Shit man they had universal healthcare in Star Trek's 2024. In Star Trek's 2024 the tech billionaire decided to help the homeless. We're doing worse in the real world than what Star Trek depicted as being near the absolute nadir of human society.
The Empire can shield an entire planet. Those big spheres on top of a Star Destroyer's command tower are shield generators.
It depends on whether you are approaching the question from a narrative perspective or an empirical perspective.
Narrative: The Federation wins because the Federation are The Good Guys™ and the Empire are The Bad Guys™. The Federation starts out on the back foot and it looks pretty grim in the middle, but ultimately they eke out a win. If this is a TNG two-parter it plays out the way "The Best of Both Worlds" did: engineering prowess combined with timely application of the human factor wins the day. If this is a DS9 arc or Discovery season, then Section 31 does what needs to be done.
Empirical: The Empire crushes the Federation like a bug. The Imperial industrial base is enormous and their power generation capabilities vastly surpass anything the 24th century Federation can muster:
- The Death Star could violently destroy an entire planet, reducing it to asteroids. In "The Die Is Cast," a combined Romulan-Cardassian fleet requires multiple volleys to simply glass the surface of a planet.
- The Millennium Falcon—a ship a little larger than a runabout—could cross the known galaxy (Tatooine on the rim, Alderaan in the core) in a day. Voyager estimated a similar journey would take 70 years at maximum cruising speed.
- In the 2360's the Federation built six Galaxy-class ships and maybe a few dozen more throughout the course of the Dominion war. These are among the largest, most powerful, most advanced ships the Federation can build, yet they are dwarfed by an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer and the Empire built hundreds of these in the mere two decades it existed.
It you could somehow snap these two spacefaring nations into existence and pit them against each other, it would be like late-WWII United States facing off against Napoleonic France. It's a blowout.
Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don't exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn't big enough to host a new Daystrom.
I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.
On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it's unlikely that StarTrek@lemmy.world is going to be flooded with memes. StarTrek@lemmy.world is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.
Now of course, there's no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in StarTrek@lemmy.world, the answers won't be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like "the real answer is 'don't think about it!'" which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it's easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.
One could make a community that enforces Daystrom's two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But daystrominstitute@startrek.website exists... and it's pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.
So, tl;dr if you want "Daystrom on Lemmy," I invite you to post discussion prompts to StarTrek@lemmy.world.
You really do not want compare this place to /r/Star_Trek. I saw a lot of really hateful shit in that sub. It was hijacked by bigoted culture warriors almost immediately after being created. It was easily the Reddit focal point for "Discovery is too woke" discourse.
The lone mod for that place was a creepy weirdo who was completely oblivious to what being a responsible moderator entailed. He regularly left comments containing actual hate speech up due to a combination of being too incompetent to use Reddit's mod tools and too ignorant to understand that yes you actually do need to remove hate speech and slurs when you're in charge. The Reddit admins had more than enough justification to nuke it.
We are absolutely worse off in the real 2024 than what "Past Tense" depicted.
- Vin asks Sisko for a "UHC card" when trying to identify him. A universal healthcare card. In the real 2024? Still no universal healthcare in the US.
- The famous billionaire's role in the story of "Past Tense" was to get residents of the districts access to "the nets" to tell their story. In the real 2024, Elon Musk would just take to Xitter and advocate for crackdowns.
- Once on the nets, the resident's stories actually swayed public opinion. Can you honestly imagine the stories they told making a dent in the zeitgeist, even if they trended on YouTube and TikTok?
- Sanctuary districts exist too, they're just on the border and privatized.
Ira Steven Behr set out to depict a horribly dystopic 2024, succeeded, and undershot.
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“Is Discovery canon?” is an interesting question because the only real purpose canon serves is to give us boundaries for where it’s reasonable to stop expecting (searching for?) a degree of consistency throughout all of Star Trek
When someone says “that’s not canon” what they’re usually telling you is that they don’t care to reconcile it with other Trek
Given that Discovery is two seasons of “top secret classified never happened” and three seasons of “800 years later than any other series,” even if we decided it was canon in some technical or legal sense, it gives us basically nothing that could potentially influence other Star Trek, before or since. In other words, it’s not canon in any practical or meaningful sense.
tl;dr yeah I guess you’re right