So where are all the average Joes and Janes? I’ve been through the Star Trek canon and back, and I’ve found that the visible Trek universe (or at least the parts where humans live) is a pretty elite place. Most of the important characters are captains, high-ranking officers, experts in engineering, ace pilots and so forth. So where are the plumbers? City-to-city shuttlepod drivers? Blue-collar factory workers? People performing manual labor? Do they exist in the 23rd and 24th centuries? If so, where?

For the moment, let’s talk just about humans, and Earth in particular, since we’ve seen a certain amount of gritty turmoil outside humanity for larger story purposes (the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, for example).

Of course, that brings us back to the question of what drives Earth’s economy, if there is one. (While Trek has claimed that money doesn’t exist on Earth, some form of economics has to exist in the Federation, doesn’t it?) But the nature of the Federation is another column in itself — which we will tackle comprehensively one of these days.

The point here is that, really, because Star Trek is about exploring space and spacefaring characters, the franchise hasn’t cared to examine the more routine lifestyles, the mundane aspects of daily life.

I’d still like to take a moment to go under the surface and see if I can figure out where all the non-Starfleet non-elite humans are.

On The Original Series, I always found it amusing that 90 percent of the time the average Joe meant the expendable, nameless guy on an away mission. As many know, these guys usually wore red shirts and got vaporized, speared, blown up, struck by lightning -- pick your method of untimely death. Who were these guys? The episodes didn’t care, because they were minor incidentals to the story; who they were wasn’t the point. So today we look back and laugh at the "red shirts" as a quirky franchise in-joke.

TOS was largely based around its three central characters, with occasional scenes for the rest of the bridge crew and Scotty. In the newer incarnations of Trek, we eventually got slightly more balanced coverage among supporting characters, and we’d occasionally get characters who were closer to ground level.

Probably best known for his status as the resident everyman was Chief Miles Edward O’Brien on The Next Generation and later Deep Space Nine. Sure, he was an excellent engineer, but he was not an officer like the vast majority of Trek characters. His job served less to define him as simply to be one aspect of him; it wasn't something he was, but something he did.

As DS9’s run continued, O'Brien was the family man that average people in the audience could identify with. He wasn’t running the operations of a war or bearing the duties of a religious icon like Captain Sisko, and when it came time for him to move on, he took up a teaching job, returning to Earth to enter a more civilian life.

"Civilian." Trek tends to see things in a Starfleet military chain-of-command sort of way. But using the chain of command in reverse produced one of my favorite episodes of TNG -- the seventh season’s "Lower Decks," about four junior officers on the Enterprise who watch as a larger authority deals with a diplomatic crisis. It was a rare glimpse of the system from the other end.

Which is something else we rarely see. Very few people on Trek are portrayed as underskilled or incompetent. They generally are powerful, intelligent, competent people. This is understandable for story purposes -- we want to see heroes. But given the real world where it takes all kinds, I find myself wondering what happens to the people who aren’t up to Starfleet standards. Where do they go? Just what exactly is the standard of education on Earth, anyway? High, presumably, but not everyone can be getting straight-A’s. High standards presume that somebody, somewhere must be low.

Roddenberry’s universe is famous for having painted a utopian future, but here’s my question: Exactly how "perfect" are people in the future? One fact of individual competition is that not everyone is going to get what they want, and there have to be some losers out there somewhere, even on Earth in the 24th century. The losers in society aren’t getting much exposure on Star Trek, and maybe that’s because they don’t make for the kind of Trek stories most people are thirsting for.

Unless, of course, it’s in an alternate universe. In Voyager’s "Non Sequitur," Harry Kim ends up in a parallel universe where he meets an apathetic version of Tom Paris, whom Kim labels "a loser and a drunk." We don’t typically get to see many citizens of Earth that match this description. The word "drunk" implies the possibility of alcoholism. Is there alcoholism among humans in the Trek universe? Maybe the era’s medicine has erased the physiological problems associated with excessive drinking. We do know that real alcohol exists and is occasionally consumed on Trek (though, it would seem, less frequently than synthehol, a concept I still don’t entirely understand).

For that matter, who smoked the last cigarette in recorded human history? This is assuming humanity has kicked the habit. If so, how? Could it possibly be that humans have become mature enough to self-inhibit those actions that are harmful, despite the fact they may want to engage in those actions?

And what about divorce? Is everyone happily married or happily single? I propose that it simply can’t be. In the alternate timeline of TNG’s finale, "All Good Things...", Picard and Crusher had been married . . . and got divorced. I’m not entirely certain, but it could very well be the only mention of divorce in the Trek canon.

Maybe this is all just pointless (but hopefully interesting) rhetoric. If we want to see those kinds of contemporary issues, we’d turn on a TV show set in contemporary time, wouldn’t we?

If there’s so little crime, it must partially be attributed to great prosperity. But if there’s no economy as we know it, I’d like to know what it is that motivates the average citizen (if we can define such a thing) to get out of bed every morning and do something productive. Does Ben Sisko’s father, a chef in New Orleans, open his restaurant and serve customers for free? That’s pretty selfless. How are people being compensated for their time? Is satisfaction from the work alone really enough? Part of me seems to doubt it.

This whole issue plays like the old cliché of whether a tree in the forest has really fallen if no one was there to hear it. If we never see the non-elite population of human and Federation society, is it really there? As far as the canon core material is concerned, just barely. And what little is there leaves the door open for major contradiction.

So, then, how does it all work?