What If? Everything in our Solar System except Earth is colonized by an Alien Force?

[CarlManvers2019]

This fact is discovered around the Cold War when Neil Armstrong lands on the moon only to be informed, he’s not allowed to step on their territory and sent back to Earth

The aliens who rule and harvest virtually everything in the Solar System say that they don’t want to “Affect Earth’s Cultural Development”

How do things go when said aliens also intervene and say they’re not giving any of their technologies either because “You are not culturally developed for it all”

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Sounds like the aliens are the Federation and they're treating Earth like a pre-warp civilization.

Well, the aliens are morons. Because if the earthlings aren't allowed to set foot on Mars or Titan or even tow asteroids from the Kuiper belt back to Earth orbit, then Earth has absolutely no incentive to develop their spacefaring capabilities, and will never end up becoming sufficiently advanced to develop warp capability.

If the alien's criteria for joining their Federation/trading for better tech/being allowed to set foot on other planets besides Earth is that they must be culturally unified, then, well, the aliens are once again dumb and I would have to question how they managed to get this far. Or they're not "human-like" aliens that consist of individuals within a society, but rather they are the Borg or the Zerg or some other singular, unified consciousness.

I always found it dumb how sci fi keeps assuming that every nation on earth will join together into one super government. I always found something like Gundam IBO or Mass Effect more realistic, where you have different nations on Earth, and maybe there is a loose alliance between them for the purposes of negotiating with other planets, but they are definitely not unified back home.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I always found it dumb how sci fi keeps assuming that every nation on earth will join together into one super government. I always found something like Gundam IBO or Mass Effect more realistic, where you have different nations on Earth, and maybe there is a loose alliance between them for the purposes of negotiating with other planets, but they are definitely not unified back home.

A major part of this is simply upscaling in sci-fi. Planets effectively become nations or cities, hence why not only does every nation on earth become one (note that foreign planets are often other nations), every planet also has a single biome so you wind up with desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet, planet which happens to be entirely Japan etc.