Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.
By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.
Oh no, they have the ability to manually produce wine in a civilisation with no money, free replicators, and a synthetic form of alcohol that doesn’t give hangovers and doesn’t impair your faculties in an emergency. With such extravagant wealth, they could even… checks notes… give free alcohol to wine snobs
…which, to be fair, is exactly what the Picard family does with their vineyard. They devote their time and energy to making alcohol and giving it away for free. Because they’re communists.
You’re thinking about it in terms of commerce. I’m talking about the luxury of a huge piece of beautiful land in the French countryside. Compare that to some basic apartment in San Francisco which probably looks like the crew quarters on the enterprise.
But anyone can go to that land and walk around. The transporters are free, you can get there in minutes from any city in the entire world. The only privilege is having a bedroom with a view.
Watch the show (S4E02: “Family”). At what point do you see thousands of tourists walking around, eating grapes, sampling wine, running through the vineyard, playing frisbee? Right, you don’t see it at all because the place is closed.
Now look at a public beach in China and see what it’s like when a place is open to the public (and this one not even the whole world, just China):
Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.
By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.
Oh no, they have the ability to manually produce wine in a civilisation with no money, free replicators, and a synthetic form of alcohol that doesn’t give hangovers and doesn’t impair your faculties in an emergency. With such extravagant wealth, they could even… checks notes… give free alcohol to wine snobs
…which, to be fair, is exactly what the Picard family does with their vineyard. They devote their time and energy to making alcohol and giving it away for free. Because they’re communists.
You’re thinking about it in terms of commerce. I’m talking about the luxury of a huge piece of beautiful land in the French countryside. Compare that to some basic apartment in San Francisco which probably looks like the crew quarters on the enterprise.
But anyone can go to that land and walk around. The transporters are free, you can get there in minutes from any city in the entire world. The only privilege is having a bedroom with a view.
No one can walk around on Picard’s family estate. They own it! It’s private property.
Disneyland is private property but anyone can go there.
They charge you money and can ban you from it at any time. Picard’s family estate is closed to the public. You can’t even go there.
Source?
Watch the show (S4E02: “Family”). At what point do you see thousands of tourists walking around, eating grapes, sampling wine, running through the vineyard, playing frisbee? Right, you don’t see it at all because the place is closed.
Now look at a public beach in China and see what it’s like when a place is open to the public (and this one not even the whole world, just China):