On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 05:29:14 GMT, "Midnighter"
wrote:


"Gene Ward Smith" wrote in message
roups.com...

Midnighter wrote:

In the episode after the Enterprise E fought the Borg. Picard went home
to
France. In that ep he was offered teh job as an administrator or
something
else of a project where they were raising the seafloor somewhere to
create a
new continent. Land was at a premium, people don't create continents on
a
whim.

They don't create them at all if they have any sense; particularly with
FTL available.

That shows you how available commerical travel is to the average human.
How many commercial transports have you ever seen on Star trek? There are
small shuttles very rarely. they never had to deal with private vessels, or
even space buses or cruise liners. More often than not people hitched rides
on cargo ships and federation vessels. DS9 was supposedly Ellis Island for
the Beta Quardrant, but it was never any busier than a middle sized mall.

The federation doesn't strike me as being very conductive to private
exploration. Sure the USS whatever goes where no man has gone before, but
the other 99% of humanity sits home doing whatever it is they do.


The Federation was shown as having a Socialist economic system. We
only saw a small number of private business people, as opposed to
government employees of one sort or another, and the private business
people tended to be borderline criminals. So, it would be logical
that private ownership of spacecraft would be frowned upon, although
evidently not banned altogether. Historically speaking, Socialist
governments tend to like to have their populace stay in the assigned
places and work at the assigned jobs, and thus limit individual
travel.

--
John F. Eldredge --
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria