Kane Starkiller wrote:I would ask is there even canonical evidence for a formal institution of "member species" in the Federation? What would that make immigrants? Second class citizens? If a Bajoran is born and raised on Andor can he not represent Andor on the Federation Council?
No. It's quite possible for unique individuals to be treated as Federation citizens without the bulk of their species being on board. However, I expect each world to have individual processes for being considered a citizen of that world and emigrating or immigrating, and further expect cases where a member of species X is representing the homeworld of species Y to be incredibly rare at best. We've never heard of such cases.
Again you showed no evidence that Federation members would opposed the addition of colonies to the membership list.
I have, actually. The complete lack of any canonical mention of a Federation colony being considered a member world establishes it as
rare at best. As I have stated; I have also provided perfectly logical motivations for such.
For all we know it's in the Federation constitution to add colonies when certain conditions are met.
I already gave you the definition of Federation: an alliance of planets.
This is your strongest argument so far. It has also already been addressed.
Finally don't pretend that when Picard states "150 planets" this automatically implies homeworlds. It doesn't and you provided no evidence that it does. We can assume that he only meant inhabited planets, further assume that he only meant major inhabited planets or finally assume that he only meant homeworlds. Your assumption is the last and is unnecessarily generous, something I pointed out many times.
It does not automatically imply homeworlds. It
does “automatically†- i.e., unless given compelling reason otherwise - imply either total territorial possessions (contradicted by Kirk in TOS and also implicitly absurd given the number and relative frequency of Federation possessions displayed onscreen) or
the members making up the Federation. By the definition
Your claim to a reduced number of member
species therefore, in its strongest form, taps the claim that colonies may become members of the alliance.
However, we know of
no colony world identified as a Federation member, out of a minimum of 40 Federation members.
The business of leaning on
minimum rather than
probable member lists adds a further complication. We then have some 30 homeworlds that
are not from Federation worlds who nevertheless are likely allies of the Federation, or attempting to enter the Federation.
This we know that Federation had at least 30 members in TOS and at least 40 members in TNG. That is all we know and it might be that Federation already had close to 40 in TOS and there was no growth or that it has 80 now so it doubled in size. But it's all assumption as are your attempts to seamlessly switch from the number of species to the number of planets as given by Picard, Sisko and Janeway.
Actually, we know the Federation has grown substantially during the quarter century preceding TNG (“Yesterday's Enterpriseâ€) and also that the Federation has been making contact with many new species during this time period (various).
And I already disproven that claim citing examples like Canada which is nowhere near it's carrying capacity yet has much lower fertility rate than places like Nigeria or Bangladesh.
No, you have not. The
de facto carrying capacity of a given country is not established.
What I'm citing is a very basic ecological principle that
generally applies. In the circumstances where it does not apply - and global human population does not appear to be one of those circumstances, however much you might like to point to curiosities in individual countries' behavior - we should be able to identify clear reasons.
The fact remains that the best model for human population growth in Star Trek is going to be an exponential growth model.
Decreased mortality will only work so far, a doubled lifespan will mean double population for a certain amount of time. However if the fertility rate is below replacement (thus below around 2) population will ultimately fall.
Of course.
So how did Sisko use up his "transportation quota" when visiting his parents every day? Obviously there are still limitation which really shouldn't be hard to grasp since they hardly invented perpetuum mobile. You still ignore my point that replicators are known to cost more energy than other old fashioned methods hence you have no evidence that it would be less economically costly to produce them with replicators than the old fashioned way. Thus a civilization wit more fertile planet can grow it's food without wasting energy on replicators as well as do manufacturing thus having more energy to spare on, say, ship contruction. Therefore they will always be more powerful no matter what the technology level is.
Actually, I do have evidence for the economic utility of replicators: Replicators are commonplace and widely used for both food
and industrial purposes. Almost everywhere in the Federation. You're also not addressing the point I made at all, which is that for a developing colony world, replicators can replace - or create - highly specialized temporary industries for a low cost. I don't know if you've noticed, but manufacturing plants in the real world are very large and very expensive, and the energy cost to transport things interstellar distances is quite high.
