Hmm, I had some minor formatting issues with that post.

But I think it can still be read and understood easily enough.

The idea here is to:

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Placing the Frontier, alien homeworlds, other inhabited sectors that might become areas of play, and so on all on the far side of the galaxy nicely obscures it all from the perspective of people on Earth or anywhere even remotely near it. Dust, supermassive blackhole, all that.

I have always been intrigued by the boxed text on page 8 of 2001, where they casually mention "The mega-corporations (which will eventually evolve into Pan Galactic, of the normal STAR FRONTIERS game setting) dominate the quality of life." Maybe your idea does not contradict that much.

Yup!

I'm very much going with that bit of boxed text.

I don't think I read/played that one. 

No doubt, Pan-Gal textbooks depict the megacorp in a positive light.

It's a civilizing force!

Maybe there's a human religion that reveres the monoliths and their creators.

Wee monolith pendant is the commonly displayed symbol.

Villians of Volturnus on page 63 Affirms the existance of Earth and the moon in the form of a joke by an 11 year old boy. This of course contradicts the statement in AD basic book. I dont take everything in this book as authoritative and largely treat its story as a holo drama aimed at young people. For example Universal Minerals is portrayed as a mega corp owning numerous space ships and even a starliner, as well as having mercenaries on hand and it is headquartered in Truane's Star it would seem. I suspect that the best answer for this setting contadicting information is that UM is creation of the writers of this holo drama since they may not want to name STreel specidically but everyone gets that PGC and Streel are being portrayed by proxy here.

The Earth contradiction falls back on individual prejudices of game referees, IMO. I dont see a good way to harmonize this and simply leave it to individual taste. My leaning is to say yes Earth exists but there is no communicaiton with it nor is it possible to travel to it at this time.

Well, I always thought Earth should be part of the Frontier mythos. But it is long cut off.

"Near the center of a great spiral galaxy..."

Well, I think modern astronomy shows that any stars near the center of the galaxy probably had any planets stripped off/heavily irradiated. Maybe this is some mis-translation by the Pan Galactic Corporation. Maybe the human homeworld is the considered the "center of the galaxy" because it is the center of human civilization.

"...where stars are much closer together than Earth's sun and its neighbors, a Human race developed..."

Hmm, can't do much with that. Hey, maybe it's the Space 1999 universe! Those stars certainly seemed close together. And, Earth is just the name of our planet in English. 

Earth can be translated as soil, dirt, terra, Gaea or Gaia, or the Third Rock from the Sun...

Greyhawk was the name of a city on the continent of Oerik (pronounced like "oi-rik") on the planet Oerth (pronounced "oith"). It was generally understood, if not officlaly said, to be in the same place as Earth on a parallel plane of existence.

Greyhawk was the name of a city on the continent of Oerik (pronounced like "oi-rik") on the planet Oerth (pronounced "oith"). It was generally understood, if not officlaly said, to be in the same place as Earth on a parallel plane of existence.

I understand. That's right, Greyhawk was a city. 

Another purpose of Humans in the game is probably to give the players a race they can visualize and understand.

I put the frontier close to the center of the galaxy in my campaign by concidering about a quarter way out on the edge of a spiral arm as close to the center.  I don't consider Earth part of my campaign because I have no problems with similar evolution.  We do not know anything yet about extra terrestrial biology to even claim that it doesn't follow patterns of developement.  Also I don't want to carry any bagage from Earth history and politics.  Yet I have used Earth history elemnts and hand waved them as unrelated in my mind so I am guilty.  I kind of like the idea that the frontier is the frontier because you as so far from the homeworlds that you can't aford to go back.

Elsewhere on this site I have agonized about developing homeworlds so I won't repeat the agony here.  I wish there was a way to balance the need for homeworlds with the desire to keep them out of the complexity.

So far the only homeworld plot that I have been presented with that I bought into is the yazirian exodus and world deistruction that TerlObar contributed so much to.

My guess is TSR went with no Earth connection so that they were free to create whatever setting they wanted and the players could do the same.  Their competitors at the time included Earth alot so this was a way to not just be a me too clone of the other games.

Basically its a galaxy far far away.....

I do see the appeal of that.

I have no problem with anyone who wants Earth in the game or not. As Iggy said, you can do without the homeworlds because they are cut off from the setting.

And, if you want to use Earth stuff anyway, well, you can use the this is an alternative dimension argument or the Star Trek Original Series parallel earths story line. 

I think Kirk and crew encountered at least one world that was a copy of Earth, another where the Roman Empire took charge, then of course there was the anthropologist that introduced Nazism into a two-planetary system, or one of my favorits, "A Piece of the Action" with the gangster planet (a result of cultural contamination of an old book left behind. Kind of a cargo cult.)

From a Dralasite view of the Frontier's humans:

Some call the human's world of origin "Soil," which seems odd, but they say they arose from dust and the first human was Adam who was made of dust, so that makes sense.

Or, a possible mistranslation is calling their planet "Dirt," but humans sometimes like to tell each other to eat dirt. Are they perhaps related to worms and hence the Sathar?

Since the human's homeworld is far away, others seem to call it "A Distant Soil" or a "Faraway Dirt"... (You might need to know about the Wendy and Richard Pini Elfquest and spinoff comics to get that reference.) 

Other humans call their home planet Gaia, the Third Rock from the Sun, or that "Damn place where no one gives a damn about you so I don't care about it." Preferably, I would take Gaia from that list.

Still others call it Earth, which seems to incorporate dust, dirt and rocks all in one. 

Since some humans like an old form of music called Rock, maybe they're all just rockheads at heart.

  

That was lazy writing on the part of the writers so they could recycle gangster costumes and nazi costumes and back lot sets at paramount. 

I prefer a distant earth cut off, in distance and time and lots of information lost so that its Earth is approaching the status of myth. There are artifacts in human language that people dont really get the reference- "Napoleanic" "he's a boy scout" etc. sort of like the literary phrases that are common usage in everyday language but trace their start to the king james bible but few people realize that is their origin: like "the apple of my eye" and "the ax is laid to the root"

A decade ago I felt it was really important to logically explain the things in setting obviously originate on Earth like "Minotaur" but today I could be much more progressive about it and not worry about illogical features in the setting.

so I guess I could go either way. but that still leaves the question of what to do about the home world.

Maybe the Daleks destroyed it.

Being able to recycle existing sets and costumes was part of the pitch Gene Roddenberry gave to the producers. Star Trek probably would never have been made without it. Many episodes recycle things this way.

There was also a common idea in science-fiction back then that "planetary evolution" meant every planet would go through exactly the same stages as Earth in its development. They took this very literally, to the point that Miri's planet is a nearly exact duplicate of Earth for absolutely no reason other than "didn't they say something about that in the writer's guide?"

System 892 has Romans and Christ. Omega IV had Yankees, the American flag, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and Communists. The people and architecture of Beta III look VERY 20th century Earth. "The Paradise Syndrome" has people whose culture is downright stolen from Native American films, and they attempt to explain it as "the Preservers."