Incorporated

[aesmael]

    On my way back home I had a thought about the Federation and its nominally multispecies nature (that's the United Federation of Planets of Star Trek fame). Despite claiming to represent an equal partnership of species from many different worlds the Federation we see is dominated by humans. Nearly every character we see is human. The senior officers are all human (particularly of rank Captain and above). The headquarters are on Earth; indeed, the Solar System is designated Sector 001. This has bugged me for quite some time.
    Why does it seem as if non-humans barely exist in this society? Where are all the alien crews and officers? Why is it every enemy lunges direct for Earth as their target and never, say, the Tellarite homeworld? The Federation is a Federation in name only. It might better be called the Terran Republic.
    My thought was that the Federation is basically the United States in space and the United States does not enter into equal partnerships. Its relationships are hierarchical. Other cultures are expected to be assimilated and come in the position of supplicants when they do; either way their culture itself is ignored. It is no wonder there is scarcely any alien presence in this society where hypothetically humans should be a minority.

    I thought again before I started writing this entry and decided I was wrong. It is not the fault of the United States that the Federation is what it is. Rather, I shall say it is only to be expected because the story is told by humans and, being what we are, it is overwhelmingly likely that the story would be human-centric.

Comments

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

Also that the story is being told by American writers. >.>;;; It IS the United States in space, down to the mostly white crews with a few minorities (i.e. the demographic makeup of the States). :\

Maybe the humans just outbreed the other species? It seems like it. :( Earth has SO many other colonies, while Vulcan just has Vulcan. >.>;; (Esp since they live twice as long as humans you'd think there'd be twice as many)

It seems to be implied that other races reach a point where they realize continual population increases are bad for their society and they look inward, while humans seem to just keep breeding and then expand to support their booming population. >.>

[shooichi.livejournal.com]

Heh. I always just thought it was because Humans started the Federation, so they tend to be more invested in it. Your ideas make more sense though.

PS your user icon looks familiar. El Goonish Shive?

[chaoticset.livejournal.com]

I think it was retconned in by saying that the Federation existed, but a lot of the rules were created just after humans got involved, etc.

Realistically...I'm curious now if perhaps the numbering system we see in Trek is simply the human numbering system within the Federation. It's not impossible to imagine that, were we listening to Klingons describing their Federation, their home sector would be their sector 001. Automatic translation could easily handle these conversions, assuming (as we are) that there's a gigantic shared database that keeps getting updated on each ship's computer.

Has nobody noticed that they keep referring to it as the "ship's computer", as if you only have one?! One computer on the whole ship?! How Borg is that?