Does the importance of Starfleet make Trek less utopian?

[Adam Reynolds]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

[Jub]

Trek could be far, far more utopian and peaceful if they didn't fall into the tropes of minimalist sci-fi where only certain planets are colonizable and each species home system is barely more populated or developed than that of modern Earth despite, in Trek's case, having a couple of centuries to develop the start of a Dyson swarm around not just Sol but every system within a dozen light-years. Both Trek and Wars are soft sci-fi series hampered by their tiny scope and a need to be an allegory for events back on Earth.

[Mr Bean]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

Well Gene's Star Trek visions and what made on TV was often very different but if you look back at Star Trek and Next Generations the wars were either cold or were just brush fire conflicts. Somethings going on in star system X-Y or Z and the Enterprise shows up solves the issue learns something and moves on. Even the conflicts were from aliens of the week or cowboy planets.

It's not till later on in Trek once Gene is out that warfare becomes a constant theme and the utopian theme becomes a parody of itself.

[Formless]

I think that if you re-watch the Original series in a vacuum as it would have been seen by people in the 1960's, I think you will find that its progressive, but not Utopian or intended to be. Yes, racial tensions have been essentially erased between humans and the Cold War era is looked upon by the characters as a silly irrelevant rivalry in hindsight, but the show hints that society isn't perfect. We see hints of xenophobia against certain alien species like Romulans and Vulcans-- especially once their common ancestry is revealed. We hear Kirk openly define himself as a soldier and succumb to militaristic fallacies when dealing with the Klingons. In the episode with the Organians, Kirk and the Klingon commander both berate the Organians for stopping their war using exactly the same logic, and the Organians make Kirk look like a fool and a hypocrite when its pointed out to him that he's defending the right of both civilizations to snuff out billions of lives on both sides. Oh, and there is General Order 24, the command code for bombarding a planet into dust from orbit! Scotty even explicitly defines the order as meaning that all life on the surface is to be eradicated. And all these things happen in the first two seasons when Gene Roddenberry was producing the show. Its clear that Roddenberry wanted a show with conflicts, some of them internal and some of them even between a man and his own conscience, such as in The Conscience of the King where Kirk grapples with his desire to bring a mass murderer to justice, but both Spock and McCoy question whether its really justice he's after or revenge due to how close Kirk is to the murderer in question. And Kirk doesn't automatically deny it, instead knowing that on some level they are right. TOS wasn't a show about a perfect humanity, but instead we saw a Kirk who was constantly seeking to better himself whenever his flaws were pointed out. We even saw a diplomatic meeting of a whole bunch of Federation politicians who the Enterprise is hosting, and see that between the many species that make up the Federation there was still division and disagreement-- as you would expect in a democracy.

Its once you get into the first two seasons of TNG that the Utopian vision is brought in to the show's mythos. Only there will you find Picard quoting Hamlet's sarcastic rant about humanity, sans the sarcasm. In fact, Q's presence in the first two seasons shows the difference. His whole purpose in the pilot is to by the godlike judge who questions whether Humanity can really be moral given its history, so that Picard can try and defend the Roddenberry ideal and prove that Utopia has been achieved. Q is unsatisfied by their first encounter, though, so he comes back for a second time and gets frustrated by the crew's moral superiority (though this is partially a reading against intent). Its only in his third encounter during the second season, when he introduces humanity to the Borg, one of the most dangerous civilizations in the galaxy, that he finally makes a fool out of Picard, but also its the first time Q has anything positive to say about Picard-- that he can show humility, even a little bit, when he's truly out of his depth. In other words, the whole point of these interactions was to try and justify to the audience through the viewpoint of Q that humanity is now Perfect with a capital P.

Unfortunately, Roddenberry's writing talent went down the toilet at some point during the 70's, so the audience found it rather unconvincing and tedious, so once he was kicked upstairs the writers immediately started subverting the Utopian message any way they could. I don't think it is the focus on Starfleet per-say that makes Trek feel less utopian, so much as that when Riker and Picard kept saying that Starfleet wasn't a military organization, that was Roddenberry trying to make the audience forget the time Kirk explicitly stated that he was a soldier. And since the TOS movies were still coming out, and since Picard's own ship was still heavily armed and fought many enemies in the first two seasons, that was doomed to fail. He could have made a better case if he said that Starfleet had a military wing and an exploration wing, and the Enterprise D was part of the exploratory wing. Then downplayed the continuing importance of the military wing all he wanted, so long as he also stopped using space combat as a crutch for creating drama or tension. There are ways or writing that kind of story; arguably Dr. Who counts, since The Doctor's pacifism forces the writers to find ways of him solving problems or even foiling villains without pulling out a gun in the process. And on the few times where he does use a gun, its often in a way that subverts its purpose as a weapon.

And to be fair, after Roddenberry was kicked upstairs the writers managed to do a lot of good stories like that. I'm only criticizing Roddenberry to show what really happened to make Trek feel less utopian than it liked to proclaim it was. Even before DS9, I think the writers were trying to subvert that utopianism in whatever small ways they could, not because they disliked the idea but simply because it made for bad television. At least, in the form of utopianism that Roddenberry was trying to create. No conflict between the crew? That eliminates many important techniques for characterizing the crew, which explains why so many of them felt flat in the first two seasons. Roddenberry's vision of a corruption-free Starfleet also created the Bluegill parasite episode, because originally they were going to do an episode mirroring the Iran Contra affair. If there is no room for internal division or conflict, then the only kind of conflict you can have is with The Other, with people outside of the organization or society that disagree with it. In other words, Roddenberry sort of shot himself in the foot that way. So the other writers followed suit by creating background wars to fill out the backstory of O'Brian, and went against his intentions by creating corrupt admirals so they could have another kind of conflict arise in an episode in later seasons. And then DS9 happened, and because Roddenberry was no long around to tell them no, they went all in with deconstructing his ideals entirely and deliberately. They respected his values, but could see contradictions in his way of thinking, and that's why Trek ultimately stopped being a utopia.

