Realizing a Star Trek Future (Part 1)

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At the time of writing, humanity celebrates its 60th anniversity of human spaceflight and an experimental helicopter prepares for its first flight on another planet.

I wanted to take a moment to not only reflect on how far we’ve come, but also contemplate on where we should be going from here.

I don’t intend this post to be a persuasive essay; rather, more of a high-level technical specification (with commentary) for building a post-scarcity civilization that can someday scale to a space-faring one.

The moral imperative of this post is that we should embrace humanism - the philosophy that values and celebrates the best of what humanity can be.^[1] If we’re to develop new technological capabilities, enabling novel ways in which we venture into the cosmos, which is arguably inevitable, then we ought to bring with us nothing short of the most admirable traits of humanity.

Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, told actor (now director) Jonathan Frakes, "In the 24th century…​ There will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all the children will know how to read."

Roddenberry’s vision of the future is one based on the philosophy of humanism.

We should avoid a dystopia - a future in which we’ve overstimulated our dopamine sensors and deprioritized environmental issues, but advanced private/commercial spacetravel - to the extent that you could afford to go. i.e., Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994.^[2]

Like it or not, we all have a moral imperative to share this rock floating through space, which we call "Earth".

In order to become a society that embraces humanism, it may be useful to know how to build a society. Consider the following thought experiment…​ You’ve just been elected leader of the new world (congrats!). Your first task on the job is to establish a set of "fair and just" policies for how society will operate. Where do you start?

Political philosopher, John Rawls, may argue it is virtually impossible, since creating a completely "fair and just" society will require a "veil of ignorance" of ones personal identity, as to deter bias in the policy formation process.^[3] Perhaps you consider the basic needs of a human: food, energy, clean water, garabage management, sewage treatment, and shelter. What would it require to provide every human being with these needs? How do you accommodate for those who have special needs and/or disabilities? What mechanisms will we use to produce and deliver those needs?

Designing a post-scarcity society is a necessary prerequisite to realizing the fundamental vision of Star Trek. Markets will emerge out of virtually every society, and in doing so, they will run into the issue of scarcity. Historically speaking, scarcity has brought about war, famine, disease, greed, and (arguably) capitalism, but I digress…​ Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which goods and services that provide basic needs are produced in surplus and distributed with minimal to no human labor.^[4][5]

The 24th-century society of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has been labeled a post-scarcity society, due to the ability of the fictional "replicator" technology, with the capability of instantaneously synthesizing almost anything from a ships replicator reserves.^[6]