Patrick Stewart has died (nytimes.com)

It’s nice to watch something that highlights the best of humanity in a future setting.

Almost everything else in SciFi is dystopian. But ST is a rarity. And it’s all the more beautiful for it.

While established SF writers wrote episodes for the original series (Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, etc.), David Gerrold was a recent college graduate and "The Trouble With Tribbles" was his first sale.

• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.

• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.

• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.

(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)

I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.

Also agree about Bashir.

https://youtu.be/qYWBBFJKlPM

https://youtu.be/NMcLXG6PXto

Also from Andrew Sorkin...

    • Joshua Malina: Jeremy Goodwin (Sports Night) / Will Bailey (The West Wing)
    • Janel Moloney: Monica (Sports Night) / Donna Moss (The West Wing)
    • Felicity Huffman: Dana Whitaker (Sports Night) / Ann Stark (The West Wing)
    • Clark Gregg: Calvin Trager (Sports Night) / Mike Casper (The West Wing)
    • Timothy Busfield: Director (Sports Night) / Danny Concannon (The West Wing)

What would the effects of growing up in a post-scarcity utopian society be on a human? To never fear poverty or hunger? To be sure that no matter what they do (or don’t) they will be housed and cared for as long as they live?

I assume the people in Starfleet would be the ones who are most inclined to work for their betterment, with no fear of competition, with the drive to do The Right Thing. Outside the organisation there would be people who would be totally happy in doing nothing.

Well, post-scarcity really just means that ordinary citizens have free access to replicators (matter-energy converters).

So the closest example (and the only one I can think of where you see civilian Earth, outside of SF Academy / SF HQ or a time travel episode), is probably the double episode in DS9 where the changelings reach earth and there's a false flag event by a corrupt Admiral that causes a momentary power outage and a planetwide lockdown for a few days. I believe it's meant as a 9/11 allegory -- the homeland is attacked and suddenly everyone WANTS a police state, or at least is willing to go along with it, and only the courageous honorable military officers are there to stop the corrupt ones, all the civilians are frightened into compliance.

But post-scarcity? That just means when the security officers aren't around, people can wander into Joseph Sisko's restaurant and eat as much as they want for free, and Joseph Sisko can run his restaurant with as much food supply/ingredients and kitchen equipment as he wants for free, and every gets as much clothing as they want for free, etc. When Earth isn't on lockdown, that's the implication, everyone has as much material goods as they want for free, that's post-scarcity and the implication is they have it.

Post-scarcity doesn't mean infinite resources, or that you can have whatever you want, not everyone gets free land/space on which to build their home, for example. If that's your definition of post-scarcity then I guess at least the Q Continuum has it! :)

It's worth remembering that social organization (currency, capitalism, democracy) is a technology as well, and we should not expect that a sci-fi author can explain the advances in that technology any better than they can explain a warp drive. (one nod to this I think is telling is one scene in the movie where they travel back in time and Kirk is telling the others 'they still use money' in much the same way that he would say 'they still use guns'. They have replaced guns with phasers and replaced money with something else and Roddenberry can give us the blueprint for neither).

I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... You can read https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an... which is by a working historian.

I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.

i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.

No, it doesn't.

Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.

Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.

Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa

You comment shows your utter general ignorance and complete misunderstanding of medieval times.

My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)

You're somehow succumbing to the fallacy of the edilic life of old.

The same life where you had to have a dozen of kids to overcome infant mortality, and each time a woman gave birth it was like a Russian roulette.

And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years? You didn't had a midlife crisis because you'd be dead by then.

> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.

There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.

But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.

Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.

Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)

s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.

I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.

However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.

The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.

So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.

The 8th Air Force suffered heavy losses over Europe but I don't believe Roddenberry served there. He was in the Pacific and after his B-17 crash stayed in the mainland US.

I don't like the premise that Picard, alone, out of the entirety of the Federation, is the only thing standing between the Borg and the assimilation of Earth. It seems to go against the collectivist identity of the franchise. It's fiction, they could have written it another way, they just didn't because Picard is the star of the show.

And the PTSD isn't even the issue, he was compromised by alien mind control implants from a species far stronger than the Federation, with hostile intent. Implants the Federation couldn't even remove. Implants which have the property of aggressive assimilation. A single nanoprobe is a potential extinction level event.

Humans lose their security clearance by smoking a joint. Being puppeted and mind-controlled by eldritch alien gods into a system-wide genocide should at least lead to a demotion.

And everyone forgets Geordi was tortured and mind-controlled by the Romulans. In anything close to reality he'd never be allowed on a starship again, and Picard would spend the rest of his life quarantined inside a force field getting scanned like that guy in the X Files with the dark matter shadow.