They say to never write a hagiography, and I think the Trek writing staff decided that Roddenberry's vision of humanity required them to do exactly that on a grand scale. So its not wonder they subverted it as soon as they thought they could get away with it.

[FaxModem1]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

Eh, even utopias portray the measures they have to go to in order to keep their utopia from being destroyed, and to what extent doing such guarding of said utopia destroys the utopia.

[The Romulan Republic]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

Starfleet's mission is not entirely military, of course: it is a composite of scientific, diplomatic, military and law enforcement organizations which arguably does not really have a real world analogue.

[Elheru Aran]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

Starfleet's mission is not entirely military, of course: it is a composite of scientific, diplomatic, military and law enforcement organizations which arguably does not really have a real world analogue.

Notably, they frequently act as more or less just the transport for many civilians, from diplomats to scientists. Starfleet is more intertwined with the civilian structure of the Federation than most real-world militaries are with their governments/societies. It has what amounts to a monopoly upon space travel (that we can see; we do know there is civilian space travel independent of Starfleet, but we only see it very rarely). Well let me modify that, at least that's during the TOS/TNG/DS9 period; by Picard, it appears that civilian space travel has expanded to the degree that a ship is more or less readily obtainable and even a disgraced ex-Starfleet officer can get their own.

But then, Picard has a *lot* of major changes to the status quo, so...

[Solauren]

While the question of whether or not Star Trek is really utopian is certainly one that can be raised, this was clearly the intent. It was meant to inherently be a future better than the present. However, at the same time, this future revolves around a space navy who wind up fighting wars. They can imagine a mostly different society, but they can't imagine a future that doesn't revolve around warfare.

Would all of this have been more utopian if it wasn't a future that revolved around warfare?

MAHAHAHAH.

Sorry, but..
Star Trek was NEVER Utopian. Anyone that thinks that is missing the point.

Humans thought they had achieved a Utopia. Then, as they pushed beyond their happy bubble, they learned, they were wrong.

I Ben Sisko summoned it up. He told Major Kira, point blank, that the problem with the Federation was Earth. People would look out their window and see paradise, so they assumed everyone else had paradise. But they're wrong.

[Khaat]

Ben Sisko summoned it up. He told Major Kira, point blank, that the problem with the Federation was Earth. People would look out their window and see paradise, so they assumed everyone else had paradise. But they're wrong.

Sisko got his panties in a twist: Earth doesn't see paradise and assume everyone else HAS is, they assume everyone WANTS it. It is an achievable goal, but some other people just want to see the universe burn. Those people wrote for DS9.

[Solauren]

Seeing how DS9 was one of the better Trek series, I don't see a problem with them having a job as writers

[Vendetta]

Ben Sisko summoned it up. He told Major Kira, point blank, that the problem with the Federation was Earth. People would look out their window and see paradise, so they assumed everyone else had paradise. But they're wrong.

Sisko got his panties in a twist: Earth doesn't see paradise and assume everyone else HAS is, they assume everyone WANTS it. It is an achievable goal, but some other people just want to see the universe burn. Those people wrote for DS9.

Even in TNG we see a lot of places in the Federation that are considerably less than utopian. Even outside of explicitly failed colonies like Turkana, there are regular visits to places that need rescue, and the Federation was complicit in ethnic cleansing to the point that it spawned a terrorist organisation, the Maquis, that just wanted to hang onto their homes that the "utoplain" federation agreed should be ceded to a hostile fascist power.

[Formless]

I think a big part of what makes the Federation feel non-utopian despite its protests is that it keeps failing to prioritize its own values correctly. For instance, with Maquis situation it prioritized peace over justice and the self determination of its own citizens, so its citizens had their citizenship revoked when they refused to leave their homes, and as a result the situation was neither just nor did they really get a peaceful resolution to the underlying conflict. BUT what they did get was a resolution where the Federation could wash its hands of the whole affair, at least temporarily, by scapegoating the colonist's as the real problem. That is what Sisko is really referring to when he says that the problem is Earth being paradise: the problems of Earth have already been solved, so they assume that the problems are easy to solve, when in reality it took centuries for Earth to figure them out. In the long run, their failure to recognize the Cardassian government as the problem, and the injustice it perpetuated as a matter of course, lead to another, bigger war in the long run, and the murder of almost ALL the colonists that they abandoned previously.

