Do you believe at some point, everyone in the Milky Way joined the Federation?

Ninja'd.

 

Can't imagine the reason/need for a galaxy wide government. It would be clunky, inefficient, and serve no purpose. The Federation was created as a response to threat, specifically Romulans. Anything capable of crossing over from another reality, (8472) or another galaxy (Kelvans) would take a look at how difficult and long a task taking on that kind of zone would be and find some greener pasture.

Even in the Star Wars Galaxy, their Republic didn't manage to unify the entire galaxy and they had 30,000 years and a much faster method of travel, plus super-power warrior monks who'd aligned themselves with the government in power willing to act as shock troops.

I could imagine some kind of galaxy-wide trade system, but Disco season 3 seems to imply that was already starting to occur.

 

Well, what would happen if in time we invent some type of FTL and go out into the galaxy, and we find that we are smack dab in middle of an already established "Federation" ?
Sure some of us would want to establish freindly relations, others would chafe at there leadership being challenged or being dictated to by the federation. but in the end we would have to weigh the benifits vs the costs of joining the federation. And thats even if they let us NOT Join. Would it end up like the Revolutionary war with laws being dictated from oh high with no representation??
Maybe they would offer trade but on less favorable terms that being a full member, or offer more worlds to colonize if your a member, or only the local couple of worlds if your not a member.
Maybe there is a law that we in good conscience can't do, so we say, nope.

 

Using that as a starting point, let's just look at the numbers alone, aside from all the astropolitical arguments. Let's say that one in ten of those habitable planets has a warp-capable civilization, either indigenous or colonized. Many of them would be members of larger coalitions of worlds while others would be singular, so let's assume an average of 10 worlds per civilization, or about 6 million civilizations. Let's say that, by some miracle, every one of those 6 million civilizations is willing to join the Federation or can be persuaded to overcome its resistance to doing so. That still leaves the fact that the Federation is roughly 900 years old when the Burn happens. To recruit 6,000,000 civilizations in only 900 years would require signing up roughly one new member every 80 minutes on average!

So obviously it's an absurd premise. The galaxy is simply too immense for any single astropolitical entity to assimilate it all in less than tens of millennia, most likely. Plus there are plenty of reasons why various civilizations would have no interest in joining the Federation, and the Federation would respect their autonomy.


Poul Anderson pointed out in his Terran Empire universe that beyond a certain scale, a civilization just gets too huge to be manageable as a single entity, and ties between worlds become tenuous. Historically, empires tend to fall when they get too large and stretch their resources and control too thinly. Granted, the Federation has often been portrayed as a fairly loose alliance of worlds that are largely autonomous where local matters are concerned. But there would still be a size beyond which it would be unmanageable as a single astropolitical entity.

So it's more likely that insted of a single galaxywide Federation, you'd have a loose higher-tier alliance, or at least amiable relations, between the Federation and similar multi-world alliances or unions. But there'd be a finite number of such neighbors that the Federation could practically maintain ongoing diplomatic relations with, since there are only so many days in a year. So that meta-alliance might be just one of numerous meta-alliances with amiable relations, resulting in an even higher meta-meta-alliance.

This is the way things have to be organized when their numbers get large enough. You can't just have a single level of organization, since it would collapse under its own weight. You need individual entities to interact following local rules that collectively organize into a higher level of structure, which in turn interacts with other structures on that level to produce an even higher level, and so on.

 

If Earth were to establish regular contact with a much higher technological state, history suggests the results upon our own civilization would be devastating. The best we could hope for would be to be largely ignored like the Andaman islands.

 

That's a myth. It's something Europeans tell themselves to pretend it wasn't their fault that the civilizations they contacted got destroyed. The truth is that Europe itself was once the less advanced civilization in its interactions with the Middle East and Asia. Europe acquired a lot of advanced knowledge from those cultures, such as the stirrup, the printing press, decimal mathematics, the magnetic compass, the lateen sail, and gunpowder. But Europe was not destroyed by this advanced knowledge, because it was allowed its own cultural autonomy and was free to incorporate foreign knowledge and ideas at its own pace and to serve its own ends.

The myth that contact with less advanced civilizations "automatically" destroys them is a lie that Europeans find it comforting to believe in, because it lets us hide from the ugly truth that European imperialists actively tried to destroy other cultures. It didn't happen by accident -- except as a result of diseases like the ones that wiped out 90 percent of the population of the Americas after contact with Europe. It happened because European colonialism was an outgrowth of the 700-year struggle of Christendom to retake the Iberian Peninsula from its Muslim conquerors, leading to a culture of religious intolerance and expansionism, a belief that other cultures had to be forcibly conquered and converted to Christianity rather than allowed to live according to their own beliefs. And it happened because of the cultural construct of white supremacy that evolved to justify the slave trade, the belief that the "white race" was intrinsically entitled to exploit and subjugate other "races." Pretending that the damage was inevitable or accidental, that it was simply the result of different technological levels, is making excuses for deliberate persecution and genocide and the toxic, xenophobic belief systems that drove them.

