>>2393
For this reason, the federation relies on natural development instead of intentional technological progress. This means allowing natural biological systems to solve your problems for you, allowing you to simply harvest the results. When big business sees this as their main source of new products, biological diversity becomes their most important asset. A single plant could sometime in the future be found to have immeasurable value when combined with any other biological existence. No one knows this, so everything must be protected. This has lead to extensive regulation on everything connected to natural life. You can't go to a desert planet far off in space and pick a mushroom without someone finding out. Someone will show up and ask you to register the picking and motivate why you are allowed to pick this mushroom, as well as show that doing so doesn't harm the biological system.

Other things may be seen as very relaxed compared to our current society. Drugs, escort services and slave trade is perfectly fine in the federation. But again, highly regulated. Slaves have contracts giving them so many rights that the average human business owner would probably just sit down and cry. Whores work for a set monthly salary and get quotas of work to do, because it is still communism.

The single largest industry is fuel. Much of the federation space fleet uses "ancient" technology relying on liquid or dry concentrated rocket fuel. Some aliens even refine their rocket fuel from their equivalent of sugar beets. "Real" alien technology as imagined by many new agers is still pretty uncommon. It is a psychic ability of manifestation and is only available to "ascended" or partially ascended races. Some advanced races use magnetic fields or other types of propulsion because they simple never learned how to use burning fuel. The lyrans went this path, developing directly from stone age shamanism to space travel.