This is a universe with faster than light travel and near infinite resources. There’s a homeless shelter in one of the major cities. I helped them out. Why the fuck is there a homeless shelter in a universe with FTL and near infinite resources?
I’m starting to think Fallout under Bethesda isn’t a satire and their writers are just incapable of imagining anything beyond capitalism.
There’s plenty of interesting stories to tell without invoking aliens. The Measure Of A Man, for instance, where Data’s personhood is debated
True, but a show of nothing but stories like that would be a bit limiting. Stories like that work as good SciFi narratives, which Trek was great at. But also, for longer running stories and overarching Space Opera plot-lines they needed to have some galactic conflict.
Okay it’s been a while since I watched it but I recall being thoroughly disappointed with that episode. Like this is a sci-fi setting with all manner of strange alien life that has been determined to have legal rights (hence the prime directive etc), but there’s no legal definition of what does or does not constitute a legal person? Then Picard ends up “winning” the argument with what was IIRC mostly empty rhetoric.
To be clear I don’t disagree with you, I quite liked most of Asimov’s I, Robot anthology which is mostly about interesting logic puzzles and the difficulty of creating inviolable rules.