Does the importance of Starfleet make Trek less utopian?

[Jub]

To Broomstick I pose these three challenges:

1) Define natural.

2) If human changes to our environment aren't part of your definition of what is natural, prove that human behaviour and the effects of said behaviour are different than changes to the environment are unnatural but similar behaviours and changes caused by animals are natural.

3) If your argument for why human lead changes are unnatural hinges on humans having consciousness and freewill, prove that either exists and that their existence is in any way unnatural.

Make these challenges because I do not see the human-caused changes to the universe as being unnatural. I'll go beyond that and put forth the idea that nothing that exists in our naturally occurring universe can be unnatural. Finally, I will posit that the universe has no unnatural states that can be caused by anything originating from and/or existing within its confines.

[bilateralrope]

How does building affordable housing deal with homelessness?

That analogy sounds like you're trying to dodge the question. So I'm just going to keep repeating my question until you answer it. How does the finite space of a dyson swarm solve the problem of a group engaged in exponential growth ?

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?

Who are these other political entities in our solar system that exist in Star Trek ?


As for your super breeder group:

If they want to start kicking people out of their homes to dismantle them to build a swarm, then they need to be dealt with.

If they want to go try to build their swarm in an unoccupied star system, let them. Though, if they succeed at building a swam, that's going to lead to more killing once they fill it and try to expand than if they just get killed off now.

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.

So tell me, how would one go about creating dark matter in a lab ?

Because that is something that exists with our current physics. But I'm not aware of anyone having any idea about how to create it in a lab. Not even under theoretical models.

If we don't know how to create dark matter in the lab, then I must question your assumption that dilithium can be created.

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.

Well, if that's what your super breeders are doing, then it's easy enough to stop them. Ban cloning. Ban the ways they are stripping those children of the ability to choose for themselves.

Why does this group even want to breed so fast ?

[Jub]

How does building affordable housing deal with homelessness?

That analogy sounds like you're trying to dodge the question. So I'm just going to keep repeating my question until you answer it. How does the finite space of a dyson swarm solve the problem of a group engaged in exponential growth ?

You're missing the point entirely.

The argument I'm making is that, unless they are actively being suppressed, Trek should have had a population explosion coinciding with the industrialization of space because in every other such case in human history we see this pattern of expansion. Hence Trek should have massive populations and the likely reason for them not having such population explosions among any species is almost certainly suppression that the behest of UFP. Such suppression makes Trek a non-Utopia.

There's also the fact that Trek has provable and solvable resource scarcity that can logically be solved by harnessing more stellar output via means of building a Dyson swarm or some other means of energy collection. Some of these scarcities are phosphate (one possible reason why colonization of planets in Trek seems limited to very low populations), latinum (considered rare enough to be used as a unit of trade), dilithium (stable enough to be minable, rare enough to be sought after, a possible bottleneck for expansion). We also see resource scarcity on DS9 both the station and in the show as the Federation struggles to defend itself due to a lack of industrial capacity and population.

In addition, we see that space, or at least control over certain sectors of space, are issues for all parties in Star Trek. Given that any species we see could fit many times their stated population around a single well-utilized star this lack of appropriate infrastructure has likely caused multiple megadeaths given the scale of the conflicts. So why doesn't the UFP push for greater utilization of existing space as a means of conflict resolution?

How can such a society be a utopia if it doesn't utilize the resources at its disposal to alleviate major issues such as those outlined above?

If they want to start kicking people out of their homes to dismantle them to build a swarm, then they need to be dealt with.

If they want to go try to build their swarm in an unoccupied star system, let them. Though, if they succeed at building a swam, that's going to lead to more killing once they fill it and try to expand than if they just get killed off now.

Why would they need to? Trek's Sol system is so under inhabited that they haven't colonized prime spots like Mercury and Venus yet. There's going to be enough material that you could get to

So tell me, how would one go about creating dark matter in a lab ?

Dark matter has yet to be proven and is merely a leading assumption for observed phenomena that we cannot otherwise explain. Also, unlike the fictional materials in Star Trek's universe, we don't work with and handle dark matter as on a daily basis. If we did both confirm the existence of dark matter and find a way to interact with it I would expect that we'd have theoretical ways of producing it even if we lacked practical means to act upon them.

In addition, dark matter may not be required to explain what we see either, there are alternative theories that do not require it even if such theories are currently fringe.

Well, if that's what your super breeders are doing, then it's easy enough to stop them. Ban cloning.

Such a group could continue to use cloning a ban is merely sternly asking for them to stop. I would also argue that using force to stop them when provably the Sol system has room and resources for quintillions of humans is a fascist and inherently evil act that goes against all visions of the UFP in Trek's canon. Hence why it's such an interesting hypothetical to discuss.

Ban the ways they are stripping those children of the ability to choose for themselves.

In which way are they infringing upon a child's ability to choose for themselves? These children, clones, sentient AIs, uplifted pets, etc. wouldn't be required to themselves reproduce so long as the group's capacity to continue growing is able to increase.

In the case where you create beings that were never children that can be done by cloning the image of a mind in software with enough variables that a unique intelligence emerges, creating AIs that don't mature in a similar way to humans, or via other creative means.

Why does this group even want to breed so fast ?

To expand and colonize, to exert political dominance, as a social experiment, to force another group to action, religious belief, insanity, corruption by an outside intelligence, because it's an AI programmed to do so... It's Trek take your pick.

[Broomstick]

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.

That seems like an awful lot of work - you could just leave a star as-is and tap what you need as you need it. Due to entropy converting solar energy into another form for storage and back to something you use again is going to involve loss along the way.

