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  • We are very much on Trek. For reference, check out season 3 episodes 11 and 12 of Deep Space Nine. These episodes take place on Earth in 2024, roughly six months ago. It was always clearly laid out in Trek that their path to utopia was paved with war and hardship.

    Well that and the fact that our first contact in Trek is with a peaceful but vastly superior race. We had everything to gain by creating an alliance and could have easily been wiped out by Klingons or Romulans if we didn't.

  • No, sorry, we're going for Neuromancer style corpo control, possibly with the veneer of democratic republics. No Jedi for you, best we can do is... Well, have you read Snow Crash?

  • "Could" is a very strong word with lots of assumptions.

    Have you never read anything from antiquity? Even the Bible is a good start, you see the stories of how humanity has always been, and will be for a long time to come still.

    Though it's easily arguable humanity has already come a long way, and continues to improve (though non-linearly, naturally). Just your post here demonstrates this. You, me, and a bunch of other people, from anywhere in the world, are discussing these ideas, practically in real time. This was impossible as recently as 35 years ago.

    Worldwide privation (notably starvation) has dropped 30%+ in the last 10 years.

    The difference from my parent's generation, to me, in the west is staggering. Infant and mother mortality dropped a staggering 90% from their birth to mine. They grew up always hungry, I did not. They saved everything: pieces of wire, string, old worn out parts, etc, because even if you had money, that stuff wasn't necessarily even in the store. While I can order just about anything, from anywhere in the world, and have it in two days. They couldn't get air mail across the Atlantic that fast. As an example, during WWII, they couldn't move all the soldier's homeward-bound mail, so they microfilmed it all in Britain, shipped the film back, and re-printed it there to be mailed. Today we can ship almost anything by plane to much of the world.

51 comments