Here's a discussion starter: If you could take any technology from Star Trek and make it real, what would it be? Would you choose warp drive? Phasers? Transporters? I'd take a different choice than most people: I'd want the replicators.
If you're not familiar with them, they're the machines that instantly construct anything the crew needs. When Captain Picard goes into his office and says, "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot," and a hot cup of tea appears in the alcove in the wall, that's the replicator.
I don't think they've ever made it clear, but I've always assumed that there has to be a way to reverse it too. Like maybe Picard puts the empty cup back in the replicator and says, "recycle," and it dematerializes and gets added back to the big heap of generic stuff in a back room of the Enterprise that the replicators make stuff out of.
But I digress. If you're wondering why I would chose a technology of convenience over the chance to explore the universe or destroy my enemies, it goes back to the show's economics. Or lack thereof. The Star Trek future has no money, which is something that many people think is unworkable no matter how mature and advanced our species gets.
But it always made sense to me, because of the replicators. If you can produce anything you want whenever you need it, then you no longer need money. Economics is a way of forcing people to produce before you can consume. But if production has no real cost, and most things are automated, then there is no need to force people to work. Or to put it another way, economic systems (whether capitalist or communist or anything in between) exist to deal with the fact that there isn't enough stuff to go around; so if there is enough stuff for everyone, then there's no need for an economic system.
I realized all this during one of my many hours watching the various Star Trek series in university. It seemed pretty clever to me, but it turns out it's called post-scarcity economics. Trek assumes that in a world where work is not required, people still would want to work just for personal enlightenment. But the point is that the non-economy would still work even if most people sat around watching holographic soap-operas. You'd just need enough people voluntarily working to do the work of programming, debugging, and improving the machines that do production.
The New York Times has an article about an economist who believes all of this is possible, and probably the only aspect of the show we're likely to see any time soon.
I think he's got a point. It's surprising how close we already are to a post-scarcity society. In information-related fields, we already have the needed technology; that is, we can reproduce anything that consists only of information (text, audio, video, software) as easily as Picard's tea. Of course, those things haven't become free because people still have to eat and sleep, and we can't reproduce food and housing as easily as information. I'm willing to believe that if we could produce those necessities of life that easily, there would be plenty of creative types producing original work even without any economic incentive. Writers would still write, singers would sing, and programmers would program.
But for all of this to work, we need to make food like we copy files. And that's why I'd want to see replicators for real. Getting to that life of abundance would do more good for us than exploring the universe. Yes, I know we're not likely to see a machine that can materialize things one atom at a time, but I'm hopeful that we could have machines that could produce things almost as easily. If 3D printing advances as fast as computer technology has, who knows?
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