Not to mention a black hole getting loose - which is almost inevitable given a long enough time scale - is going to be a very destructive force, even more so than an active star. Certainly if you have an application that requires a black hole that's one thing but just making an storing them? Sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

Not to mention a "small black hole" used to provide gravity is going to result in some very weird gradients. Not sure that would be comfortable to live with. Or, if you're at a great enough distance that tidal forces aren't turning you into a strand of spaghetti I'm not sure if you're going to get any sort of gravity useful for, say, keeping a human body healthy.

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?

You just defined the Borg.

Frankly, a civilization that is dismantling entire star systems to build "millions" of each of a several types of ships is downright terrifying to someone outside that civilization, it would look like a plague or a blight, consuming everything in sight. That's not exploration that's consumption.

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?

What if the desire is not to work so damn hard, kick back on a tropical beach, and chill? Especially if there's a planet where those exist already and you don't have to bother making them?

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.

Because we're dreaming of something else?

Sure, lots of people were off to the "New World" and boldly going across the Americas 400-500 years ago... but the vast majority of Europeans stayed home and didn't want to move anywhere. And a sizable percentage of people from Europe and even more so Africa that wound up in the Americas were forced into moving and didn't want to be there at all. How well has that worked out in our world? Sure, we've got some neat toys but we've got a lot of problems to go with them.

There is nothing inevitable about technology advancing, or scientific progress. It just looks that way because of where we are in history at the moment. Not only has humanity experienced long periods of stasis civilization has even gone through periods of losing technology.

Your vision is nothing more than a rewrite of "Manifest Destiny" which was never universal at any time and is not inevitable.

We don't know if our descendants are going to be the sort of space-faring race you envision, or if they're going to retreat into artificial reality on just this one planet and never go anywhere else in the physical universe, or if we're going to destroy ourselves in a future war that leaves only cockroaches and scraps of plastic around. You're acting like there's an inevitable script we're following - there isn't and we're not.

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.

Making it atom by atom is easier? Easier than sending out automated mining machines to harvest it from the environment? Um...no.

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.

Some things are not possible. Not all problems have solutions, or solutions that you or I would like and throwing more money or scientists at the problem(s) won't change that.

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.

Again - "solving problems" doesn't automatically mean getting the answer you want. No matter how much resources and effort you throw into it.

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?

More time to party.

More time to relax with family or friends. More time to enjoy concerts or plays or the latest epic form of entertainment - or more time to create that epic entertainment.

More time for hobbies - maybe flint-knapping which, despite being very much an obsolete technology some people still take the time to master. More Japanese tea ceremonies. More flower-arranging. More breeding of gerbils and parakeets with color mutations in their fur/feathers.

As geeks or engineers it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that most people don't care about going into space, or to the stars, they have other interests and concerns.

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.

How so?

Is there a cosmic referee saying "oh no - you can't go back there! You have one and exactly one chance to pick up a rock, don't take it and you can never in the history of the universe go back and pick up that rock!"

If you're living in a solar system there is no reason not to leave the rocks where they are until you need them. It is the most efficient way to "store" them - just leave them where they are. The planets we know have been where they are for how long? How many billions of years? Oh, sure, you might need to act to avoid the occasional collision but it's not like Mars is going to bugger off to Cygnus or the Andromeda Galaxy next Tuesday!

When we mine, say, aluminum, we don't extract all the ore from the mine and store it somewhere THEN begin processing it, we take the ore out and process it as we need it. There's no need to move it or do anything with it until we're ready to do something with it. For matter your argument falls apart.

Now, with solar energy it's true what is not captured is "lost" to space, but unless you NEED the entire output of a star all at once there's no need to worry about that. It's like Niagara Falls - sure, a LOT of water is "wasted" as it goes over those falls without being harnessed to make electricity or used as drinking water or whatever but it's not necessary to capture it all. We could - we absolutely have the capability of capturing all that water and using it to drive turbines, but we have never bothered to do that even though people were proposing that as early as the late 19th Century. In part, it's because society thinks the falls are pretty and there's money made by hosting people who come just to look at them. Gee, maybe our descendants will like the look of natural planets and stars that aren't entirely encased in solar collectors.

It's because we don't automatically dismantle something like Niagara Falls and "make something useful" out of it that makes me question your assumption that we're going to inevitably dismantle entire solar systems for such a reason. Just because we can doesn't mean we will.

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.

Why do you assume it's ONLY the people who live there that will desire that? What, people won't be allowed to be tourists in your glorious future? How many millions of people every year visit National Parks, areas that are deliberately kept wild instead of developed into "something useful"?

There have been visitors to the US who have commented on the "waste" of something like Niagara Falls, who question why such a potentially useful waterfall is allowed to continue as it is, or why the protected forests are protected - it's a "waste" to leave a sequoia standing, look at all that useful wood! Why bother to have game preserves in Africa, don't you know how much meat is in an elephant, how many people it could feed?

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.

Living in a city is "the new normal" and yet millions of those urban dwellers support maintaining at least a portion of the Earth in a wild, undeveloped state. Some of them so they have a place that isn't a man-made city and some people of some ethical reason or some for some other reason which may be no more than "it's pretty" but humans can be whimsical like that.

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.

Yeah, I sort of don't want a mini-black hole in my backyard because they can be fucking dangerous. I also don't want to live downwind of a coal plant belching toxic smoke into the air, or next to a dump for nuclear waste. That's called "being sensible".

I don't see consuming lots of material and energy to replicate a living environment that already exists with no effort on our part as "efficient". There might be times and circumstances when doing that is desirable but that doesn't make it "more efficient".

I'm not a Luddite - that's my Amish neighbors down the road, although even they occasionally adopt new things. But just as I don't update my cell phone every six months, however much Apple would like me to do so, I don't see a need to adopt everything new simply because it's new. Your notion of an advanced civilization reminds me more of cancer than anything else, consuming everything in sight until it's gone and moving on to the next pile of resources.