And this isn't an isolated problem, nor something the writers of Voyager came up with that the TNG and DS9 writers elaborated on (though that is exactly the real world origin of the Maquis situation). We also see this problem in the way the Prime Directive is written and applied. The PD is built upon perfectly fine values-- generally speaking colonialism was unjust, interfering in other government's affairs is a bad idea for practical as well as moral reasons, so having it in writing that we aren't going to do that is a good thing. Unfortunately, the PD is written so strictly that even humanitarian aid is treated as being just as evil as invading a planet with troops because cultural contamination is considered terrible in its own right. However, real world anthropologists don't try to hide their existence from native peoples that they want to study, unless they are an uncontacted tribe that might be vulnerable to diseases that the rest of the world is immune or at least resistant to. That specific concern is never brought up in Star Trek, though, and in fact we saw the Enterprise crew sometimes disguise themselves as members of an alien species specifically so that they could interact with that species without violating the letter of the law! Real anthropologists don't worry about cultural contamination so much because they understand that the people they are studying aren't stupid and can recognize them as merely curious foreigners who want to learn more about themselves, but Starfleet treats the mere revelation of spacefaring cultures as something "primitive" cultures cannot handle*. Starfleet officers even go so far as to interpret the law as meaning that they cannot prevent natural disasters from rendering whole planets uninhabitable so long as there is a native population of sentient species on it. This is so obviously wrong that literally every starfleet captain except IIRC Sisko (because he was in charge of a station) chose to break this law on at least one occasion, and somehow they managed to get away with it because in practice Starfleet was willing to accept those excuses! Which makes every time they chose not to break the directive all the more tragic and unjust. Its a rule that directly undermines the Federation's claims of valuing all life forms equally, especially because the rule is applied unevenly from one situation to the next even by people who have broken it before and gotten away with it. Again, the problem is not with their values per-say, but with their prioritization of them leading to paradoxical and obviously unjust results. Again, the very fact that every captain chose to break it on some occasions and got away with it means the show recognizes the rule isn't always good, but cannot recognize all the situations where it is not good.

* And by the way, can I just say that every time they call a culture "primitive" they are actually being kinda racist? Because it seems pretty clear to me that in many of those occasions they didn't just mean that the culture's technology was significantly behind their own. There was always this strong hint that Starfleet's officers have a sense of cultural superiority over others, including other space faring civilizations like the Ferengi whose cultural practices are different from their own, like seeking wealth and power (or honor, in the case of Klingons and Romulans). Quark was pretty on the nose when he accused Sisko of hating him because Ferengi remind humans of who they were even though the Ferengi's history was a far more peaceful one than that of Earth. Because again, that was the writers of DS9 directly commenting on a mistake Roddenberry made. Just try and watch that first episode involving the Ferengi and tell me the director wasn't channeling old colonial era racist stereotypes through the depiction of the Ferengi. Considering this was the same season that gave us a whole planet of black people (which to be fair, caused Gene Rodenberry to fire the casting director on the spot when he found out), I'd say the DS9 writers were more than justified in their critique of how the Ferengi were treated in TNG. Of course, that's not to say their own depiction of Ferengi was perfect...

[FireNexus]

Trek could be far, far more utopian and peaceful if they didn't fall into the tropes of minimalist sci-fi where only certain planets are colonizable and each species home system is barely more populated or developed than that of modern Earth despite, in Trek's case, having a couple of centuries to develop the start of a Dyson swarm around not just Sol but every system within a dozen light-years. Both Trek and Wars are soft sci-fi series hampered by their tiny scope and a need to be an allegory for events back on Earth.

On the other hand, they can manufacture antimatter for effectively free so why go to the trouble of dyson swarm?

[Broomstick]

Saying that Dyson spheres/swarms are inevitable and all highly advanced species would build and live in them strikes me a bit as assuming that everyone in today's world really, really wants to live in high rise buildings looking like Manhattan and nowhere else. It's not beyond comprehension that even for very advanced species some people might still want to live on naturally formed worlds or basically something other than a Dyson sphere just as some people today really do want to live in remote locations by choice.

In that respect, The Culture makes more sense in that there are variety of living arrangements for people.

In Trek, people might primarily colonize natural worlds out of cultural preference. It's not that there aren't other options - we even see them from time to time - but most of what we see are people on natural worlds or on ships traveling from one point to another. That could, arguably, be the fault of the writers or in the past special effect limitations might have had an impact. There are references to other options - in Enterprise one of the kids grew up on a freighter in between worlds. The Borg have their cubes. DS9 was based on a space station where people lived long term. TNG encountered at least one Dyson sphere that I can recall.

I just don't see Dyson structures as inevitable. Sure, you can capture the entire energy output of a star - what, exactly, do you need so much energy for? If a civilization doesn't need that why go to the trouble of building it?

[Jub]

I just don't see Dyson structures as inevitable. Sure, you can capture the entire energy output of a star - what, exactly, do you need so much energy for? If a civilization doesn't need that why go to the trouble of building it?

My take is that any energy you don't capture from your star is forever lost. Sure you can make enough antimatter for your current fleet/society without it, but why not store the excess? The same goes for those rocky bodies that otherwise do nothing for you and will be lost when the sun goes nova; use them, or lose them.

I get that it's far off, but if you have the capacity to do so and present yourself as a benevolent utopia you should be doing long term planning for your main systems, and at their capacity that means million and billion-year projections for Starfleet.

[Broomstick]

Why bother to store the excess? Stars burn for billions of years, and when one star is finished, or nearly its end, surely any civilization capable of building a Dyson structure is also capable of moving to another star, even at sublight speeds. For what purpose are you saving all that energy? HOW do you store it long-term?

You still haven't explained the why behind a Dyson structure. You don't even bother to throw out something as basic as "pride". Are you presuming endless population growth? Why? Would a species that capable actually want to engage in endless unlimited growth? Granted, humans are only one case and we may or may not be typical but amazingly enough even horny humans have interests beyond merely fucking and squeezing out more babies.

I don't get why you assume ALL highly advanced species would want or need Dyson spheres and the total energy output of a star either short or long term. Again - for what purpose? Do they eat this energy or something ? Possible, I suppose, if you had energy-to-matter conversion which Star Trek sort of does with transporter technology - but how enormous in numbers would a species have to be to require THAT much energy to convert to food? Would a species want to live on what is essentially the backside of a solar collector?

