That’s true - all the ensigns could just live in tower-blocks, each in their own holodeck. Man, you can get to some real dark shit fast when you start to game-out the world that Trek posits…
Still, I always thought it was funny the number of people living super rural lives all across the galaxy in TNG… But I think it has more to do with budget constraints for set design more than any in-world reason
ETA: Then again, its hard to gauge how rare the holo-suite / holodecks are… Would everyone have one? In DS9 there seems to be a real constraints on their usage… But maybe in the post TNG era federation they are a dime a dozen. There’s just never a coherent explanation for how resources are distributed, even in this post-scarcity world. Anyway, fun to think about.
Seems very reminiscent of the Marvel/Star Wars films, which I think Producer Alex Kurtzman (who laments that Star Trek isn’t attractive enough to children) would be very proud of. Trek gets it’s nostalgia road show treatment, with familiar characters I’ve never really wanted to see in their geriatric years tugging at my heart strings by popping up in unfamiliar circumstances. I guess that’s fun, but it’s not really what I want from Star Trek and the trailer doesn’t promise much else.
I guess the argument is it would be more expensive to show Picard in an assisted-living group home in Paris, complete with patio, skycar parking lot, and the Starbucks down the street
They’d have to build everything from scratch, or fake it with CGI
“M. Picard, your application to maintain residency of your family’s winery and to oversee the vineyard has been approved. Considering your genealogical attachment as well as the service you have performed for the United Federation of Planets, the Terran Department of Land Management (Europe) would be honoured.”
“Mr. Riker, thanks to your service and your proposal for stewardship, your offer to assume residency in the farm has been approved. We are always grateful to see such dedication to maintaining the pristine nature, joined with your ideas for keeping certain historical practices alive. This particular farm had been unoccupied for far too long. The Terran Department of Land Management (North America) thanks you.”
I think the trailer has a CBS All Access splash, and a date. The release date on Netflix might be different, and Netflix would like a Netflix logo over it in countries where they will distribute it.
So to the extent that releasing an Internet streaming service geolocked makes any sense having trials for things on those services makes sense as well. Things that make less sense to me is geolocking streaming services (sure, local laws, blah-blah, but come on, CBS is big enough to figure that stuff out, and maybe CBS foolishly sold rights for “too many” of it’s properties in some countries…so what, just launch with the subset you actually have and set prices accordingly)…and not releasing trailers for all locales at the same time. Also geo locked videos should have a way to specify “equivalent videos in other geos” (“should” as in “would be a good idea if they would”, not “technically feasible, so I bet they do it already”)
In ST:TNG S1 they were portrayed as a very new technology, or at least new to Picard, so at least brand new to starships, and new enough that he hadn’t encountered one prior to joining star fleet (or even on shore leave).
In a society that has “done away with the evils of money” I can’t say “I imagine the prices of brand new technologies drop rapidly”, I’ll have to go with “I imagine brand new technologies become more common, going from rare to common place in a few decades”
As for distribution of resources, yeah, Star Trek just glosses over that. It is a lot easier to declare money bad, and say we found a better way then to actually come up with a better way and talk about it in a way that doesn’t make a TV show either boring or rapidly incomprehensible. (not impossible: I imagine “down and out in the magic kingdom” as a thing that could be a mini-series, except clearing the rights would be impossible unless Disney actually wanted it; and um…Oriville at least had a few brief things to say about how a no-money economy works…but it failed to talk about why “real” food would be preferable to replicated food…)
Yes I think so (in this fictional universe). One assumption I always made though, is that the holo-decks/suites take an immense amount of power, since they seem to require a warp core to operate. Even in the post-money world, there would still be scarcity based on the amount of raw resources available to power the core, especially if you are in a remote location (Voyager kinda shows this). Within the heart of the federation though, it would seem that by the time of this Picard series, holodecks could be commonplace. There’s so many episodes that suggest the holodeck is dangerous when it becomes a replacement for everyday life that I have to assume there would be tensions in the society as a result…
Well said. I think they do enough hand-waving to make the fiction enjoyable, and to me thinking about how it might all work is a secondary pleasure. That the world of Star Trek hangs together fairly well is amazing and what makes it so enduring, even if it might be getting long in the tooth at this point.
I’m not so sure Trek hangs together for me, but it doesn’t get in the way of me really enjoying it. I like the bright outlook for the future, even if in many cases it has to do extreme hand waving. I’m also a fan of a lot of works with a less bright outlook. The (real) world is vast, lots of room for vastly different stories.
I like the bright outlook for the future, even if in many cases it has to do extreme hand waving. I’m also a fan of a lot of works with a less bright outlook. The (real) world is vast, lots of room for vastly different stories.