Trek has touched upon many of the key questions regarding galactic civilizations in scifi and science. Perhaps not dwelt upon them, but touched nevertheless.
- Is it possible for sapience to emerge early on? Well, science now agrees that our universe was pretty much like it's today from a very early date on, and basically there could have been a billion duplicate Earths and Suns sufficiently many billions of years ago. Trek adds the concept of terraforming by a successful culture that thus propagates its own ideal of a world, apparently this so-called Class M, and indirectly makes all successor cultures also favor this or then suffer the consequences of being in a minority.
- Is it likely to happen? We know squat about the evolution of sapience today, but Trek says this is no issue: advanced aliens have taken care of that already, forcing such evolution upon us all.
- Will sapience propagate? Well, warp drive means it will happen in a timescale of millennia rather than tens of millions of years, but yes.
- Will sapience cluster into Galactic Empires or wannabes? Trek shows the whole range of possibilities, even when the sapients doing the work are all more or less carbon copies of humans. You can isolate yourself with the help of high tech either on a single planet or across the entire galaxy or even on a different realm, you can expand and clash, you can rule openly or from behind the curtains, you can take over the whole show across the galactic lens and still face competition from upstarts.
- How will Galactic Empires die? With a massive bang, as with the Slavers; with a smaller and more physical bang, as with the Tkon; by being challenged and overrun; by shedding the mortal coil altogether, again apparently by alien influence forcing the evolution into eventual noncorporeal forms as with the Ocampa or the Zalkonians or the Organians.
- What will be left of them? Writings, artifacts, languages, population patterns, transformed worlds; very seldom truncated remains of the empires themselves, perhaps because revenge is a bitch. Technological heritage is fairly irrelevant because the lesser empirelets already have and share (willingly or through war or espionage) all the essentials such as galactic-range FTL, parity weapons and defenses, and high speed and long range communications. Anything beyond that is just likely to shorten the cycle from Glorious Empire to Noninterfering Lightbulbs.
Is Star Trek still missing something interesting or essential in this respect? We have seen the Human Empire clash with its lessers and peers like the Dominion and triumph. We have seen it challenge its betters like the Borg and survive. We have seen it tug Q's cape and still live. Standard empire-killing methods such as nova bombs have been wielded against it and thwarted. We have seen expansion through conquest, construction and alliances.
Should we perhaps examine the collapse of an empire firsthand and up close, that is, across a distance of space rather than of time? Romulus seems to have gotten a dose of what killed the Tkon - what will happen next? Should the Dominion or the Borg go down, now that the humans have dealt them certain nontrivial blows? Alas, Trek no longer examines the eras and regions where such questions could be answered. Perhaps there's still a story or three to be written on the subject.
Timo Saloniemi