I don't see supporting evidence that human civilization as a whole is going to keep going forward in leaps and bounds without end. The Concorde was supposed to herald a new era in faster transportation ("better" because it was faster) but apparently there's not sufficient interest for it and we no longer have civilian super-sonic transportation. Standard jets are, apparently, good enough so that's what we have. We could have more, we even did for awhile, but not any longer.

We could utilize every drop of water from Niagara Falls, but we don't.

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?

A lot of urbanization has been forced on people, it's far from always voluntary. A lot of people living in dense cities would like to live in less dense areas.

No doubt there are some people who would like to live in a space hab their entire lives. There are a lot of people who don't and won't even if they're born in one.

We evolved to live on the surface of a planet. That definitely has some drawbacks, but space is much, much more hostile to our living selves than most Earth environments. One thing living and working in places like Antarctica and Earth orbit has shown is that people are NOT adapted to such artificial environments which is why both of those places now put resources into growing plants in their living quarters, or providing lights that replicate sunlight during the antarctic winter. Even in cities our societies try to incorporate parks and green spaces because people are healthier and less likely to self-harm their neighborhoods with things like riots and crime.

Now, maybe in the future we'll genetically engineer ourselves to live in zero gravity and not need growing plants around us or a need for companionship that leads us to share our homes with dogs and cats. In which case we'll have two species of human and all bets are off because who the hell knows what Homo spacetraveler is going to do with the universe? Maybe he'll decide H. sapiens makes a good food source, who knows?

You can even leave some unpopulated as parks if that floats your boat.

Apparently that floats a LOT of peoples' boats, that's why National Parks are found all over the world these days. I think a larger fraction of humanity would vote for leaving some natural planets around to live on than you assume.

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.

In other words, when the cancer that is your space-faring civilization is done munching it's way through the sterile rocks of a solar system it will eat the living planets there as well and fuck the inhabitants. How... colonialist of you.

Funny, though - we DO have governments that protect the uncontacted tribes these days. We do have National Parks. We still have Niagara Falls being a giant waterfall.

Maybe we learned something in the last few centuries. Some of us at least.

So why are they already planning the next more powerful collider if this one is all the collider we'll ever need?

Because that's how high-energy physicists justify their paychecks.

But even if you design a collider that doesn't mean it will be built. It's getting harder to find funding for that sort of megaproject, just as it's hard to find funding for a lot of space projects. In reality, the "small fraction" is the number of people who want and seek such things, not the ones who don't, or even oppose them.

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?

Without FTL that's one fucking hell of a long commute to your "job", and just getting there would involve time spans that exceed the existence of any human civilizations we have any record of.

That's leaving aside how a wandering black hole or blowing up a star might fuck up the local celestial area. Wow, and I thought Superfund sites were bad....

Worst case you can use all that energy to build something cool or spell your name in the cosmic background radiation.

.... or you fuck up and turn the thing you're living on into a stranglet that eats you and your civilization in a fraction of a second and turns it into a "stranglet star".

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.

No, it's saying that because the Amish exist we should maintain parts of the planet that don't look like downtown Manhattan.

Actually, lots of people living in dense, urban downtowns support maintaining swathes of natural or near-natural landscape, even to the point of donating their own money to the cause on top of advocating that government use tax-money to protect such places.

I suspect your view is the minority here.

Nothing about the way things happen to be right now is sacred to me.

Yes, that is quite obvious.

Humans aren't meant to live on planets because we're not meant to do anything.

We're not meant to go into space, or build Dyson Spheres, or continue to exist beyond next week, either. We decide what we do, and as I have pointed out right now plenty of people have decided on different priorities than what you hold dear.

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.

Yeah, OK, but that does leave the question of where the fuck are we going to live? In junkyard of disassembled machine parts?

You are welcome to your beliefs, but just like high-energy particle physicists, if you want that new particle collider you're going to have convince the rest of us why we should fund your project and assure us we'll still have backyard next Tuesday even if something goes wrong. Most people don't care about your priorities. Maybe they should, but right now they don't.

Look, I'm not even your most hostile audience - I'm all in favor exploration for exploration's sake, more money for science, and getting at least some of us off this rock. If you can't convince me, though, good luck with the rest of the human race.

Maybe the reason the Federation doesn't have million-ship armadas and Dyson Spheres everywhere is because most of the people living in the Federation don't actually want that. I mean, the Klingons seem to want more bloodwine, prune juice, and bar fights. The humans seemed to like weird clothes fashions and restaurants with food made by people even when you can get whatever you want to eat out of a replicator. The Vulcans like ceremonies and philosophy. The Ferengi want to make money and research costs money. The Hortas just want to be left alone to eat rocks. Most people just don't seem to care about the things you do, even in the Federation.

Clearly, yes, science IS done in the Federation, including some very hazardous cutting-edge stuff.... but they also have FTL so they can do those experiments off where they won't pose a big danger to the rest of known civilizations. A civilization without FTL might be a tad reluctant for some types of experimentation because it's happening in the backyard and moving elsewhere would be difficult and time-consuming if possible at all. The limitation then becomes not money or energy but your fellow human beings.

[Broomstick]

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.

Except we have no idea if those technologies will ever be developed - like flying cars. It's the future, dude, where's my flying car?

I doubt naturally breeding new humans is going to entirely out of fashion if for no other reason than sex is fun and evolved to make more life forms. It's preventing natural reproduction that takes effort. Fucking is easier than cloning. Probably more fun for most people, too.

Creating new minds in some other way? Then you're not talking about human beings any more. Who knows what a different species would decide, or how they would act?

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.

It might kill us all off.

As I keep saying, there is no guarantee we'll still be here next Tuesday.

I am saying that we have actual examples from past human history of human societies taking some pretty draconian actions to limit their populations. We also have examples of societies that didn't do that, like Rappa Nui, and that got pretty damn ugly. There are also examples of abandoned ruins where we don't know what the hell happened.

