this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Trouble with Tribbles episode... the planet in question was a federation world. (Prior to the episode, it was contested with the klingons, with the organian treaty saying it goes to whoever can develop it the best- that was the federation. Which sets up the klingons wanting some revenge.
TNG episode Code of Honor, the plague was happening on Styris IV- another federation planet. In The Man Trap, with PIke, we see that medical science can't repair damage from that accident, neither. The Deadly years is a federation colony world that has that rapid aging.
in The Cloud Miners, Merak II is facing a "botanical plague" (aka, potentially causing a famine... though it was much worse than just the food. All vegetation. ) if they don't get the mineral. Merak II was also a federation world.
They didn't eliminate disease, Illness, or anything so dramatic as that. which is why the scientists in TNG's Unnatural Selection, the whole purpose of the genetically engineered immune system was to do exactly what you were suggesting it should. and the events in that story- on a Federation research and ship, no less- was kicked off by a minor flu.
So no, that's not really true either. Core worlds do face and deal with disease, fammine, illness all the time. TNG and even TOS era medical science is advanced, no doubt there, but still limited.
You've just listed a bunch of incidents on frontier worlds and said that proves they haven't solved any problems on core worlds. SIgning some paperwork to join the Federation doesn't instantly solve all your problems, and colonies aren't founded with prescience that means they avoid ever running into problems. Also, you've ignored the key point that it's meant to be relative to what's possible for modern humans, so things like being seriously disabled after exposure to high levels of fictional kinds of radiation like Pike was instead of being a very dead puddle of goo is a huge victory.
Merak II and Styris IV are… frontier worlds?
Interesting. I’m curious as to how a throw-away line convinces you of that? All we know is that there “federation planets” and they have problems.
The others are colony worlds which were established by humans, presumably with federation technology and human culture. Sherman’s world was already developed by the time of Tribbles. (To the point that there was speculation of Klingon sabotage.)
Doesn’t really matter though. If the federation had eliminated disease (including contagions in crops,) then there would have been no need for such emergency runs.
The material they were getting for Merak or Styris would not have been needed and Ardana and Lingon wouldn’t have had the sole source for the relevant “cure”; they wouldn’t have needed to ship in more, fresh grain for Sherman’s, etc.
As for the “point” that I’m missing… shifting goal posts. Besides which, Pike’s (and who knows how many others,) would have never actually needed that medical care if they had, in fact, an ounce of safety planning in the people designing star ships.
You get that the reason Pikes accident happened (and oh so many other incidents like that, including Spock dying,) is that the federation just doesn’t give a fuck about life? How many deaths could have been prevented if they had just installed surge protectors and seatbelts? How many deaths could have been prevented if researchers had just asked themselves “what could go wrong?” and taken steps to minimize that?
It's not shifting goalposts, you've just been arguing against Star Trek missing different goalposts to the ones everyone else understood it to be aiming for for several posts.
The Fedaration core worlds are ones like Earth, Vulkan, Andoria and Tellar that have been member worlds for a very long time and are physically closer to the center of Federation territory. By the time of TOS, it's obviously not just the founding four worlds, but as TOS is a series about a multi-year deep space exploration mission, nearly every planet the Enterprise visits is going to be either outside the Fedaration or a frontier world. If a planet only gets a throw-away line rather than a load of exposition about how they've been a member for decades and several of the crew are from there, then that's enough to say it's a frontier world.