I have a new piece up at Discourse asking, “What Replaces the Biblical Cinematic Universe?” This is part of a series of articles I’ve written in the past few years responding to the precipitous decline in religious belief and trying to figure out what a secular culture—which is where we are clearly headed—can and should look like. Except that in this piece, I am trying to describe what it
The reason that Star Trek's Federation has moved "beyond money" is not because they became "more enlightened", though I'm sure that that's a conceit many in that world would want to cling to. It's because they invented the replicator. The replicator removes physical scarcity. It converts matter nearly losslessly into all the energy anyone could ever dream to want, and then can turn that energy back into whatever matter anyone could ever want. No scarcity means that so much of the economics we deal with in our real universe has been obviated. It's not enlightenment. You want to do away with money and wealth inequality? Invent an open-source replicator.
The reason that Star Trek's Federation has moved "beyond money" is not because they became "more enlightened", though I'm sure that that's a conceit many in that world would want to cling to. It's because they invented the replicator. The replicator removes physical scarcity. It converts matter nearly losslessly into all the energy anyone could ever dream to want, and then can turn that energy back into whatever matter anyone could ever want. No scarcity means that so much of the economics we deal with in our real universe has been obviated. It's not enlightenment. You want to do away with money and wealth inequality? Invent an open-source replicator.