned, in some cases credits for specific things (transporter credits you have to spend to teleport yourself around Earth, for example). I think the main point is that Earth culture is no longer founded on greed or the pursuit of wealth for its own sake; doing certain unpopular jobs might still get you more transporter/replicator/whatever credits to provide incentive, it's just that people don't take up jobs just to be rich, and everyone is provided with everything they need to lead a happy life, so work is done mostly because you want to do it, not because you have to.
    • Why wouldn't they be? Because they're not on starships, where such a thing would be an advantage. And even if they weren't, you're telling me that no one ever has to go fish Sewerbot #242 out of Junction 1234X because it's jammed or some stupid kids have covered a statue of Admiral Archer in Ferengi graffiti? Even if they have machines for that sort of thing, no one 's running them? Even by remote control? No sale, sir!
    • No matter how shitty a job is you can always find someone who honest-to-god-actually enjoys doing it. It's like Rule 34 of employment. Plus jobs aren't just about money, there is a social element to them as well. People enjoy getting out of the house, doing stuff, mixing with others, and feeling useful in society at large. I bet there is an employment ladder thing there too, y'wanna do #cleannicejob, well there is four hundred people wanting that, so we'll only give it to you if you've done #dirtynastyjob first.
    • Forgive me if this seems a bit rude, but this argument strikes me as rather naive. It's easy to say that "someone" must enjoy, say, shoveling shit for a living when you yourself don't have to shovel shit for a living. As for the possible psychosocial benefits of shoveling shit, those are all well and good until our hypothetical shit-shoveler runs into someone else who has the exact same quality of life as he does...without having to shovel shit all day long (an office worker for instance). The shit-shoveler will start to wonder why this other person gets to spend his time sitting in a comfy chair in an air-conditioned office, while he has to perform back-breaking labor under the hot sun and has to go home smelling like the southbound end of a northbound cow. In the real world the only reason the shit-shoveler would keep doing his job is if he was unable to get the education/training to find a better job or his paycheck was fat enough to make shoveling shit all day worth it. Lack of skills or education would not be an issue in the utopian Federation, where such resources are available to everyone. So if the hypothetical shit-shoveler is not drawing a big fat paycheck, then what keeps him from quitting his job?
    • In one episode, it is mentioned that the Enterprise-D has some ability to clean itself (specifically, someone gets told that they don't have to clean up something, the ship will do that for them). And running the machines, well, that changes the nature of the job.
    • Changes the nature, perhaps. But it doesn't eliminate dirty and degrading jobs. And our concept of what a "bad job" is is very relative. Running a cleaning robot may seem better than doing the cleaning yourself, but once everyone has replaced their janitors with clean-bot operators, then being a clean-bot operator will become the new "bad job" that nobody wants. Instead of parents saying to their kids "Don't skip school or you'll end up as a janitor!" they'll say "Don't skip school or you'll end up as a clean-bot operator!" And as one of the above tropers pointed out, there will inevitably be times when a clean-bot malfunctions and gets itself stuck somewhere unpleasant. So who has to go fish it out? Or are there also robots for retrieving stuck clean-bots in the future? And robots for retrieving stuck retrieval-bots?
    • I see no reason why running janitor bots would become a "bad" job to everyone. That's a very cultural perception, and not one that necessarily holds true in the future, certainly not in the same way that it would for a manual cleaning job. The point being, there's a very objective reason why a present-day janitorial job is generally considered unpleasant: because shit smells bad. That's going to be true no matter where you grew up or what your interests are. But where's the objective reason to find teleoperating a robot disgusting? There's literally a video game out there right now that's all about being a space janitor. People pay money for it.
  • I got the impression that officers were paid, but, as Picard said, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer our primary goal." So they get paid, but the majority of people don't care about the amount, just that they're contributing to society.
    • Alternatively, Picard and other Starfleet personnel are trumpeting the official Federation line, but many individual Federation citizens do care about money.
    • While that is an interesting theory that adds a rather disturbing undertone to the Trek franchise (a society where the military and the civilian populace are so ideologically at odds with each other is a recipe for bad things) it doesn't jibe with everything we see on screen. For instance, in The Neutral Zone the Enterprise encounters some 20th-century humans in cryogenic stasis. When one of them (some sort of banker or stock broker or some such) says he wants to see how much his financial assets have grown in the centuries he's been in stasis, Picard reacts with puzzlement and confusion. Far from simply disdaining the acquisition of wealth, Picard clearly doesn't understand even the basic concept of monetary investment.
  • Adding a strange twist to it all is that, in "In the Cards," Jake Sisko explicitly states (in a sequence that gloriously sends up this entire issue) that humans don't have money — not the Federation, per se. So maybe humans just refrain from making money. So... Starfleet pays Dax but doesn't pay O'Brien or Sisko?
    • It could be a planetary government thing, with each member of the Federation having its own economic system (in fact, it'd almost have to be that way, unless abandoning money is a requirement for joining the Federation, which doesn't seem to be the case). Earth government doesn't use money, but let's say the Trill government does, in which case each one handles its own reimbursement for citizens serving in Starfleet; Earth would cover the moneyless O'Brien and Sisko's expenses with "Federation credits," as Quark called them, while Dax would just get a paycheck from the Trill government.
