ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Yeah, I think that part is fascinating! Honestly, the part that has made me "What the..." over the years is the lack of money. Yes, we've literally heard from several main characters in multiple different series that humanity has moved beyond money, is free from want and just works towards the Gene Roddenberry utopian vision all the live long day. And that's exactly what the privileged well-off people at the top of the food chain (the captains of our flagships) would say.
Meanwhile, we've got Deep Space 9 staring us right in the face explaining in a hundred different episodes how that's not at all realistic or practical (you've got dozens of instances of Starfleet personnel gambling for real money, going rogue and joining the Maquis because of the same perceived lack of Starfleet support that Picard eventually rebels against). Yes, we wave it away by saying, "Oh, they're on the border right outside of Federation space," but if we really had a galactic-quadrant-spanning utopia that can cure all the ills and fully provide for billions (trillions?) of citizens, what explains the squalor happening on Bajor, which is under Federation protectorship? This is not at all the only case where we've poked through the Federation utopia and found it to be a myth. Tasha Yar was also from a human colony that utterly failed and descended into poverty, drugs, civil war and "rape gangs" ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Turkana_IV ). Humanity has clearly not actually evolved into some higher state of being - the standard of living is generally just much, much higher on the core worlds, so they like to think they have. So with replicators and other forms of advanced technology, the cost of survival is almost nothing, and they give that away for free when it's convenient. But there are still finite resources: space, time, maybe even actual resources that can't be replicated for one reason or another. There's also clearly limits to what can be replicated. Why do they need space docks with clouds of worker bees putting ships together? Why can't they just replicate the whole ship? The TNG pilot is about a groppler that's forced a shape-shifting space squid into servitude in the shape of a starbase they wanted to offer up to Starfleet because starbases are worth enough to make this a worthwhile endeavor. So things still have value, and you still have to have some way of conferring that value. Everyone on Earth gets a universal basic income - enough to get you set up with a trailer in the desert or a high rise apartment susceptible to Romulan assassins (Picard's attackers conspicuously didn't beam straight into his living room and instead had to deactivate the security system first), but those who have contributed more to society get more in return (or in the specific case of Chateau Picard, those with greater family wealth continue to inherit more) and live better because of it. Such is a system where you can almost say with a straight face that money isn't a thing, but money is always a thing.
Remember, the United Federation of Planets is still younger in Picard than the United States of America is in 2020. We know lifespans now are 120 years or more, so there's absolutely people alive in Picard who knew their great-grandparents that were alive pre-Federation. Human nature doesn't fundamentally change that fast. The show runners are clearly making a story for today. Having watched numerous interviews with the crew making the show, I'm sure they're looking at the politics of today concerning Trump, Boris Johnson/Brexit, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte and others and subtly making the point that you have to fight for your ideals or it's easy to backslide in short order.
(And if this makes you mad, hoo boy, you're going to be in for it in Discovery, Season Three)
Yeah, there have been several references to how it was affecting the small local region (not literally "the galaxy"), and that it went off before they were predicting. Likewise, they said that they asked the Federation for help, not that they were helplessly stranded on their own homeworld otherwise. These seem like things that are very easily smoothed over and we'll learn much more about in the weeks ahead.
46 strands if you must. Doesn't change the point. You are talking about a microscopic component (involved in memory and likely not with much in common with our own synapses) in a synthetic life form capable of storing 800 petabytes, and self repairing. It could store any data his creator chose for it to store, and there would certainly be good reason to keep that data around just as our DNA does otherwise androids would be very fragile creatures indeed.