Again - to my mind it's like saying everybody on Earth actually really, really wants to live in a high-tech skyscraper in the middle of a city of other such tall buildings. No, actually not everybody does - lots of people want to live in different environments than that. In a solar system with a Dyson structure, though, there's no choice because once you build the damn thing there is nothing else left. Would rather live on a naturally formed planet? Tough shit - we need that rocky orb to build this colossal thing, you lose, you have to live in a situation you don't like forever and ever because... why?

Oh, but we have to store all that energy long term! Again... why? What are you using it FOR?

At least when humans build a big ass skyscraper we envision a use and purpose for it - work space, living space, a hotel for travelers, SOMETHING. We don't just throw up a ginormous building and say well, we'll think of a use for it later.

What they hell would be the use of the entire power output of a star?

I'm not ruling out a possibility I haven't considered, but I do want to hear why YOU are so certain that these structures are so very necessary. All I hear from you is that if it's possible to build them at all they will be built. Sorry, that's just not so - "it's physically possible" is generally not enough for megaprojects, there has to be some sort of NEED for the result.

[bilateralrope]

Are you presuming endless population growth? Why? Would a species that capable actually want to engage in endless unlimited growth?

A dyson swarm isn't a solution to endless population growth. If a civilization has their birth at or below the replacement rate, then the extra living space is unnecessary. If the birth rate exceeds the replacement rate, you've got exponential growth that will fill up the finite space a dyson swarm provides.

[Jub]

Why bother to store the excess? Stars burn for billions of years, and when one star is finished, or nearly its end, surely any civilization capable of building a Dyson structure is also capable of moving to another star, even at sublight speeds. For what purpose are you saving all that energy? HOW do you store it long-term?

You store the excess in case you need to crash build a fleet, so you can build civilian ships not tied to Starfleet, or because you're planning for what to do when you eventually need to leave your solar system and want to take as many of its precious resources with you as you can. Plus the infrastructure for storing that energy can also be used to power all sorts of interesting experiments and industries that simply can't be done with less energy. For example, you can create rare but life-essential elements like phosphorus in particle accelerators, or try to synthetically create the plethora of Trek materials like latinum or dilithium which otherwise need to be mined from seemingly rare deposits.

You can also plan for when new star formation becomes rare and plan to be one of the last civilizations standing trillions of years from now. It's the equivalent of space environmentalism where it takes a fairly large investment but can pay off in spades later.

You still haven't explained the why behind a Dyson structure. You don't even bother to throw out something as basic as "pride". Are you presuming endless population growth? Why? Would a species that capable actually want to engage in endless unlimited growth? Granted, humans are only one case and we may or may not be typical but amazingly enough even horny humans have interests beyond merely fucking and squeezing out more babies.

It only takes a small fraction of people who want to breed to cause a population explosion, and they don't all need to be a single group to do it. Its a bit extreme but if one million people out of a population of ten billion decide to double their population every decade, not hard to do with Trek's medical technology and even easier if they want to use cloning, they'll match the systems starting population in ~200 years even if the starting population goes into a slight decline.

The other reason for growth is that any resource your civilization doesn't use is lost. Given that there's no inherent value to the uncountable lifeless rocks, gas giants, and even stars, why wouldn't somebody want to go out there and use them to create something spectacular? It may not even cost you anything if you're willing to automate it and wait.

I don't get why you assume ALL highly advanced species would want or need Dyson spheres and the total energy output of a star either short or long term. Again - for what purpose? Do they eat this energy or something ? Possible, I suppose, if you had energy-to-matter conversion which Star Trek sort of does with transporter technology - but how enormous in numbers would a species have to be to require THAT much energy to convert to food? Would a species want to live on what is essentially the backside of a solar collector?

This is like a person in the pre-industrial age asking what we need electrical powerplants for. Why would any human want to live in a city on the backside of a coal burning power plant?

Again - to my mind it's like saying everybody on Earth actually really, really wants to live in a high-tech skyscraper in the middle of a city of other such tall buildings. No, actually not everybody does - lots of people want to live in different environments than that. In a solar system with a Dyson structure, though, there's no choice because once you build the damn thing there is nothing else left. Would rather live on a naturally formed planet? Tough shit - we need that rocky orb to build this colossal thing, you lose, you have to live in a situation you don't like forever and ever because... why?

You don't need to pull apart all the rocky bodies in the solar system to build it. For one, you can get a nearly uncountable mass of any element you like by pulling it from the sun. Secondly, these habitats don't need to be densely populated, if you want to live in a forested pastoral hab go-ahead. Even without artificial gravity, we can even make ita nice unspun 1G by building it around a heap of gas pulled from Saturn or Jupiter.

Oh, but we have to store all that energy long term! Again... why? What are you using it FOR?

Who wants to do pesky things like explore high energy particle physics, explore the birth of our universe, create miniature black holes as stellar drives and sources of power, power super-intelligent AIs, become god-king of a simulation that puts the scale of Star Trek to shame... Even at smaller scales, you could build and power stadium-sized holodecks and crank them out rapidly enough that any individual who wanted one could have one to themselves. This seems wasteful, but when all it takes is some AI, an automated factory, and time it really doesn't have a cost.

It costs even less when you have transporters and FTL and could disassemble a nearby lifeless solar system while leaving Sol as a preserve until the Sun eventually renders that idea impossible.