    • Also, keep in mind that Jake said humans don't need money, not that they don't have money. To cover essentials, humans don't need money, but it would be safe to assume that, in order to afford some luxuries (e.g. anything you can't just order out of a replicator, such as an authentic Willie Mays rookie baseball card), humans would have to use money like anyone else. Whether or not that translates into pay for Starfleet officers isn't ever really made clear ("Federation credits" notwithstanding), but it does suggest that there is at least an incentive system to entice people to perform otherwise lousy jobs (I don't think there are enough people in Starfleet who believe that being a janitor or whatever is the ultimate job to cover all the janitorial work that needs to be done).
    • For what it's worth, Jake's precise line is "I'm human, I don't have any money." Nog follows up with "It's not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement."
    • Followed by Jake espousing the Starfleet philosophy, to which Nog replies, "What does that mean, exactly?" and Jake says, "It means...it means we don't need money." Humans don't need money, so Jake, being human, doesn't have any, or at least he doesn't until someone has something he wants and won't give it up without payment. Though I suppose it's splitting hairs at this point; the line could be interpreted several different ways. The point is that evidence that other humans do use and seek money (Vash, for example) does exist, so going from "humans don't need money as a general rule, as part of their philosophy" to "no human ever uses money ever" doesn't work.
    • Yes, but Jake's reaction then is not "let me access the incentive programs by which human beings acquire money under exceptional circumstances," but rather "let's go on a wacky bartering adventure." One assumes that those humans who deal with money, like Vash (or Harry Mudd?) are dealing with different economies (and implicitly betraying that "philosophy of self-enhancement"). This is one of those issues that seems to have no adequate answer. In Star Trek: First Contact, Picard unblinkingly says "Money doesn't exist in the 24th century" which is demonstrably untrue, although one assumes he's limiting it to the human context and oversimplifying for his audience. The problem really seems to be that the writers haven't thought this through: they're committed to the idea of the future as a nebulous post-scarcity Utopia but haven't worked out the details.
    • There's an entry on the DS9 page that covers money. It's probable that Star Fleet officers do get paid something, so they can use it when they're visiting places that do require money. There are plenty of scenes where characters eat in restaurants and/or shop in places where you probably have to pay. It's just that if you live in the Federation you won't need money to get by; all the essentials are free. As for the "working for pleasure" matter, if you just sit around at home you'll get bored, and also people will probably value you more if you have a work ethic. If you want to be a janitor because you love it, well, more power to you, but otherwise there are other reasons to start out in bottom-rung job. You'll meet people and hopefully get promoted. And if you were applying to another job, having something like that on your resume shows that you were willing to work and contribute even when it isn't the greatest job.
    • If you go back, you'll find Roddenberry thinking technology will solve the problem of money, with no idea of how, so the show just acts like it doesn't change much. Well, if you assume enough Federation citizens value being an enlightened being enough, technology can solve it, but with dramatic visual changes: a transparent society. This allows checking on someone's enlightenment. Adding a standardized rating system could allow individuals to take on a penalty in exchange for giving someone else a bonus — that is, to exchange enlightenment rating as if it were money. (I.e, to print fiat money against their personal economy as a producer of enlightenment.) If this is what Federation credits are — as in "credit where credit is due", not as in "credit and debit" — the Ferengi objections would be obvious. It would also mean jobs that nobody wants to do are probably a quick way to rack up the ability to print credits. So there's a mix of janitors who're in it because they like fixing society's shit, even if that must be literal, and janitors who're in it to make the big bucks(er, to better themselves quickly).
  • If those people were provided with food, accommodation and healthcare then that might be payment enough? They do get to travel the universe, after all, it's not that bad a deal.
  • To quote A Matterof Lifeand Death, "There are millions of people of Earth who'd think it heaven to be a clerk." Even Utopias will require unglamorous jobs, but that doesn't mean people won't be happy to do them.
    • I have not seen the film you're referring to, but I would wager that in context that quote is referring to people who live even worse lives than the average clerk. I'm sure a starving person in Africa or a homeless man living under a bridge would love to be a clerk, but only because it would give them a steady source of income, not because they've always dreamed of being a clerk.
    • It actually refers to Heaven, where you can do what you like for eternity (apparently).
• This is really a question about the peculiar thing called "job satisfaction." No job is intrinsically satisfying or unsatisfying. Just about any job can be fulfilling to the person doing it; conversely, any job can be unfulfilling (I'm sure we all know people who are miserable in what would seem to be a "dream job"). The Federation has two advantages. One, it's very large: unhappy with your job? There's bound to be another one somewhere that suits you, and there's a strong likelihood that social engineering exists to connect people with the jobs they'll do best in (since fulfillment and productivity tend to run together, this is overall best for society). The other is that, as a Utopian enterprise, if people buy the "dream" of the Federation (often framed in quasi-religious terms, as with Sisko in "The Ship"), then it becomes much easier to derive satisfaction from working to maintain that dream, even as a small cog in a vast machine. Furthermore, in a post-scarcity future like the one we see, it seems likely a lot of people maintain a "work to live" mentality; put in whatever hours necessary at whatever they do and even if that's no fun, a few hours in the Holodeck or strolling the paradise that is Earth make all the difference.
  • I hasten to note, however, the presence of characters like Richard Bashir for whom the work prospects of the future seem to have barely panned out. Adds a touch of realism (even a great system is bound to fail a few people now and again) or, on a darker note, reveals the cracks in the system.
• Federation humans may not have money, but they do still occasionally have crime. Who gets to haul Sewerbot #242 out of the tunnel it's jammed in? Somebody convicted and sentenced to a term of public-service menial labor, probably.

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