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.

If there's infinite space to move into then those who don't want to be part of the cancer civilization can just keep moving further outwards. But you still haven't made the case they we're going to turn into a cancer civilization that consumes everything in our wake. We're humans, not locusts. Why would we suddenly start acting like a locust swarm?

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.

We preserve the SYSTEM, not the individual particles that make it up, any more than you preserve every cell in your own body indefinitely. You are not individual cells, you are the conglomeration that forms a living system.

Will an immortal or a human born in the orbit of a distant star feel the same way that you do?

Who knows?

I value flowers not because they are enduring but because they are beautiful, even if for only a short time. I have valued the lives of my pets even though I have a vastly longer lifespan than they do.

There are entire religions that are built around impermanence. The Japanese elevate the appreciation of the ephemeral to entire esthetics: mono no aware and wabi-sabi being the two I'm aware of and there might well be more.

For all we know immortals might be more into this sort of thing than we mortals are. After all, why would immortals care about building eternal monuments when they're going to be around forever? It's transient types that seem obsessed with enduring piles of rock.

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?

Can't prove anything about the future, if we could, we could actually predict it and we can't.

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.

Well, hell, I've never seen the ocean in real life but I still give a damn about it. Some of us care about stuff we don't actually directly experience, for all sorts of reasons.

Also, may I ask what makes a skyscraper 'unnatural' but a bird's nest 'natural'?

One is built by human beings and one is not.

Which, admittedly, is a limited view of "natural" but for this discussion it works pretty well.

Here's another way of talking about it: building a nest, and activities surrounding it, are instinctive in birds. Put suitable materials in their living area and they'll start manipulating them and making the materials for nest building even if they don't complete the nest. Humans, on the other hand, do not spontaneously start mixing concrete and fashioning I-beams and rebar if you give them a pile of sand and another pile of iron ore. That takes an entire society and specialists and ancillary support tech.

How about a sandcastle and a sand dune?

A sandcastle is produced by the deliberate manipulation of sand by a human being. A sand dune is made by non-human movement of sand.

A natural chemical versus a molecular copy made in a lab? Where do you draw the line and why does the line even matter?

Well, to start, making it in a lab in a manner that results in toxic shit getting into the water people drink does matter. At least to the people drinking that water. So let's throw something in there about not harming other people, just for a start (we might later on add "harming other life forms", too, but we'll start with people).

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.

Only if space actually does, somehow, provide infinite resources and energy... but you haven't proved that, either.

Certainly, without FTL we're pretty much limited to the solar system, and that does not have infinite resources. It has a lot of resources, but not infinite. Your cancer civilization will, eventually, consume everything then starve/choke to death on waste like any other cancer.

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?

Assuming we're talking about human beings? While I find it morally repugnant genocide is not off the table. There have been societies utterly exterminated in history, and for lot less compelling reasons than survival in the face of a group that is acting like a cancer or locust swarm, intent on consuming everything you have and leaving you to die.

In a universe without FTL, a cancer society wanting to bugger off elsewhere to a different solar system will probably be let go.... and its remnants exterminated in the home system. If they want to stay and eat everyone else? Then a fight to the death might be on the table.

[Broomstick]

To Broomstick I pose these three challenges:

1) Define natural.

See the post just before this one where I actually address this. I see no reason to repeat myself.

I am using "natural" for short hand for "processes that are not driven by human intellect or activities" which is a perfectly accepted use of the term in ordinary English. I am doing enough typing, it is counter-productive to replace one word with a ten word phrase that would just make my posts more convoluted without adding additional meaning.

[Broomstick]

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.

Well, if that's what your super breeders are doing, then it's easy enough to stop them. Ban cloning. Ban the ways they are stripping those children of the ability to choose for themselves.

Why does this group even want to breed so fast ?

In our world, when humans act like that usually they say God told them to do that - not that I expect Jub would accept that explanation but from what I can see that usually is the justification given.

You're missing the point entirely.

The argument I'm making is that, unless they are actively being suppressed, Trek should have had a population explosion coinciding with the industrialization of space because in every other such case in human history we see this pattern of expansion. Hence Trek should have massive populations and the likely reason for them not having such population explosions among any species is almost certainly suppression that the behest of UFP. Such suppression makes Trek a non-Utopia.

Except.... the real world provides counter-examples.

Over and over, when you increase the educational level of women they produce fewer children. When you give women control over their own reproduction they choose to have fewer children. What does Star Trek have in abundance? Educated people and advanced medical technology.

Yes, there are a few people like the Duggers who choose to turn a human vagina into an infant slip-n-slide but they're such outliers that if it weren't for immigration from other places the population of the US would be slowly contracting, not expanding, despite abundant space and resources.

People will in such advanced societies choose to have children. I don't see it as automatic they'd have some exponential expansion of population.

There's also the fact that Trek has provable and solvable resource scarcity that can logically be solved by harnessing more stellar output via means of building a Dyson swarm or some other means of energy collection. Some of these scarcities are phosphate (one possible reason why colonization of planets in Trek seems limited to very low populations), latinum (considered rare enough to be used as a unit of trade), dilithium (stable enough to be minable, rare enough to be sought after, a possible bottleneck for expansion). We also see resource scarcity on DS9 both the station and in the show as the Federation struggles to defend itself due to a lack of industrial capacity and population.

Well, gee, maybe the Federation has a "low" population because they don't force women to churn out a baby a year for 40 years each? They let women decide how many kids they're going to have, and the answer ranges from "none" to "many" with most around just a couple or a few?

You seem to want to model human populations like locust swarms. We're not locusts.