At worst, we expect replicators to require on the chemical bond order of energy in manufacturing, since they assemble materials from existing substances. If you have all the appropriate elements on site, it's never going to be
too much worse than the cost of shipping in materials from out-system. In many cases, we expect it to be less in the short term than building acres and acres of manufacturing facilities.
You never know when hostilities might break out. And it's not the only strategic location. Closeness to other major planets, closeness to other resources like dilithium rich asteroids, closeness to wormholes etc.
Need I remind you that Cardassians invaded Bajor for the express purpose of stripmining it? Where were their fancy replicators and population pressure then?
Hostilities being likely to break out nearby is a good reason for establishing a military outpost, but not a colony.
As far as stripmining Bajor, replicators require raw resources. They're also a technology that is most developed within the Federation. Why establish and develop a colony to run mining operations when you can simply exploit native labor and install overlords? There are enough empty habitable planets to settle excess population on.
So what? Somalia has a fertility rate of 6.6 in terrible conditions and with no need of fancy technology. When did I claim it's impossible for Federation to have higher population growth? My point was always that you are incorrect in assuming that human fertility will increase naturally because they found new colonies.
And my point is that I'm not making that assumption. I'm making the assumption that
overall human fertility is going to be, in this particular model, practically independent of any modern constraints - of medical care, of available living space, of food, as
none of these restrictions are significant given the typical colony size.
What do you mean "the episode did"? The episode in fact showed Dr. Bashir seriously advocating immediate surrender because his asylum friends said that in 5 generations Federation will be free and in 1000 years Federation will enter golden age and the prince kissed the Snow white and they lived happily ever after.
Plausible to whom? Bashir? Yes he obviously considered their claim to be able to predict the future for 5 generations so plausible he actually advocated Federation surrender. That makes him foolish and naive no matter what the assumptions about population were.
Foolish, perhaps. But he's not uneducated - simply socially inept. Same with the Jack Pack.
How? Picard states 150 and you only provided proof for 40 species.
How? Because every identified member world is a species homeworld. As in every observed case the two descriptions coincide, conflating them is justified in the manner I described.
Which means they themselves were not federations of planets before they signed the document. Or that none of their colonies fulfilled any of the criteria to be independent. Or that Federation constitution has plenty of time to be amended.
Or that the multi-system polities we know existed signed on behalf of themselves
and all their possessions. Just as the three member Triple Entente at the beginning of the first world war consisted of the British Empire, Russian Empire, and France - meaning that Algeria and India were included as colonial possessions.
A actually never claimed that humans make up for a large percentage within the Federation. They certainly seem to make up the majority of Starfleet. So the situation could be similar to NATO where US has about 35% of population yet most of the Navy. Finally I don't accept that your assumptions about assumptions of mentally unstable individuals actually give us information about Federation fertility rates.
In other words, you wish to ignore the canonical data at hand in favor of professions that we cannot know anything.
I've mentioned before that when you start assuming the bridge crew is either stark raving mad or complete idiots, you are no longer working in a plausible model of Star Trek, and in this case, you're assuming Bashir - a doctor and perfectly competent, if socially inept, member of the DS9 crew - would not notice the gaping hole in a model that concludes identical results after five generations when not even the gross population numbers - let alone economic and military resources/options - are going to be close.
I
do assume the Jack Pack made some mistakes in the model. However, as I said before, the
Jack Pack model needs to be plausible. And in order for it to be plausible, the population shouldn't be terribly different, which in turn means that the population should be - at a minimum - completely recovered to its original value.
l33telboi wrote:You really should learn the difference between evidence and absolute proof. Evidence has been given by the truckload, the only thing that's missing is absolute proof. And you seem to be using that as an excuse to say absolutely no evidence has been given.
I think this is what captures it. There is nothing that explicitly states the Federation's membership strictly consists of homeworlds of varying species, totaling to a bit over 150 as of ST:FC.
However, there's a lot of evidence related to each little piece of our contentions, such as the frequency distribution of Federation member species seen and identified onscreen. Such as the fact that every identified Federation member
is the homeworld of a species. All these combine to create a pretty high probability that my interpretation of the matter is correct.