EDIT: We can also look at the United States and the demographic shifts that caused and fed the expansion west as well as the economic changes that created. Space based habitats and manufacturing will likely cause another such boom in both economic growth, population growth, and immigration (from earth to space) so long as the quality of life is at least as good as it is planet side.

[bilateralrope]

It only takes a small fraction of people who want to breed to cause a population explosion, and they don't all need to be a single group to do it. Its a bit extreme but if one million people out of a population of ten billion decide to double their population every decade, not hard to do with Trek's medical technology and even easier if they want to use cloning, they'll match the systems starting population in ~200 years even if the starting population goes into a slight decline.

So, how exactly does the dyson swarm solve that problem ?

You're talking exponential population growth, and a dyson swarm can only have finite space for that population.

It seems a much better idea to get that population growth under control before you need to build a megastructure.

[Jub]

So, how exactly does the dyson swarm solve that problem ?

You're talking exponential population growth, and a dyson swarm can only have finite space for that population.

It seems a much better idea to get that population growth under control before you need to build a megastructure.

How do you intend to stop them? Are you willing to kill people that breed too much, will you institute Chinese style one-child policies, do you exile them to another star system and let them grow there?

Also, what's the harm in expanding and filling up the solar system/galaxy/universe? Do lifeless rocks have some value that means we should take them apart and make stuff out of them? Are stars something sacred and untouchable? The reason to expand, capture, and consume can be as simple as why shouldn't we.

[Broomstick]

Why bother to store the excess? Stars burn for billions of years, and when one star is finished, or nearly its end, surely any civilization capable of building a Dyson structure is also capable of moving to another star, even at sublight speeds. For what purpose are you saving all that energy? HOW do you store it long-term?

You store the excess in case you need to crash build a fleet, so you can build civilian ships not tied to Starfleet, or because you're planning for what to do when you eventually need to leave your solar system and want to take as many of its precious resources with you as you can. Plus the infrastructure for storing that energy can also be used to power all sorts of interesting experiments and industries that simply can't be done with less energy.

OK, you're saving the energy output of an entire star.... what the hell kind of bucket does THAT fit into? How literally massive will the infrastructure for that be?

How would you need more than just a fraction of a star's output to "build a crash fleet"?

This whole "save everything" reminds me of preppers that try to store 20-30 years worth of food in their basement bunker - if the situation is that dire you probably need to go somewhere else and you'd be better served by getting better transport than trying to stay in place. You're talking about saving entire output of a star over BILLIONS of years. How the hell does that work? Concentrate that much energy in one place and you have a star. You'd probably need a star's worth of some sort of mass to hold it. And you're going to store that for billions of years? WTF?

Just build some generation ships and leave already.

For example, you can create rare but life-essential elements like phosphorus in particle accelerators, or try to synthetically create the plethora of Trek materials like latinum or dilithium which otherwise need to be mined from seemingly rare deposits.

Seems to me that if you need phsophorus it would be easier to just, you know, mine phosphorus that already exists. Sure, it's a tiny percentage of, say, an asteroid but if you've got capture of stellar energy you just grind up/melt asteroids and other rocky/icy/whatever bits and extract that small percentage. Along with anything else already there.

As for latinum or dilithium... no one knows the physics of those things so kind of hard to comment on them.

You can also plan for when new star formation becomes rare and plan to be one of the last civilizations standing trillions of years from now. It's the equivalent of space environmentalism where it takes a fairly large investment but can pay off in spades later.

Um. Yeah. A trillion years from now no species currently in existence will still exist just because genetic drift over that time span would cause sufficient mutations everything would be something different by then. Or, in the Trek 'Verse we'd all be energy beings by then with no need of stellar energy capture and would probably be off to a different dimension or building a new universe.

You still haven't explained the why behind a Dyson structure. You don't even bother to throw out something as basic as "pride". Are you presuming endless population growth? Why? Would a species that capable actually want to engage in endless unlimited growth? Granted, humans are only one case and we may or may not be typical but amazingly enough even horny humans have interests beyond merely fucking and squeezing out more babies.

It only takes a small fraction of people who want to breed to cause a population explosion, and they don't all need to be a single group to do it. Its a bit extreme but if one million people out of a population of ten billion decide to double their population every decade, not hard to do with Trek's medical technology and even easier if they want to use cloning, they'll match the systems starting population in ~200 years even if the starting population goes into a slight decline.

You still didn't answer the WHY.

WHY build a Dyson Sphere or Swarm? How is it inevitable? It's hardly the only imaginable alternative to living space in space.

The other reason for growth is that any resource your civilization doesn't use is lost.

No, it's not. If you don't use a rock it is still a rock - unless you're talking about so far out there's proton decay in which case solar energy capture and storage will take a back seat to more pressing problems, like whether or not matter even exists anymore in a form that can make up a living body.

Given that there's no inherent value to the uncountable lifeless rocks, gas giants, and even stars, why wouldn't somebody want to go out there and use them to create something spectacular?

You totally haven't read the bits about "maybe some people will want to live on a naturally formed planet", have you?

You know, some of us appreciate the scenery formed by happenstance.

Why do you rule that out? You don't even acknowledge the possibility.

I don't get why you assume ALL highly advanced species would want or need Dyson spheres and the total energy output of a star either short or long term. Again - for what purpose? Do they eat this energy or something ? Possible, I suppose, if you had energy-to-matter conversion which Star Trek sort of does with transporter technology - but how enormous in numbers would a species have to be to require THAT much energy to convert to food? Would a species want to live on what is essentially the backside of a solar collector?

This is like a person in the pre-industrial age asking what we need electrical powerplants for. Why would any human want to live in a city on the backside of a coal burning power plant?

