"Please stop. There is no such thing."

I think this is the same attitude as the guy who wrote the book, and the recent article, predicting that science is slowing, or whatever. You simply define away anything exciting that is discovered after you wrote your book. Like covering your eyes and singing "Lalala".

I'm taking the edx MOOC Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe. One of the instructors is Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Prize winner for discovering Dark Energy. I just watched a video where he displays his data from 1998, which led to the conclusion that the universe's expansion rate was speeding up. In his words, "What a surprise."

So I think I was quite correct. Dark Energy was (surprisingly) shown to exist after the guy's book was published.

No way, he should have pulled a Satoshi Nakamoto.

What relevance did relativity have, when it was discovered? And yet it's used today for GPS. Who saw that, in 1905?

The true business of mankind is knowledge. Using economics to subvert that is making economics into a God that we must serve, instead of using it as a tool to serve us.

Wasn't Dark Energy discovered after that book? Something that occupies some 70% of the universe?

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."

Michelson, 1903

The point is, you are imposing scarcity upon the show, which does not exist in the show.

Consider Moriarty episodes (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_Moriarty_(hologram)). Again, no mention of constraints on holodeck usage. You're inventing constraints with no evidence from within the show itself. Moriarty ends up living in an endlessly running holodeck program.

Consider also a replicator. It ends scarcity of food (or anything it can replicate, such as itself). Under a scarcity model, food should have no value since it is no longer scarce, and no one should want to produce it. But such a model is irrelevant since no one has to produce food anymore: the replicator does it. Old models based on scarcity simply don't apply.

The show doesn't treat the holodeck as a scarce resource. You're putting your own ideology into the show. Anyone who wants to use it appears to be able to use it as much as they like.

I just read through the synopsis of the "Hollow Pursuits" episode, at http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...

There is no mention of rationing holodeck time or the scarce resources of the holodeck or Barclay trading favors. The holodeck is not considered a scarce resource.

The writers of that episode didn't think of MOOCs?

How come Barclay could easily use the Holodeck as much as he wanted? Credits weren't really scarce.

The only real scarcity in Star Trek was of knowledge. The Prime Directive inexplicably furthered that scarcity.

Harsh words on the internet beat shooting up schools.

Did they put the arrows back at the top and bottom of the scrollbar? I use those a lot.