The only societies that seem to push for churning out as many babies as physically possible are early agricultural societies, which also tend to have high infant mortality and a lot of warfare. Otherwise, there always seem to be mechanisms to limit child production whether those are scientific (modern birth control) or social (abstinence, infanticide, etc.) The Federation doesn't have a high infant mortality rate, and the wars tend to be on the borders and not constant.

In addition, we see that space, or at least control over certain sectors of space, are issues for all parties in Star Trek. Given that any species we see could fit many times their stated population around a single well-utilized star this lack of appropriate infrastructure has likely caused multiple megadeaths given the scale of the conflicts. So why doesn't the UFP push for greater utilization of existing space as a means of conflict resolution?

For all we know they do - we just don't see it. Certainly we do see star systems with megastructures. But not everyone in Trek is at the same tech level. Some species just don't seem to reproduce as fast as others - Vulcans, for example, seemed to have evolved towards less rapid breeding than humans (that every seven years thing) possibly because their resource-poor planet drove them towards towards it and now they can't outbreed other species.

Maybe there are limitations on building Dyson Swarms we're just not aware of, any more than stone age hunters would be aware of the problems around nuclear power.

How can such a society be a utopia if it doesn't utilize the resources at its disposal to alleviate major issues such as those outlined above?

Because... they're using a different definition of utopia than you are?

Also keep in mind that no one is portraying the Klingon Empire as utopia. DS9 is outside the Federation, or right on the border. The Ferengi use latinum, but they're not part of the Federation, either.

The UFP hasn't taken over the galaxy. It hasn't even taken over the Alpha Quadrant. It's like looking at the Colonies in North America in 1750 and asking "why haven't they taken over North America yet?"

Why would they need to? Trek's Sol system is so under inhabited that they haven't colonized prime spots like Mercury and Venus yet. There's going to be enough material that you could get to

Um.... tip for you. Don't go into selling real estate if you can describe Mercury and Venus as "prime" spots for colonization....

Well, if that's what your super breeders are doing, then it's easy enough to stop them. Ban cloning.

Such a group could continue to use cloning a ban is merely sternly asking for them to stop. I would also argue that using force to stop them when provably the Sol system has room and resources for quintillions of humans is a fascist and inherently evil act that goes against all visions of the UFP in Trek's canon. Hence why it's such an interesting hypothetical to discuss.

Well... except for those genetically engineered people who tried to take over Earth and killed a lot of normal people sort of gave them an allergy to that sort of gene-manipulation. And the Borg is just making them itch even more with that allergy.

Also, we've seen more than once in Trek that while cloning is fine for awhile you can not do it indefinitely - see the episode "Up the Long Ladder".

There do seem to be reasons in Trek not to encourage cloning, at least among humans, based on both technical limitations and human history in that universe.

Why does this group even want to breed so fast ?

To expand and colonize, to exert political dominance, as a social experiment, to force another group to action, religious belief, insanity, corruption by an outside intelligence, because it's an AI programmed to do so... It's Trek take your pick.

All of which might also be reasons they DON'T breed like locusts....

[Jub]

That seems like an awful lot of work

Does something count as work if it's done via just intelligent enough AI and basically automated to the point where an engineer just needs to make sure it doesn't disassemble anything it shouldn't and that any check engine light warnings get investigated?

- you could just leave a star as-is and tap what you need as you need it. Due to entropy converting solar energy into another form for storage and back to something you use again is going to involve loss along the way.

That's only short term though. That star won't always be there.

Not to mention a black hole getting loose - which is almost inevitable given a long enough time scale - is going to be a very destructive force, even more so than an active star. Certainly if you have an application that requires a black hole that's one thing but just making an storing them? Sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

An orbiting body, which is what a small black hole is, doesn't just 'get loose' it sits in a predictable orbit and can even have a fleet of warning beacons orbiting it assuming its large enough.

Not to mention a "small black hole" used to provide gravity is going to result in some very weird gradients. Not sure that would be comfortable to live with. Or, if you're at a great enough distance that tidal forces aren't turning you into a strand of spaghetti I'm not sure if you're going to get any sort of gravity useful for, say, keeping a human body healthy.

If you build a sphere around a black hole there is no gradient, it'd be the same as if you packed the middle of you hab with hydrogen, iron, silicon, etc. as mass is mass as far as gravity is concerned. The plus side with a black hole is that it functions as a source of power and gravity.

You just defined the Borg.

I just described a species that, for the most part, nobody willingly fucks with. If they weren't lobotomized by Voyager and knew what diplomacy was they'd be very well setup indeed.

Frankly, a civilization that is dismantling entire star systems to build "millions" of each of a several types of ships is downright terrifying to someone outside that civilization, it would look like a plague or a blight, consuming everything in sight. That's not exploration that's consumption.

Anything outside of it will fall into one of two camps, both unworthy of consideration. Anything smaller than them that isn't expanding faster than they are will never catch up to that civilization's manufacturing rate and thus can not be a threat while anything larger has already done the same thing and, depending on the scale difference, may already control several galaxies worth of stuff. In either case, the difference in scale between groups means that the smaller group WILL be at the mercy of the larger one.

What if the desire is not to work so damn hard, kick back on a tropical beach, and chill? Especially if there's a planet where those exist already and you don't have to bother making them?

Who's working? Even in Trek they have automation and AI that means human labor is basically unnecessary except to make requests and to keep things running smoothly.

Your vision is nothing more than a rewrite of "Manifest Destiny" which was never universal at any time and is not inevitable.

So humans didn't start out in one geographical location and spread over the entire planet in a way that no other species has accomplished then...

We don't know if our descendants are going to be the sort of space-faring race you envision, or if they're going to retreat into artificial reality on just this one planet and never go anywhere else in the physical universe, or if we're going to destroy ourselves in a future war that leaves only cockroaches and scraps of plastic around. You're acting like there's an inevitable script we're following - there isn't and we're not.