I sure as hell don't - coal plants are nasty.

I'm much rather live at a considerable distance from a coal plant (if we have to have them at all). I'd prefer not to live where the power-generating mechanism of my civilization blocks out the sun, sky, and stars. So why the fuck would I want to live in a Dyson Sphere?

Secondly, these habitats don't need to be densely populated, if you want to live in a forested pastoral hab go-ahead.

But I don't want to live in an artificial "hab". I want to live on a naturally formed planet! Why do you assume I want forests? I'm allergic to trees! Give me a nice, red desert like Mars - love those wind-eroded rock forms! Or maybe I find hydrocarbon lakes and an orange sky fascinating, let's go to Titan!

You're assuming that people WANT to live in massive artificial structures. A lot of people DON'T. They really, really don't. Maybe they like living in a slightly challenging environment. Maybe they like the ways the stars look at night. Maybe they're just a stubborn cuss.

On what basis do you assume everyone else will like and want what YOU want?

Even without artificial gravity, we can even make ita nice unspun 1G by building it around a heap of gas pulled from Saturn or Jupiter.

Again - why do you assume I'm looking for 1g?

A lot of the problem here comes down to you making assumptions, to be honest. You talk like all of this is self-evident and it's not. Some people LIKE living in a desert. Some people LIKE living on the sea-shore. Some people LIKE living inside all the time and some others can't stand being inside.

Like I said - The Culture with it's MANY options makes so much more sense than you're assumption that automatically everyone is going to live in a Dyson Sphere in the future.

Oh, but we have to store all that energy long term! Again... why? What are you using it FOR?

Who wants to do pesky things like explore high energy particle physics, explore the birth of our universe, create miniature black holes as stellar drives and sources of power, power super-intelligent AIs, become god-king of a simulation that puts the scale of Star Trek to shame...

What if all you want to do is live on Mars near a kick-ass rock formation you can watch at sunrise and sunset?

Not to mention we're already exploring particle physics, the birth of our universe, and I believe the Hadron collider can make teeny weeny black holes (they evaporate quickly due to Hawking radiation because they are that tiny) with our primitive, definitely less than entire-stellar-output machines already. You don't need the entire output of a star to do those things.

Even at smaller scales, you could build and power stadium-sized holodecks and crank them out rapidly enough that any individual who wanted one could have one to themselves.

Again, the assumption that everyone wants something artificial - what the hell happened to experiencing the real world, with all its faults and limitations as both a challenge and something to discover?

What the hell do you have against nature?

[Broomstick]

How do you intend to stop them? Are you willing to kill people that breed too much, will you institute Chinese style one-child policies, do you exile them to another star system and let them grow there?

1) You're assuming that all the descendants of "super-breeders" will likewise be super-breeders themselves. Why? Raising kids takes a lot of time and energy from the parents. Even people who want kids usually want to do other things besides just raising more offspring.

2) While I personally find it abhorrent yes, you could in fact institute "Chinese-style one-child" policy. Or even a death penalty for having too many kids. I mean, c'mon, the Aztecs built a large empire that operated to kill thousands of people (or even tends of thousands) in a given year based on religion, it's not like people can't conceive of killing each other for some cause or other. Who knows how an alien species would view something like that?

3) Sure, exile to another solar system could happen - look at Oceania, plenty of islands there dealt with overpopulation by plonking the excess people into boats and pushing them out to sea to either find another island or die.

Now, none of the above are MY choice by just because I don't like them doesn't mean they haven't been done in the past or couldn't be done in the future. My, you have a large blind spot about these sorts of things, don't you?

Also, what's the harm in expanding and filling up the solar system/galaxy/universe? Do lifeless rocks have some value that means we should take them apart and make stuff out of them? Are stars something sacred and untouchable? The reason to expand, capture, and consume can be as simple as why shouldn't we.

There's no reason we couldn't clear-cut the forests in Yellowstone, bottle the weird waters and sell them at profit like Ferengi, and mine for exotic minerals there but we don't - because it's a uniquely weird place some people consider beautiful in its own right and society has chosen to NOT fuck with it or convert it to cash.

Like I asked before: what do you have against nature?

Like I asked before: what about people who want to live on naturally formed planets because that's what they like, as opposed to what you like?

Not everyone wants to go out, mine the universe, chew it up, swallow it, and shit it out their ass. That's YOUR assumption. Why do you assume that?

Here on Earth not every society exploits its resources into non-existence, why should you assume everyone in the future will?

[Jub]

OK, you're saving the energy output of an entire star.... what the hell kind of bucket does THAT fit into? How literally massive will the infrastructure for that be?

At a small scale where you're not using much energy but also not capturing much, it could be amassed in antimatter storage tanks of the kind Trek already uses. At larger scales, you may convert that energy into stocks of exotic matter you produced using particle colliders or store each as a small black hole that provides power and gravity to a space habitat. Alternatively, you could spend it by moving your star somewhere else, such as an unclaimed star system, and colonizing that as well.

How would you need more than just a fraction of a star's output to "build a crash fleet"?

How much more secure would the Federation be if they walked softly and carried a million ship string fleet as their big stick? Given how often Earth and other important planets are threatened by everything from Klingons to rogue space probes you'd think they may want more of a security blanket. You could also build trillions of tons of science vessels and explore space far more rapidly rather than sending a lone ship to get into amusing 'made for TV' adventures on a weekly basis.

