Earth’s population is 9 billion per the movie “First Contact.”
Picard’s British accent is more easily explained by his having been taught English by a person with a British accent, rather than presuming England’s influence will expand across the continent. Similarly, Bashir (and his parents) may live in or around India but learned English from teachers who were from England, rather than having lived in England themselves.
One cultural element I found amusing was a minor bit in the introduction of Ro Laren, with her explaining (after Picard addressed her as “Ensign Laren”) that her family name was actually Ro, and Picard’s apparant surprise. More than half of Earth puts the family name first, including the actor playing Bashir, who went from being credited as “Siddig El Fadil” to “Alexander Siddig”, so this made Picard look like some kinda rube (“Pish-posh, these bloody heathen foreigners know nothing of proper naming or how to drink scotch like a good white man!”)
Annoyingly, though, Kira Nerys’s family name sounded like a conventional female name, so Jadzia casually addressed her as “Kira” for a time before I guess it eventually occurred to somebody that calling her “Nerys” made more sense.
I remember that. And it absolutely, positively does NOT jive with the images of Earth we’ve seen. Maybe some part of Earth that we haven’t seen yet (like China) is overflowing with billions upon billions of people who are living in squalor, but since they’re always claiming to have eliminated poverty I kinda doubt it.
Either that, or Earth has huge underground and undersea cities that we’ve never heard of.
OTOH, perhaps the nine billion figure includes all the humans living on colonies and space stations, but only one or two billion actually live on Earth itself. In the early days of the Federation, when the colonies were all small and relatively insignificant, the colonies were probably treated as dependencies of Earth. (Much like how Guam or Midway Island are dependencies of the United States.) I mean, they’re not going to give some rathole outpost with 200 guys on it a seat on the Federation Council, next to homeworlds with billions of inhabitants, are they? It could be that colonists are still considered to be citizens of Earth even in then 24th Century.
No, I’m pretty certain the ‘nine billion’ figure is brought up after the earth gets borg-ified. Therefore, whatever the population of Earth-prime is the Borg are all about efficient, crammed population centers.
As for Bashir it’s always been clear to me, both from his role and his parents etc that he’s a culturally British arab. Not unlike, say, Freddie Mercury (who’s real last name was Bulsara). I betcha there’s some arabic in his childhood home for certain.
Without meaning to, at times they did imply some very nasty things about the Federation. For example, they did some very awful things to Maquis - not only failing to defend them, but actively stabbing them in the back, and cutting off those who did help them. At times, they made mention of sending people to re-education (or re-orientation) centers. That does not sound like a very nice society.
Also, given that western religion was respected and common in the original series, but seems to have been exterminated by TNG, I think something very bad happened. Note that while in TOS, starships may have been too expensive for private individuals, in TNG it seemed more like no one was allowed to own one within the federation. All privately-held starships seemed to have been from outside the Federation.
Honestly, the Federation looks awful controlling.
Remember the episode of DS9 where Sisko poisoned the human colony to force them to abandon the planet? Sure, it was a convenient solution to the problem, but what ever happened to Due Process of Law? Apparently, in the 24th Century, any military commander can take it upon himself to de-populate any community whose existance is problematic.
As for religion, there was one episode of Voyager where the Doctor was using the holodeck to pretend to be a preacher in a small Irish village. Several of us noticed a very curious ommision: There was no crucifix in the church! It was clearly supposed to be a Christian church in the 18th or 19th Century, but no crosses were anywhere to be seen. This makes it look like the Federation is actively supressing religion. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that the Federation has a sizeable religous community, but they have to meet in secret, and use coded symbols, and do all that other stuff that the early Christians did during the Roman persecutions.
Really, the more I think about it, the more the Federation looks like a futuristic Soviet Union. Haave you noticed how nobody has any sort of portable music player, or how nobody except Starfleet officers has a portable communicator, or how all the furniture is very plain and unornamented, even in people’s homes. About the only thing that differentiates Picard’s room from Riker’s or Geordie’s is the knick-knacks on the coffee table. It looks like people don’t have the same access to consumer goods that we have. Another very communist aspect to the Federation.
All the more reason he gets his shrimp from a boat that nets them in the gulf and a guy hands them to him swimming in a bucket at the back of the restuarant.