If we do the VR thing we're doomed to a swift, relatively speaking, death. Is a society doomed to death in a few hundred million years really a utopia next to one that can offer all the same experiences and which can live on until the death of star formation?

Making it atom by atom is easier? Easier than sending out automated mining machines to harvest it from the environment? Um...no.

Consider this. You're setting up a solar system for people who want it 'natural' so you don't want to cut up too many rocky planets while getting things ready for moving day. You could fish it out of the system's star, but the spectrograph shows that's phosphorous poor. What it does have is a lot of materials that can be used to set up particle colliders, much of which can be bombarded into phosphorus.

Or consider an even farther future. There are very few active stars left, rocky bodies are so scattered that it costs more to go grab them than it does to harvest the energy from a black hole and manufacture new elements from 'nothing'. Think long term, like trillions of years long, and this setup makes more and more sense.

Some things are not possible. Not all problems have solutions, or solutions that you or I would like and throwing more money or scientists at the problem(s) won't change that.

Prove it. Show me a naturally occurring element or compound that MUST be impossible to create in a lab rather than being merely extremely difficult to create in a lab.

More time to party.

A-U-T-O-M-A-T-I-O-N

Is there a cosmic referee saying "oh no - you can't go back there! You have one and exactly one chance to pick up a rock, don't take it and you can never in the history of the universe go back and pick up that rock!"

YES. At the scales and time frames, I'm planning for the expansion of the universe will literally make going back for anything impossible and all it takes to not be fucked eventually is planning and automation.

Now, with solar energy it's true what is not captured is "lost" to space, but unless you NEED the entire output of a star all at once there's no need to worry about that. It's like Niagara Falls - sure, a LOT of water is "wasted" as it goes over those falls without being harnessed to make electricity or used as drinking water or whatever but it's not necessary to capture it all. We could - we absolutely have the capability of capturing all that water and using it to drive turbines, but we have never bothered to do that even though people were proposing that as early as the late 19th Century. In part, it's because society thinks the falls are pretty and there's money made by hosting people who come just to look at them. Gee, maybe our descendants will like the look of natural planets and stars that aren't entirely encased in solar collectors.

How much beauty has been lost to climate change because we'd rather burn coal than destroy one beautiful landmark?

Why do you assume it's ONLY the people who live there that will desire that? What, people won't be allowed to be tourists in your glorious future? How many millions of people every year visit National Parks, areas that are deliberately kept wild instead of developed into "something useful"?

How many fractions of 1% of our planet's population visit a park is irrelevant on the scale of a galaxy. We could leave that percentage of a percentage of systems untouched as parks if there's a desire to visit such spaces. Converting most systems to one thing doesn't stop us from having some systems kept as parks.

Living in a city is "the new normal" and yet millions of those urban dwellers support maintaining at least a portion of the Earth in a wild, undeveloped state. Some of them so they have a place that isn't a man-made city and some people of some ethical reason or some for some other reason which may be no more than "it's pretty" but humans can be whimsical like that.

Quote me saying that every single atom in the universe must be captured, processed, and consumed. Just because I advocate for large scale construction doesn't mean I'm saying we can't leave areas untouched for the vanishingly small fraction of people likely to care.

Yeah, I sort of don't want a mini-black hole in my backyard because they can be fucking dangerous.

You keep asserting this but have yet to prove it. Show me the math that says an artificial black hole is any more dangerous than the equivalent mass of anything else.

I don't see supporting evidence that human civilization as a whole is going to keep going forward in leaps and bounds without end. The Concorde was supposed to herald a new era in faster transportation ("better" because it was faster) but apparently there's not sufficient interest for it and we no longer have civilian super-sonic transportation. Standard jets are, apparently, good enough so that's what we have. We could have more, we even did for awhile, but not any longer.

Your argument is that *checks notes* one type of technology failed to capture a sustainable market share in a capitalist system all progress doomed to reach a wall... Please explain why this paradigm MUST apply to space-based post-scarcity societies?

A lot of urbanization has been forced on people, it's far from always voluntary. A lot of people living in dense cities would like to live in less dense areas.

No doubt there are some people who would like to live in a space hab their entire lives. There are a lot of people who don't and won't even if they're born in one.

You keep asserting this. Show me the percentages that make this kind of thinking a hard roadblock to the type of progress I favor.

We evolved to live on the surface of a planet. <snip>

This is a solved issue in the fictional universe we're talking about. They even have stuff I won't assume we'll ever have like artificial gravity, shields, replicators, transporters, and FTL travel.

You keep mistaking something being difficult to get started for something impossible as if Sci-Fi isn't about exploring the difficult.

Apparently that floats a LOT of peoples' boats, that's why National Parks are found all over the world these days. I think a larger fraction of humanity would vote for leaving some natural planets around to live on than you assume.

I'm making a hard sell case for a level of automation that you feel uncomfortable with. I'm arguing that there is a purpose to a Dyson swarm, that star lifting and galaxy sculpting is a smart idea, that living on planets is a wasteful luxury but I'm not saying that we ignore all dissent. Instead, I'm saying that it is likely that a demographic shift and emerging technologies will likely erode your way of thinking into irrelevance, just like the idea of women having to swim in dresses for reasons of modesty has been driven into irrelevance in many societies.

In other words, when the cancer that is your space-faring civilization is done munching it's way through the sterile rocks of a solar system it will eat the living planets there as well and fuck the inhabitants. How... colonialist of you.

Funny, though - we DO have governments that protect the uncontacted tribes these days. We do have National Parks. We still have Niagara Falls being a giant waterfall.

Maybe we learned something in the last few centuries. Some of us at least.

How far do our responsibilities extend? When Yellowstone does blow and if we should survive such an event, should we attempt to rebuild it as it was, or do we accept the destruction and mass extinction as natural and thus good? Do we save uncontacted tribes from such events or do we let them perish 'naturally'?

