When shall we ever have a society much like the one featured in Star Trek Enterprise?
Name:
Anonymous2010-01-20 15:20
It won't work in any stretch of the imagination for now. The society of the Star Trek universe has always been strictly post-scarcity. The only resource that they can't manufacture are (poorly named) dilithium crystals but everything else is easily available to everyone without supply problems. We do not have material transmutation that would allow such resource triviality and the major limitations to such conversions are energy and safety.
The singularity of the Earth government is a necessity in a society like Star Trek due to the prevalence of power monolithic interplanetary powers. A planet which is composed of many different governments just doesn't work right by definition of a Star Trek civilization, but that doesn't mean it couldn't work right by definition of a real world situation.