Western-style monotheism was around in TOS, with occasional references to God, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything resembling a conventional religious service or celebration. That’s okay, though, since the show wasn’t about that sort of thing. TNG went out of its way to sneer at religion, as well as capitalism and the military (I’d like to see a show now that depicts a character in an American World War II uniform describing that era as savage and not having anyone point out the heroism as well). I think it was an attempt to repudiate the Reagan administration and greedy phony eighties generally. The relatively relaxed (heh) sixties had no problem with humans buying and selling things. One could buy a tribble for a credit, own a private (if rickety) interstellar ship (‘starship’ was used to refer only to the 12-vessel fleet of heavy cruisers) to transport brokered wives, or even buy a whole planet and build experimental robo-babes for the best prom ever.
The Federation didn’t become creepy (and sanctimonious, and preposterous) until TNG.
Look, the problem of “no money” is easily solved, replicators provide all basic and luxury goods. You don’t need to be supported “by the government” if you can get all the food, clothing, shelter and entertainment you need just by punching a few buttons on the wall.
As a fan-explanation, the unornamented clothing and personal living spaces then make sense. No one bothers collecting material goods since they can get anything they need on a moment’s notice. Why bother with a library of books or a wardrobe of fancy clothes if you can make them whenever you need?
People only collect objects that are personally meaningful or that they use every day. There’s no rationing of consumer goods since there’s no real production of consumer goods. And the cultural expectation that material goods are just temporary, not permanent possesions has lead to a new cultural value of asceticism…not that people don’t value pleasure, just that collecting piles of crap is seen as stupid. There’s no need for the government to control most of this stuff.
As for teeming slums, why do we need slums? No one lives in poverty since they can get all the replicated food and material goods they need, then toss them into the converters when they’re finished. Land may be scarce, but it would be easy to cram people into giant high-rise apartments/arcologies. There’s no need for jobs for most of these people, you only need replicator maintenance technicians. Most people probably spend their days posting on the 23rd Century equivalent of the Straight Dope, or engaging in hobbies like joining Starfleet. Probably most of Earth’s population views the Starfleet people we on the shows as slighly nutty–like military re-enactors with unlimted budgets.
Starfleet isn’t the government, it’s just a big club for guys who like to play spaceship, like the SCA. They have pseudo-military ranks because, well, that’s just the way they do it. No one has to join, no one pays taxes to support Starfleet, maybe most people are barely aware Starfleet exists, they’re too busy using the Holodeck. Starfleet is dangerous, sure, same as mountain climbing or sea-kayaking, or hitting people with wooden swords.
Communism doesn’t work in real life because there’s no way to rationally allocate scarce resources under communism. But replicators change everything.
One of my favorite moments in DS9 was when Quark called Sisko out on the Holier-than-thou attitude projected by many Starfleet officers towards aliens, pointing out that despite the Ferengui peoples’ tendency towards being rather capitalistic and greeedy, they hadn’t come close to doing much of the bad stuff humanity did in it’s past.
It’s also worth pointing out that almost every time we’re introduced to an organization made up of a number of different alien races under one government (ala the Federation) it’s been portrayed as a bad guy, someone the Federation needs to defeat. For example: The Dominion and the Borg. Sure, they’re not very GOOD guys, at least as far as we can see (but what about all the GOOD thigns the Borg have done? 
), but then, we are looking at them through the Starfleet viewpoint. It’s very rare indeed to hear any members of the Borg complaining about their bosses. 
Actually, back when I was in JROTC, a lot of us adressed eachother by our last names, because that’s just how we had gotten used to knowing eachother by (hell, our last names were displayed on our shirts! :D)
That said, adressing fellows and subordinates by their first names in casual situations seems to be the norm in Starfleet, now that I think about it. Maybe something in Kira’s personality just made people tend to adress her by her last name?
Heck, I’m military myself. It was because of being called constantly by my last name that I stopped caring how people pronounced it. It just seemed for a time that Dax would call Kira “Kira”, while Kira would call Dax “Jadzia”. Considering that Kira outranked Dax, this struck me as odd, until Dax finally starting saying “Nerys.”
Well, Kira outranking Dax would make her use of Dax’s first name in casual conversation make some more sense (well, in the US military, dunno how it works up there in the Great White North 
), but then, Dax’s casual use of Kira’s surname without any honorifics seems odd given the rank difference. Apparantly Starfleet is just really casual about some ranks and priviledge related things. I could guess that the Bajoran militia might share that casualness, or at least they learned to put up with it.
I have a general TNG nitpick that I’d like to add to this thread after watching “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Does anyone else think it’s odd that rocks fly out of the consoles and bulkheads when a ship is damaged?
Say what?
Probably some kind of warp-age synthetic or composite material. Also worth pointing out that, since it was a somewhat family oriented TV show, they couldn’t very well have razor-sharp shards of metal slicing the crew to ribbons (as it is, one of the more prominent deaths in that episode was rather gruesome by TV Trek standards)