 

I'm going to try to explain this very carefully so that even you can understand. I'm pleased that you skimmed Gods, Germs, and Steel or read a Wikipedia article, but this is a bit more nuanced than your acumen of ladies underthings.

The cross between extremely advanced technological cultures and stone-age cultures did not occur until the European technological ascendancy. You can't compare a Frankish trader encountering an Arab trader with a lateen sail.. wait..


speaking of myths. The lateen sail was a European invention, most likely derived from the spritsail. The nature of its origin is in the name itself, though it may have been first used around the Aegean. It was common in the Mediterranean during the late classical era. If we're going to be pompous together, let me just explain that that really is a myth.

Where were we? right. Whether contact with an extremely technologically advanced civilization is dangerous for the less advanced. The intentions of the more advanced, i.e. the alien, does not matter. Inevitable changes to the contacted group's civilization, mores, technological needs will be irrevocably changed by the contact. This is why I used the word devastating, as from the Latin root "to lay waste."

This occurs even by indirect contact, such as trade goods passed third and forth party into pre-contact areas, not to mention the possibility of spread of contagion, either literal, or by other means. It is not enough to hand-wave and say that the alien in this situation would not contaminate. We have no reason to assume higher technological civilizations have ethics any better than our own. That in itself is a bit of a cargo-cult idea, waiting for great gifts from a benevolent provider somewhere beyond our solar system.

The spread of alcohol, firearms, metal tools themselves, on cultures that were not necessarily conquered or enslaved, were still not a benevolent act and the effects still reverberate to this day.

 

I have a bachelor's degree with high honors in history, and I spent four years specializing in the study of non-Western history and cross-cultural interaction. I went back to college as a history major specifically to correct the profound Western bias of my previous history education.

 

pity you can't get your money back.

 

Define “destroyed”. If contact with alien cultures and their technology changes fundamental things about your society, then one could argue it’s destructive to that culture even if one can read many of the resulting changes as overall positives.

 

Although they are allies, I don't even see the Klingons as a group who would join the Federation. Isn't it more in line with Trek philosophy and IDIC to have them with separate governments anyway?

There's no reason I can think of to have our galaxy in conflict with other galaxies instead of just having a conflict within the galaxy. Writers have been coming up with new aliens and cultures in the Milky Way galaxy for decades, and they can keep doing so into the future. Space is big.

 

Those pesky Neyel have arrived from the Small Magellanic Cloud to stake claim to this galaxy as their birthright.

 

I mean, one of the fundamental conceits of Star Trek is the idea that with enough diplomacy and mutual respect, all conflicts can be resolved and everyone will see the benefits of Federation values. So while I don't think it has happened yet in ST history as of the 32nd Century, I do think that the final unification of the entire Milky Way under the Federation would be the logical end-point of the entire Star Trek setting.

 

It would surely take thousands of years for the Federation to encompass the whole Milky Way, although I don't think it's likely they'll actually do so, as there will probably be entities which simply don't want to join. Nor would the Federation force them to.

That said, I do think that technology will one day advance to a point that it will be possible to administer a galaxy-wide Federation should one ever arise.

Random "for want of a Neyel" joke goes here.

 

Yeah, big doesn't even begin to cover it. Some years back I did some quick math and determined that if you could make enough starships so that one arrives at one new star every 60 seconds that would mean 525,960 stars could be visited per year. Wow!

But even at that incredible rate to visit all ~400 billion stars in the Milky Way would take three quarters of a million years (760,514) to accomplish. Even assuming the Milky way is low-end 100 billion stars, and the Alpha Quadrant is ¼ that, it's still gonna take you 47,532 years to drop in on all those stars.

Even if there are civilizations all over, and many of them are gonna contact you, it's gonna take forever to make contact with them all, let alone persuade them to join the Federation.

Given that, why would anyone ever bother going to other galaxies to meet new civilizations?

 

Maybe not by choice, but because of necessity, as in "By Any Other Name." Your galaxy will become uninhabitable really soon, so you gotta.

 

So the Federation is the Borg...

 

No. Is every nation in the UN?

 

No. The Borg are very selective in their joining process and appear to co-exist peacefully with many cultures within their sphere of influence. The Federation can learn alot from the Borg.