This whole "save everything" reminds me of preppers that try to store 20-30 years worth of food in their basement bunker - if the situation is that dire you probably need to go somewhere else and you'd be better served by getting better transport than trying to stay in place. You're talking about saving entire output of a star over BILLIONS of years. How the hell does that work? Concentrate that much energy in one place and you have a star. You'd probably need a star's worth of some sort of mass to hold it. And you're going to store that for billions of years? WTF?

Just build some generation ships and leave already.

Why waste all that energy when you can use it for anything your heart might desire? Once you have automated space manufacturing building habitats, solar arrays, ships, are all essentially free so long as you can find the matter and energy. The real question is why we wouldn't use that capacity to fuel a level of decadence, scientific progress, and growth that can scarcely be dreamed of.

Seems to me that if you need phsophorus it would be easier to just, you know, mine phosphorus that already exists. Sure, it's a tiny percentage of, say, an asteroid but if you've got capture of stellar energy you just grind up/melt asteroids and other rocky/icy/whatever bits and extract that small percentage. Along with anything else already there.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... tic%20life.

https://theboar.org/2018/04/phosphorus- ... gent-life/

So yes, we could pull it from our star or mine it from rocks, but there may come a point where just making it to order is easier. We're already facing issues with Earth's easily accessible supply and we may live on a very phosphorus-rich world.

As for latinum or dilithium... no one knows the physics of those things so kind of hard to comment on them.

If we can agree that they are made of matter and formed by physics within the fictional universe of Star Trek then we must agree that, theoretically, they are as open to being created in a lab as any other naturally (or unnaturally) occurring chemical and element are. Hence you can literally throw compute cycles and scientists at the problem until you solve it. This is another thing large populations are good at simply because more people equals more chances to raise and educate the next great thinker and having a billion Einstein or Hawking level thinkers who can work together means solving new physics questions faster.

Um. Yeah. A trillion years from now no species currently in existence will still exist just because genetic drift over that time span would cause sufficient mutations everything would be something different by then. Or, in the Trek 'Verse we'd all be energy beings by then with no need of stellar energy capture and would probably be off to a different dimension or building a new universe.

Most parents won't outlive their children, how is this any different? If you say that's different I could as easily point out that lines between species are pretty arbitrary anyway. There was no sharp divide between humans and our last common ancestor where we suddenly stopped being them and started being us. We just don't have the data to see every gradual step along the way so we only take notice of the big changes. How would an immortal AI see things from a god's eye view?

You still didn't answer the WHY.

WHY build a Dyson Sphere or Swarm? How is it inevitable? It's hardly the only imaginable alternative to living space in space.

What do you gain if you don't build it?

No, it's not. If you don't use a rock it is still a rock - unless you're talking about so far out there's proton decay in which case solar energy capture and storage will take a back seat to more pressing problems, like whether or not matter even exists anymore in a form that can make up a living body.

That's only true if you drag those rocks with you, which is another reason you might want to use the gravity of a star or artificial black hole as a means of storage. You can chuck those rocks or rogue planets into orbit around your power source and use them as needed. If you leave those rocks, photons, or energy differentials behind they will be lost to you.

You totally haven't read the bits about "maybe some people will want to live on a naturally formed planet", have you?

You know, some of us appreciate the scenery formed by happenstance.

Why do you rule that out? You don't even acknowledge the possibility.

Where did I ever say you can't still do that? I personally think it's a waste of resources to keep planets around but until you get to a state where stars no longer form there's very little cost to setting aside habitable planets and stars for the small fraction of the population who'll want to live there. That said, I suspect that it will be a vanishingly small population in the scheme of things as once you hit the tipping point and have more people in space than on Earth living and dying in a habitat will be the new normal.

I sure as hell don't - coal plants are nasty.

I'm much rather live at a considerable distance from a coal plant (if we have to have them at all). I'd prefer not to live where the power-generating mechanism of my civilization blocks out the sun, sky, and stars. So why the fuck would I want to live in a Dyson Sphere?

So you're a fucking space NIMBY and want your personal preference for having a planet and star as the human default to override a more efficient way of doing things... If your argument boils down solely to some naive naturalistic bullshit I think we're done here.

But I don't want to live in an artificial "hab". I want to live on a naturally formed planet! Why do you assume I want forests? I'm allergic to trees! Give me a nice, red desert like Mars - love those wind-eroded rock forms! Or maybe I find hydrocarbon lakes and an orange sky fascinating, let's go to Titan!

You're assuming that people WANT to live in massive artificial structures. A lot of people DON'T. They really, really don't. Maybe they like living in a slightly challenging environment. Maybe they like the ways the stars look at night. Maybe they're just a stubborn cuss.

On what basis do you assume everyone else will like and want what YOU want?

We can look at history to see how this will go. How has urban expansion changed population distribution since the renaissance? Why do you think it will be any different when it comes to living and working in space?

Again - why do you assume I'm looking for 1g?

A lot of the problem here comes down to you making assumptions, to be honest. You talk like all of this is self-evident and it's not. Some people LIKE living in a desert. Some people LIKE living on the sea-shore. Some people LIKE living inside all the time and some others can't stand being inside.

Like I said - The Culture with it's MANY options makes so much more sense than you're assumption that automatically everyone is going to live in a Dyson Sphere in the future.

Quote me on that. Show me where I said that EVERYONE will live in a Dyson swarm, a solid shell is fucking stupid, and that each hab in that swarm will seek to replicate a specific Earth biome. You can as easily have whatever biome you want as well as somebody is willing to build it. You can even leave some unpopulated as parks if that floats your boat.