Because that's how high-energy physicists justify their paychecks.

But even if you design a collider that doesn't mean it will be built. It's getting harder to find funding for that sort of megaproject, just as it's hard to find funding for a lot of space projects. In reality, the "small fraction" is the number of people who want and seek such things, not the ones who don't, or even oppose them.

Why are you tying innovation to the economy when one of the joys of expansion into space is the ability to break free of such systems? You seem to think that space capitalism is necessary even in a series that states that it wants to divorce itself from such things.

Without FTL that's one fucking hell of a long commute to your "job", and just getting there would involve time spans that exceed the existence of any human civilizations we have any record of.

That's leaving aside how a wandering black hole or blowing up a star might fuck up the local celestial area. Wow, and I thought Superfund sites were bad....

If you're an immortal being, via whatever means, and you can bring many of the comforts of home with you how is this any different than waiting for anything else?

You keep asserting that wandering black holes are a major hazard, please show me the orbital math that shows this to be the case. The same goes for blowing up stars at safe distances, even though I never mentioned doing such a thing...

.... or you fuck up and turn the thing you're living on into a stranglet that eats you and your civilization in a fraction of a second and turns it into a "stranglet star".

We have no proof that such a substance exists and our theories that predict its existence also predict its exponential spread. So either we're already fucked or there's no risk.

No, it's saying that because the Amish exist we should maintain parts of the planet that don't look like downtown Manhattan.

Actually, lots of people living in dense, urban downtowns support maintaining swathes of natural or near-natural landscape, even to the point of donating their own money to the cause on top of advocating that government use tax-money to protect such places.

I suspect your view is the minority here.

You do realize that you can have parks, waterfalls, and the like on a sufficiently advanced habitat right?

Except we have no idea if those technologies will ever be developed - like flying cars. It's the future, dude, where's my flying car?

We don't know if cloning and external wombs will exist in spite of them already existing...?

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/1542 ... erm-infant

I trust that you don't need a source for cloning.

I doubt naturally breeding new humans is going to entirely out of fashion if for no other reason than sex is fun and evolved to make more life forms. It's preventing natural reproduction that takes effort. Fucking is easier than cloning. Probably more fun for most people, too.

Where did I say that it would? I'm presenting this as a way a small group of people can literally breed themselves into a majority.

Creating new minds in some other way? Then you're not talking about human beings any more. Who knows what a different species would decide, or how they would act?

So like Data or the EMH in Trek, the series we started out talking about, then? Hmm.

It might kill us all off.

As I keep saying, there is no guarantee we'll still be here next Tuesday.

I am saying that we have actual examples from past human history of human societies taking some pretty draconian actions to limit their populations. We also have examples of societies that didn't do that, like Rappa Nui, and that got pretty damn ugly. There are also examples of abandoned ruins where we don't know what the hell happened.

These are all confined to very limited pools of resources compared to what I want. Show that your ideas hold true at larger scales.

Keep in mind, I'm not arguing that these policies are inevitable. I'm arguing that the factors that may lead to them are common enough that I would expect to see policies inhibiting them in works of science fiction where they haven't occurred.

If there's infinite space to move into then those who don't want to be part of the cancer civilization can just keep moving further outwards. But you still haven't made the case they we're going to turn into a cancer civilization that consumes everything in our wake. We're humans, not locusts. Why would we suddenly start acting like a locust swarm?

*Looks at climate change and current human industry* Why indeed.

We preserve the SYSTEM, not the individual particles that make it up, any more than you preserve every cell in your own body indefinitely. You are not individual cells, you are the conglomeration that forms a living system.

We aren't though. We're preventing its direct destruction at our own hands but doing nothing about the countless other threats we ourselves are causing let alone any external threats. If your argument is that we should protect things as they are because we enjoy them then you have to admit that we SUCK at it.

My system could allow us hundreds of Yellowstones in habitats not to mention the simulated versions. Why is one version of greater value than the other?

Who knows?

I value flowers not because they are enduring but because they are beautiful, even if for only a short time. I have valued the lives of my pets even though I have a vastly longer lifespan than they do.

There are entire religions that are built around impermanence. The Japanese elevate the appreciation of the ephemeral to entire esthetics: mono no aware and wabi-sabi being the two I'm aware of and there might well be more.

For all we know immortals might be more into this sort of thing than we mortals are. After all, why would immortals care about building eternal monuments when they're going to be around forever? It's transient types that seem obsessed with enduring piles of rock.

You're ignoring that such groups are unlikely to ever control the territory needed to be relevant. Just as such groups haven't halted progress in reality, such groups are unlikely to stop it in fiction. It doesn't matter if they exist when all it takes is a fraction of a fraction to want my vision to overrule them.

Can't prove anything about the future, if we could, we could actually predict it and we can't.

Then posit a scenario where such a group is politically powerful enough to prevent such expansion for the lifespan of humanity and our genetic descendants. My argument isn't about inevitability its about probability and Star Trek as skipped past a lot of the hurdles that may stop IRL humanity from getting to where I envision us.

Well, hell, I've never seen the ocean in real life but I still give a damn about it. Some of us care about stuff we don't actually directly experience, for all sorts of reasons.

Would you feel as strongly about it if it wasn't essential to life as you know it?

One is built by human beings and one is not.

Which, admittedly, is a limited view of "natural" but for this discussion it works pretty well.

Here's another way of talking about it: building a nest, and activities surrounding it, are instinctive in birds. Put suitable materials in their living area and they'll start manipulating them and making the materials for nest building even if they don't complete the nest. Humans, on the other hand, do not spontaneously start mixing concrete and fashioning I-beams and rebar if you give them a pile of sand and another pile of iron ore. That takes an entire society and specialists and ancillary support tech.

And yet our instincts lead us to *gestures with a hand* this?

