I mean, by that logic, no planet, even one with an indigenous civilization, should ever want to be independent.
Well A planet should have significant resources. There is a difference between starting a colony on a planet with no protection and being on your home planet. Lots of them.
Yup. Except starting a colony generally doesn't involve the big neon "we're over here, please don't invade" sign...
On the other hand, having fewer resources and a lower population also makes them a much less attractive target. Further, an independent colony world may eventually develop an infrastructure equal to any world with an indigenous culture.
But people still start independent colonies anyway. Perhaps you've heard of a little thing called the European colonization of the Americas. Lots of people from England, France, etc. broke off from their big powerful states and went off to found tiny vulnerable colonies far from home. This is something people do. We have abundant real-life proof of that.
Also, it would be quite often that a colony would be founded to exploit local resources, even if that means just arable land. Resource-rich worlds are a dime in a dozen in Trek as such. But by introducing the exploitation infrastructure and manpower, the colony would make itself more attractive to trade than to takeover and enslavement. Occupation takes resources, after all, whereas the colony could sell at very low price because it wouldn't really need the income, it'd be buying indirect protection through selling. Selling to the commercial and hopefully not entirely state-controlled interests of a powerful empire might be a good compromise in that the empire would have little incentive to come and dictate policies (unless the resource were absolutely critical), yet a lot of incentive to perform all sorts of general maneuvers that keep competitors away from the resource. The agrarian worlds commonly seen would be good sources of non-critical goods that could be competitively offered without inconveniencing the colony itself much. The Federation would be a good trading partner in that respect: a chain of independent colonies could be feeding an inner chain of UFP worlds out there where the central government would have logistical difficulties. OTOH, the pumping station of ENT "Marauders" would be trading in a resource too crucial to avoid the attention of "control freak" customers, and the business would be too small potatoes to be able to play customers against each other... Something like that could only be run safely if deeply within a single customer's protective sphere, and that wouldn't give much leverage for maintaining independence. Timo Saloniemi
IIRC, the first time a lost human colony cropped up in Trek lit was in the old Bantam novel "Perry's Planet"
...Yet how many of the TOS worlds inhabited by humans were "lost colonies" of Earth? Should we count Miramanee's world, whose inhabitant were explicitly Earthlings? Or perhaps Tyree's, with a less obvious tie to Earth? Timo Saloniemi
Keep in mind that Miramanee's world was created by The Preservers, and is not a "lost" human colony founded by Federation members.
^No, all we know is that Miramanee's people were settled on that planet by the Preservers. There's no reason to believe they could actually create planets.
...Well, for a rare once in TOS, a big deal was made of the fact that the planet had an Earth-style ecosystem despite failing to be Earthlike in every other respect. Probably somebody did some terraforming at some point, then. But we don't know if the Preservers were involved in that, or if they merely transplanted the Earthlings (and possibly installed the deflector beam thingamabob). Does colonization only count if the colonists made it to their new home in their own starship? Do rented ships count? Hitchhiking? Penal transport? From the looks of it, the native Americans of "Paradise Syndrome" could have been forced labor, sent into this "asteroid alley" to process big rocks eased down to the surface by the deflector machine... Timo Saloniemi
I meant Miramanee's "world" as in her colony. I wasn't implying that the Preservers were capable of terraforming.
The question nevertheless stands: do human colonies only count if founded by using human starships? The Preservers of "Paradise Syndrom", the Briori of "The 37s" and the Skagarrans of "North Star" all founded human colonies far away from Earth, long before Earth had starships of its own. These probably don't count as "lost" because Earth wasn't informed of their founding in the first place. But the three examples raise the question of further ones. Many if not all of the human-inhabited planets of TOS or TNG could be similarly alien-founded colonies of Earthlings - and one or two might have been founded so that people on Earth were aware of the founding. The information just happened to degrade to myths or got forgotten altogether. Have any novels ever retroactively drawn more direct and explicit connections between Earth and, say, Magna Roma or Ekos or Ligon? Timo Saloniemi
There are other types of "colonies" too. Large numbers of Humans could emigrate to a world outside the Federation, with a existing advanced technological civilization, establish a "human town," like so many American cities have a section inhabited by a ethic group (Seattle has a Scandinavian section in Ballard). Or a Human community in a otherwise unused and underpopulated portion of a alien word. Perhaps even their homeworld. That would be a colony outside the Federation. In Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth novel series, the insectoid Thranx settled on Earth in the equatorial regions, because the climate suited them. In the decades following Cochrane's first warp flight, when it appears that other species other than the Vulcans visited Earth, Humans could have traveled and emigrated away from Earth, using "alien" spacecraft to do so. Just book passage. This was in the decades after the third world war. Taking your family to a far away world to make a new life would have seem a really good idea. Terra Nova could have been the first Human colony establish with purely Human technology and spacecraft, other colonies might have been establish with alien tech and transport. This is where "lost colonies" come from, people just left.