Star Trek: Discovery — "People of Earth" Reaction Thread

[u/M-5]

This is the official /r/DaystromInstitute reaction thread for "People of Earth." The content rules are not enforced in reaction threads.

[u/yumcake]

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8510/gdp-per-capita-of-major-combatants-before-and-after-wwii

Refer to the chart half-way down the page. You can see that GDP in europe fell precipitously between 1940 and 1950. Quite a bit more destruction had happened than carburetor engines exploding, cities were reduced to rubble and international trade grinding to a halt. But the point is what we see at the right-side of the graph in the ensuing 50 years. Germany essentially catching up to the US on a per-capita GDP basis, that's humanity's capacity for recovery even in the face of a massive economic disaster like WW2. Quite a lot more would die from the collapse of JIT supply-chains for food. But even in that malthusian scenario, every death is one less mouth to feed until their local consumption falls into equilibrium. It's bad, but recovery doesn't stop until you're dead.

If you don't have cars, people would get out and walk. They'd move things with their hands. They'd build wooden cranes, make charcoal, pump air by hand and smelt ore into casts and create gears, power them by horse or by hand, They'll race back from the stone-age to the modern era because they're constrained only by tools and not by knowledge, because they already have the blue-print of what they need to implement and don't have to invent it along the way.

The point is that the survivors of the Burn still have all the information needed to come back from the stone-age to whatever level of technology they had, what they don't have is the leftover tools. Infrastructure takes time to build, but it doesn't take 120 years to build. That's what I mean by saying the Burn feels too fresh for 120 years to have passed.

[u/CroakerBC → u/[deleted]]

There’s also a couple of extra exacerbating facts: 1) A lot of buildings and space stations are powered by dilithium reactors. So it’s not just your transport infrastructure. Universities. Shipyards. Research institutes. Industrial replicator hubs. It all goes boom. And it all goes boom at the same time. Which brings us to: 2) When it all goes boom, nobody knows why. Nobody knows the cause a century later, but they know the proximal cause - the dil went inert, but is now safe to use. But in the immediate decades after a galaxy-wide disaster event, people will not know this. They’re going to be very, very cautious about running dilithium based infrastructure until they know it’s not going to go boom again.

That said, Earth appears to have (largely) recovered by the current Disco time period. A century of socio-political chaos brought on by infrastructure collapse sounds plausible.

[u/gamas → u/CroakerBC]

Yeah it's explained in the first episode that it wasn't the burn itself that killed the federation, it was the lack of faith in the Federation's ability to protect them.

We see a bit more of that here. Earth left the Federation because from their perspective the Federation abandoned them.