Well, to start, making it in a lab in a manner that results in toxic shit getting into the water people drink does matter. At least to the people drinking that water. So let's throw something in there about not harming other people, just for a start (we might later on add "harming other life forms", too, but we'll start with people).

You've added a biased assumption to the equation. Answer the original question please.

Only if space actually does, somehow, provide infinite resources and energy... but you haven't proved that, either.

Certainly, without FTL we're pretty much limited to the solar system, and that does not have infinite resources. It has a lot of resources, but not infinite. Your cancer civilization will, eventually, consume everything then starve/choke to death on waste like any other cancer.

That's only true if growth and consumption are the goal and not merely a means to the desired end. My vision has the end goal of stability for as many living conscious beings as we can provide space for as long as physically possible. That vision requires as many resources as possible but can be frivolous with them until such a time as they become scarce and even then due to sheer scale and planning will have even 'waste' materials stockpiled for when they may be required.

Assuming we're talking about human beings? While I find it morally repugnant genocide is not off the table. There have been societies utterly exterminated in history, and for lot less compelling reasons than survival in the face of a group that is acting like a cancer or locust swarm, intent on consuming everything you have and leaving you to die.

Except that none of what I'm saying does any more to doom humanity than simply stay on Earth until an extinction event happens does. Consumption of asteroids and comets, as an example, actually increase the mean time between extinction events as they relate to the Earth.

Your thinking is too rooted in the cause and effect loop that consumption causes in a closed system such as the Earth, or even Sol, but fails to account for vastly increased resource availability and a lack of an environment to poison.

See the post just before this one where I actually address this. I see no reason to repeat myself.

I am using "natural" for short hand for "processes that are not driven by human intellect or activities" which is a perfectly accepted use of the term in ordinary English. I am doing enough typing, it is counter-productive to replace one word with a ten word phrase that would just make my posts more convoluted without adding additional meaning.

What if there is no free will. Doesn’t that change human behavior from unnatural to natural? This is why I posed my challenge in the first place. You cannot ignore the other parts because they make your definition invalid.

Except.... the real world provides counter-examples.

Over and over, when you increase the educational level of women they produce fewer children. When you give women control over their own reproduction they choose to have fewer children. What does Star Trek have in abundance? Educated people and advanced medical technology.

Yes, there are a few people like the Duggers who choose to turn a human vagina into an infant slip-n-slide but they're such outliers that if it weren't for immigration from other places the population of the US would be slowly contracting, not expanding, despite abundant space and resources.

People will in such advanced societies choose to have children. I don't see it as automatic they'd have some exponential expansion of population.

Yes, this has such a halting effect on growth that we *checks notes* continue to expand both in terms of population but also energy usage and resource extraction. What exactly has stopped again?

Well, gee, maybe the Federation has a "low" population because they don't force women to churn out a baby a year for 40 years each? They let women decide how many kids they're going to have, and the answer ranges from "none" to "many" with most around just a couple or a few?

You seem to want to model human populations like locust swarms. We're not locusts.

The only societies that seem to push for churning out as many babies as physically possible are early agricultural societies, which also tend to have high infant mortality and a lot of warfare. Otherwise, there always seem to be mechanisms to limit child production whether those are scientific (modern birth control) or social (abstinence, infanticide, etc.) The Federation doesn't have a high infant mortality rate, and the wars tend to be on the borders and not constant.

And yet humans have spread in a way that nothing else has and reached populations that no other species in our weight class have even approached. No other single species on this planet has expanded as we have and whenever we've encountered an open space we've attempted to expand into it. Why do you feel the space will have any less expansion than other events in our history?

For all we know they do - we just don't see it. Certainly we do see star systems with megastructures. But not everyone in Trek is at the same tech level. Some species just don't seem to reproduce as fast as others - Vulcans, for example, seemed to have evolved towards less rapid breeding than humans (that every seven years thing) possibly because their resource-poor planet drove them towards towards it and now they can't outbreed other species.

Maybe there are limitations on building Dyson Swarms we're just not aware of, any more than stone age hunters would be aware of the problems around nuclear power.

Can you posit what these problems might be?

Because... they're using a different definition of utopia than you are?

Also keep in mind that no one is portraying the Klingon Empire as utopia. DS9 is outside the Federation, or right on the border. The Ferengi use latinum, but they're not part of the Federation, either.

The UFP hasn't taken over the galaxy. It hasn't even taken over the Alpha Quadrant. It's like looking at the Colonies in North America in 1750 and asking "why haven't they taken over North America yet?"

How can a society be a Utopia if it remains threatened at every turn and if it is not using its resources to deal with these threats? You've brought up the Culture universe before, examine closely how they handle threats and expand their influence and compare that to Trek. Then examine which society is more utopian.

Um.... tip for you. Don't go into selling real estate if you can describe Mercury and Venus as "prime" spots for colonization....

They're better than 99% of the solar system. Is the top 1% of real estate not prime?

Well... except for those genetically engineered people who tried to take over Earth and killed a lot of normal people sort of gave them an allergy to that sort of gene-manipulation. And the Borg is just making them itch even more with that allergy.

Also, we've seen more than once in Trek that while cloning is fine for awhile you can not do it indefinitely - see the episode "Up the Long Ladder".

Those situations only apply to idiots. There's no reason that you cannot correct the genetic issues in cloned tissue given the technology we've seen available in other Trek media. We've literally seen them give anti-radiation pills and create viable DNA from energy and it goes without saying that they have the computing power to store genetic sequences as well as to analyze new ones.

What Trek writers think of as 'challenging' situations are merely the small-minded fears of society reflected in a new setting.

All of which might also be reasons they DON'T breed like locusts....

The issue is that it only takes one such group to crop up to cause an issue. Is Trek still a Utopia if they have to hold peridoic purges to keep to near zero population growth?