Or that greed & selfishness will prevail and we lay this planet to waste, possibly removing our species in the process.
Stories like this strengthen my belief in the former. More, plz!
Once one thing becomes abundant, other things start to feel more scarce.
Where I live in California, we have an abundance of food, wealth, and materials for building homes. What is scarce is permission to actually build. Which sends housing prices through the roof, which then causes labor prices to go through the roof, which makes building itself more expensive.
The politics will always be challenging, and I think most examples in the real world point to the politics of distribution to be more challenging than the act of production.
Instead of the "everything is awesome, everything always works, there's plenty of everything" bullshit of ST:TNG, we see a Starfleet that has plenty...for the stuff it cares about. And under the veneer, it's also got its fair share of incompetence, bureaucracy, and turf wars/pissing contests - as would be expected from a massive organization.
Starfleet doesn't care about some podunk space station in a former warzone above a planet full of religious zealots...even after it sports a wormhole.
> The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives.
> We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
In other words, they do it because they want to, not because they need to. No doubt they've got endless replicators on Earth. There is no economy, anything you want or need is just replicated into existence. There is an abundance of goods, virtually infinite supply, thus no need to economize. In Star Trek humanity is a galaxy spanning civilization so even land isn't scarce. Incredibly, they don't even seem to have artificial scarcity in the form of copyright since numerous episodes show characters freely copying works and data from their computers. Absolutely utopic.
Social standing remains scarce. Obviously some people will be captains of the Enterprise while the vast majority will not. That will probably always be true. It ultimately matters little though. A humanity that can just replicate goods into existence has absolutely evolved beyond silly things like capitalism and communism. This is a humanity that is fully liberated from toil, a humanity that is free to enjoy themselves and to pursue their dreams. In that utopic setting, we watch the exploits of the humans who just happened to choose to explore the galaxy, in the startship enterprise. They pursue their dream with inexhaustible curiosity and incorruptible integrity, precisely because they have no other concerns.
The Lower Decks is really enjoyable too, funny to see the bureaucratic elements of Star Fleet joked about.
These so called billionaires have become billionaires because the society and economy are set up that way and they got good at this economical game.
Today you are incentivised to get rich by making a technological innovation like Facebook. Facebook is a great money making business idea, however is it a life saver as much as solving clean water? I guess not. Unfortunately, we prioritised and incentivised the business models of Facebook and that's where we are.
FYI, I'm not picking on Facebook, it could be any big company today.
That said, sociopaths probably are particularly well-equipped to become very wealthy.
Maybe we can get a lot closer than we are now (I hope so) but the part where people evolve beyond their "base instincts and vices" and choose to work as though they lived in a capitalist society, just without caring about personal gain, is a fantasy.
The US is post scarcity when it comes to food already, Yet many people go hungry. Not because they have to, but because our society deems that they need to.
Someday maybe someone will decide that everyone needs to have [enough] but not more.
Eh someone already did. At the end it is always "Four legs good, two legs better"
What does that even mean?
I mean nature did do the transition from methane to oxygen which was pretty intense. And the K-T extinction was natural. And the glaciers and ice ages were natural. And humans are natural.
I have an answer to that you will probably not like.