Talk about the final frontier: In the future world of “Star Trek,” everyone’s material needs are satisfied, and money doesn’t exist. What would the economy of such a world look like?

People would act from different motives than they do now, in our 2015 world of scarcity and limited resources. And even if a society like “Star Trek’s” Federation eliminated hunger and need, it wouldn’t necessarily be the utopia it seems. Troubling questions would inevitably arise about how the mass of people would live, and whether such a world would be possible only through making ethical compromises.

“I would argue there’s a dark side to the abundance there,” said Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, speaking Sunday at New York Comic Con.

One conundrum: While the “replicators” of “Star Trek’s” future may be able to produce all the food, clothing and other material goods everyone would need, they wouldn’t be able to provide vital services. Probably robots or some other form of artificial intelligence would do that. But if those servitors are sophisticated and intelligent enough for the wide variety of those tasks, aren’t they really sentient beings, and wouldn’t we be enslaving them?

“A world in which you have servitors that give you everything you want is a world in which it’s very hard to tell the difference between those servitors and slaves,” Krugman said.

Krugman was part of a panel-cum-thought-experiment on Sunday at New York Comic Con, the yearly celebration of science fiction, fantasy and comic books, which may have hit peak geek when it brought in the world of economics as well. It was almost certainly the only panel at the four-day convention at which John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith were name-checked.

We’ve actually come a long way toward a “post-scarcity” society already, said Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and another speaker on the panel. We don’t yet have replicators, but we’ve progressed far beyond the conditions that made life nasty, brutish and short hundreds of years ago for all but the elite, he noted.

In such a world, the panelists said, people wouldn’t work because they needed to, but because they wanted to. Their goal would be not earning material sustenance, which would already be provided, but things like reputation and honor. We’ve already seen a little of that in 2015, when people will create content for social media for free but gain in stature and reputation.

Such a world would be a strict meritocracy, “extremely harsh and cutthroat,” said Manu Saadia, who wrote the forthcoming book “Trekonomics,” which inspired the panel. The kind of people we see on “Star Trek,” he said, are “really the 1 percent; these are the ultra-achievers.”

There would probably also be exploitation involved. Even if the Federation’s society is postscarcity, other societies in the show aren’t, noted Annalee Newitz, editor in chief of the technology website Gizmodo. On the show, anytime the crew left the Enterprise, “we’re constantly being reminded there may be other systems of labor…that are supporting this wonderful way of life that the Federation enjoys.”