What I'm saying isn't that everybody will want this. What I'm saying is that space can support populations so vast that the small fractions of fractions of percentages who like planets will have so little say that they may as well not exist. You'll be the uncontacted tribe of the world, unimportant and doomed the moment we stop trying to preserve you and your way of life.

What if all you want to do is live on Mars near a kick-ass rock formation you can watch at sunrise and sunset?

Not to mention we're already exploring particle physics, the birth of our universe, and I believe the Hadron collider can make teeny weeny black holes (they evaporate quickly due to Hawking radiation because they are that tiny) with our primitive, definitely less than entire-stellar-output machines already. You don't need the entire output of a star to do those things.

So why are they already planning the next more powerful collider if this one is all the collider we'll ever need? Even if we don't NEED more power, why swarm up a few nearby stars and try some big bang level and beyond particle physics because we can? Worst case you can use all that energy to build something cool or spell your name in the cosmic background radiation.

Again, the assumption that everyone wants something artificial - what the hell happened to experiencing the real world, with all its faults and limitations as both a challenge and something to discover?

Why care what you want when the far more realistic likelihood is that your vision of a utopia will only be shared by a vanishingly small minority of luddites? It's like saying that because the amish exist we should stop building cities.

What the hell do you have against nature?

What do you mean by nature? The random, to us, distribution of mass and energy in the galaxy, life on this and countless other world, some spiritual woo-woo bullshit about god creating a universe for us...

Nothing about the way things happen to be right now is sacred to me. Humans aren't meant to live on planets because we're not meant to do anything. We're the result of physics and be those physics random or predetermined none of that combines to give the universe purpose or humanity free will. My opinion may change if we figure out what makes consciousness arise from matter (if it does arise at all), and by which mechanism that mind makes choices (if it makes choices at all). Until then, my belief is that we're but cogs in a cosmic machine and thus we may as well strip the machine bear and see what that does.

[bilateralrope]

So, how exactly does the dyson swarm solve that problem ?

You're talking exponential population growth, and a dyson swarm can only have finite space for that population.

It seems a much better idea to get that population growth under control before you need to build a megastructure.

How do you intend to stop them? Are you willing to kill people that breed too much, will you institute Chinese style one-child policies, do you exile them to another star system and let them grow there?

You haven't answered my question. How does a dyson swarm deal with such a group ?

[Jub]

1) You're assuming that all the descendants of "super-breeders" will likewise be super-breeders themselves. Why? Raising kids takes a lot of time and energy from the parents. Even people who want kids usually want to do other things besides just raising more offspring.

You're assuming that we don't clone kids in exo-wombs and raise them with the help of AI. Or create new minds in such a way that the concept of a child no longer makes sense. Your what if is routed in the now, the mundane, and doesn't take into account technologies that change the current paradigm.

2) While I personally find it abhorrent yes, you could in fact institute "Chinese-style one-child" policy. Or even a death penalty for having too many kids. I mean, c'mon, the Aztecs built a large empire that operated to kill thousands of people (or even tends of thousands) in a given year based on religion, it's not like people can't conceive of killing each other for some cause or other. Who knows how an alien species would view something like that?

Does all that death solve the issue? Take your logic to its conclusion and tell me that it will actually solve the issue without also killing us off.

3) Sure, exile to another solar system could happen - look at Oceania, plenty of islands there dealt with overpopulation by plonking the excess people into boats and pushing them out to sea to either find another island or die.

Then what's to stop them from out-competing you with the resources they're willing to claim but that you aren't willing to expand to get? It only takes one such colony to eclipse the starting civilization and take on the staring role.

The issue is that your solutions to the problem aren't. They may delay things, but it'll be very hard to stop a group that wants to expand exponentially from doing so.

There's no reason we couldn't clear-cut the forests in Yellowstone, bottle the weird waters and sell them at profit like Ferengi, and mine for exotic minerals there but we don't - because it's a uniquely weird place some people consider beautiful in its own right and society has chosen to NOT fuck with it or convert it to cash.

Nor do we preserve it. We don't keep each animal healthy, extend the lives of each tree, and reset each rock exactly the way it was. Nor can we prevent it from destroying itself if it erupts, or if the climate changes, or... That beauty is fleeting, long against a single human life but short against what we may someday become. Will an immortal or a human born in the orbit of a distant star feel the same way that you do?

Like I asked before: what about people who want to live on naturally formed planets because that's what they like, as opposed to what you like?

Prove that such opposition will have numbers and political power in any future where even a plurality of people, let alone a majority, live in space? How about one where those people have never seen a planet with naturally formed life on it? It's inevitable that our views on planets and nature will change as we experience life in a new way.

Also, may I ask what makes a skyscraper 'unnatural' but a bird's nest 'natural'? How about a sandcastle and a sand dune? A natural chemical versus a molecular copy made in a lab? Where do you draw the line and why does the line even matter?

Not everyone wants to go out, mine the universe, chew it up, swallow it, and shit it out their ass. That's YOUR assumption. Why do you assume that?

Yes, but those that do want that will naturally outbreed you and do it anyway. Every utopia is somebody else's hell.

Here on Earth not every society exploits its resources into non-existence, why should you assume everyone in the future will?

Because doing that on Earth will literally kill us... In space, it gets us new places to live and keeps us alive. Try to keep up.

You haven't answered my question. How does a dyson swarm deal with such a group ?

How does building affordable housing deal with homelessness?

Besides, who's to say they aren't building new habitats themselves? There will likely be many political entities just in our own solar system by the time we have the tech to build such a swarm. How much killing are you willing to do to stop a faction from building such a swarm or leaving and setting up a swarm elsewhere?