Why so few people come from the colonies...?

I'd imagine that to a certain degree that the populations on these emerging colonies are more concerned with expanding the colonies themselves than heading back from the frontier. It's not quite like living in a quiet town or village in an established country, where the dull tedium of village life would inspire you to go out and join Starfleet, colony life would have it's fair share of high activity.

 

Yes, but what percentage of children born in the colonies would share their parents colonial spirit? If I were born and raised on some far-flung planet with 10,000 people, the bright lights of a planet like Earth or Betazed would be pretty appealing to me.

 

...In which case I certainly wouldn't join Starfleet, an organization that would send me right back to the frontier!

Timo Saloniemi

 

A career in Starfleet might give you the means to retire on Earth, or one of the high population colony worlds. A regular career might not.

Or you could buy yourself a nice little bungalow on Risa.

 

Honestly there probably should be very few purebreds of any sort left on Federation planets.

 

Really? I'd say that the ability to colonize space would only keep ethnic groups together and if anything slow the intermixing of races.

When you can just up and go into space and colonize a random planet no one else is on, people are going to. Trek even supports this. You have the colony of Irish farmers. You have the colony of Native Americans(who are no longer native or in America... Indians then?), and so forth.

I wouldn't see why groups of other ethnic groups wouldn't form their own colonies too.

 

Not just ethnic groups, but others too, like those who leave to escape religious persecution. For instance, a planet of members from the W*stb*r* B*pt*st Ch*rch who visit other worlds to hold signs at funerals for disaster victims. In which case, we just nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

 

The colonials are the cast offs, and inferior, the folks everyone once said 'go west' in the Americas. They will have to tell their own stories, the motherland will always see them as the folks across the galactic pond.

 

Given the Federation's two centuries of existence, "purebreds" would likely still be the norm. However, species that had been making babies together for extended periods prior to the Federation's creation might have at least a small percentage of their population be of mixed heritage.

But the emigrants would also be a brain drain on the "old world" that is Earth, The colonies would also bleed off the adventurists, the non-conformists, the free spirits and many of the people who are creative and form new ideas.

Zefram Cochrane seems to have left fairly quickly.

Or the culturally persecution, people who want to advance in a direction the rest (majority) of society doesn't wish to.

It's hard to accept diversity, when it's diversity that you don't agree with.

 

On outer colonies there'd probably be a higher concentration of purebreds. But what about Earth? Vulcan? Andor? Betazed? It's clearly not taboo in any of those places to crossbreed. Near population centers, and especially near Starfleet posts, I'd expect at least a quarter of the population to be mixed species.

Why aren't there orphanages full of noid-mutts inside every port city?

 

Who's to say they aren't?

 

It isn't exactly established that every sapient species can have children with just any other sapient species. I can't remember any obvious Human/Andorians walking around.

 

Which is indeed what we see -- such as the Caldos colony where Beverly Crusher was raised, modeled strongly after Scotland.

It's not unlike the patterns of immigration to the U.S., where entire towns from, say, Germany would come over at the same time and all settle in the same area.

 

Of the fully human regulars ...

TNG
Earth: Picard, Riker, LaForge
Colonies: Crusher, Yar

DS9
Earth: Sisko, O'Brien, Bashir
Colonies: None

VOY
Earth: Janeway, Paris, Kim
Colonies: Chakotay, Seven of Nine

So among the 24th-century humans, that's nine from earth, four from colonies. Not all that surprising given how small most of the colonies we see are.

The more surprising thing is that there is, as far as we're shown, only one Starfleet Academy. Even the modern-day U.S., with a much smaller area and much smaller population, has military training facilities scattered all over the country. Training for officers is more centralized ... until, of course, you start thinking about all the colleges with ROTC programs.