Re:The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction
by TheCoelacanth on Saturday March 24, 2018 @11:15PM
(#16670495)
You're exactly right. The unexplained question in Star Trek isn't why they don't have uncontrollable population growth, it's how do they get enough people to have babies to maintain a stable population on Earth and still have some people leftover to start colonies.
This is contradicted by the real world experience that when you give people education and contraceptives they really don't do this. There are not that many people who really enjoy the process that much - it's called "labour" for a reason.
Star Trek is likely to be the sort of utopia where boys and girls get reversibly vaccinated against pregnancy in childhood, and having unconsidered or large numbers of children is socially frowned upon.
Now, in Iain M Banks' Culture, it's spelled out. There is no space pressure and there are trillions of humans, but it's also sufficiently post-human that characters can get pregnant, abort a pregnancy, change gender, or get high simply by sitting down and willing it to happen, telling the nanobots in their bloodstream to do their thing.