Trek is utopia with whispers of benevolent authoritarianism. The Federation are the Borg at some level, looking to assimilate all they come across despite their morality that appeals to the viewers of the show.

Wars is dystopia with magic. Most people appear poor, all the power and money is concentrated in a few places. Gangs and warlords everywhere. Always someone trying to take more, whether it be Hutt or political fascists.

What’s cynical about it? It’s as obvious as being slapped by a cartoon fish.

I’d imagine they have a few complaints about it

It’s simple:

The warp core is a plasma intermix reaction chamber containing a dilithium matrix that moderates matter-antimatter convergence with a flow-stabilized magnetically interlocked containment manifold that distributes warp power through plasma induction conduits to the engine nacelles and charges the main deflector with anti-protons to generate a subspace field of at least 9 mega-Cochrans whose modulated geometry envelops a stable warp bubble around a starship thereby displacing its gravitmetric frame of reference. All you have to do is modify the subspace field so that protons may pass through but the anti-protons may not, and compensate for the inverse tachyon convergence factor by raising the level of graviton flux beyond the universal gravitational constant at the sublight velocity barrier. It’s all just classic warp mechanics and subspace field theory you get at first year Starfleet academy.

Now, the transporter is an entirely different animal altogether, because as it turns out molecular pattern decoherence is a major factor in why transmitting highly localized buffered matter suffers from irreversible entropy when you try to encode it on a subspace carrier wave. The magnetic resonance of the matter being transported is encoded by rectifying the interleaved signal through an array of field-effect plasma transducers while the intrinsic field subtractor destabilizes the molecular structure into a coherent signal modulation that energizes redundant cross-connected pattern buffers continuously refreshing the resulting resonance field flux to prevent entropic pattern degradation. You certainly wouldn’t want your molecular patten to randomly decohere in the middle of the transport cycle or become interleaved with another pattern in the buffer, I can tell you that my good sir!

Now don’t get me started on the holodeck though, that thing is craaaazy. Sherlock Holmes is real now whaaaaat?

Okay first of all, it’s a graviton Lance and you’re supposed to aim it into a flux ewaonarion chamber.

Is this before or after you use it to boil water and make steam?

Eh, they’ll just get data to do it or ramshackle something together because it sounds right.

Star trek predicted vibe coding…

We can’t breed with even our closest terrestrial cousin species with a common ancestor from 5-8 million years ago

… we can’t?

Dammit! All that effort, all those lacerations and broken bones, for nothing!

We can’t breed with even our closest terrestrial cousin species with a common ancestor from 5-8 million years ago

It might be possible, but there haven’t been many attempts given the obvious ethical and “what the fuck is wrong with you!?” reasons.

As for The Expanse, the linked page rates it as a 4:

One Big Lie: The author invents one (or, at most, a very few) counterfactual physical laws and writes a story that explores the implications of these principles. Consider, for instance, Cities in Flight’s “Dirac Equations” and “spindizzy motor” leading to instantaneous communication, or Mass Effect’s “Element Zero” being the basis for all of the series’ futuristic technology. Other works in this class include The Expanse series, the Ad Astra board games, Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, and many of Vernor Vinge’s books.

Ironically, a lot of hard SF is pretty progressive.