Monoculture Aliens, etc.

Some of the 'best' aliens are monocultures and justifiably so.

The Borg, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, and the Cylons are 
all deliberately monocultured. They couldn't be anything else and it 
is an essential part of their menace. The problem is that the Star 
Trek writers keeping on giving the Borg individuality, and the doctor 
who writers kept on bringing Davros back.

For the more human alien races the monoculture thing is a bit of a 
problem. There are two possible get outs:

1. If an alien encountered a Federation or Earth Force ship and made 
first contact, what would their impression be of the human culture?
They'd get the impression that humans were essentially monocultured 
with that culture being rather similrat to modern western culture.
(ie democratic, believing in individual freedoms, fairly 
materialistic and religeously somewhere between christianity and 
aetheism.) The different cultures amongst humans would humans would 
not be obvious (why are there no Muslim starship captains in Star 
Trek?).
So maybe our encounters with aliens have been similarly biased 
towards only seeing the dominant culture.

2. Most alien cultures are portrayed as being older than our own. 
Look at how much western culture has taken over others in the past 
two hundred years and tell me that in another thousand earth will 
have the cultural diversity that it does now? Maybe there will only 
be three or four distinct culture remaining.

The Ferengi mention 10,000 years of history, or is it 5000? Either 
way that is a long time. In that time their capitalist system would 
easily have had the oppotunity to invade and destroy all others. 

The Romulans are allowed to be mono-culture, they are all descended 
from the same buch of rebels who left Vulcan for the same reason.

The Bajorans are mono-cultured, but they do have their real deities 
sitting on their doorstep: it's hard to be agnostic when the gods 
send an orb down every few hundred years to bring a new set of 
visions.

Other cultures are defined by a single individual: Kahless for the 
Klingons, Surak for the Vulcans, Valen for the Minbari. This is more 
dubious, but perhaps the followers of these were very persuasive in 
one way or another.
Valen and Kahless were about 1000 years before the present. Surak 
longer ago and we know what happened to the people who disagreed with 
him: they became the Romulans.

What is the excuse for the Centauri, Narn, Drazi, Draconians, Ice 
Warriors, Betazoids or Kazon being mono-culture? There isn't one.
:-(

	Cheers,
		Steve

--
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
 Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion...
 I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. 
 All those moments will be lost, in time...  Like tears in rain." - Roy
Batty.