Historically, the concept of a "nation" (as the "nat-" root implies) is a people born of the same ancestry, a people native to the same land. Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and so forth - sharing an ethnicity, a language, and a culture.
Yet the first two "nations" to reach space, the US and the USSR, were hardly that. Sure, each had a majority ethnic group, but they both had (in their own way) an expectation that all people within their borders would conform to their culture, and relevantly that their approach to scientific research and space exploration would benefit the country as a whole.
And India isn't a "nation" in the historical sense, anyway. It's a collection of dozens of peoples, with significant and influential minority populations among them, and all are represented in the country as a whole and in ISRO in particular. Getting India into space on its own absolutely serves the needs of India as a sovereign power, but that's very different from saying that it serves the needs of humanity (or that India, or anyone else, should be a sovereign power).
And, relevant to the concept of "nation," there's no particular reason a person born into a high-information world should adopt the values of their ethnicity's historic culture more than any other values they may see.
“Groups of people” doesn’t need to mean “ethnicity.” There’s a lot of political conflict in the Us, but it’s not primarily along ethnic or religious lines, for example. But there are groups of people, and they are different. Farmers in Iowa are different people than programmers in San Francisco. Having government necessarily requires those groups of people to make decisions about the lives of other people under the same government. That becomes exponentially harder as the group becomes more heterogenous with respect to the things governments do.
> But there are groups of people, and they are different. Farmers in Iowa are different people than programmers in San Francisco.
Again, I disagree with this. Plenty of programmers in San Francisco grew up on farms in Iowa. (And to be transparent about my biases here: my parents are Indian Christians, a distinct culture from the Hindu majority; my dad worked for ISRO; and I was born in the Deep South and worked as a programmer in SF for a few years. So the culture of "India" as a whole doesn't resonate with me, nor that of "the Deep South" or "SF" nor "America," and I don't feel like a lesser person for it.)
And I would claim that the fact that you can migrate from an area with one sort of politics / culture / economy / etc. to an area with another one (as a pointed example, anyone remember the "It Gets Better" videos from a few years ago featuring gay people who grew up across the country, half of whom seemed to say "and then I moved to San Francisco"?), and that people do that quite frequently, is evidence that there isn't much reason in attributing politics / culture / etc. to people as people in the way we've historically seen it, i.e., as correlated with place of birth or parentage or childhood culture, or proxies for those like religion.
If anything, the unrealistic part about Star Trek is that the various alien species had personalities influenced by their biology (the Vulcans with weaker emotional processing, the physically resilient Klingons, etc.). If they didn't, given pervasive interstellar transport, it's hard to see why so many people stay on their home planets. (And indeed the whole conceit of the Federation is that they don't have to.)
What sort of groups, precisely?
Historically, the concept of a "nation" (as the "nat-" root implies) is a people born of the same ancestry, a people native to the same land. Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and so forth - sharing an ethnicity, a language, and a culture.
Yet the first two "nations" to reach space, the US and the USSR, were hardly that. Sure, each had a majority ethnic group, but they both had (in their own way) an expectation that all people within their borders would conform to their culture, and relevantly that their approach to scientific research and space exploration would benefit the country as a whole.
And India isn't a "nation" in the historical sense, anyway. It's a collection of dozens of peoples, with significant and influential minority populations among them, and all are represented in the country as a whole and in ISRO in particular. Getting India into space on its own absolutely serves the needs of India as a sovereign power, but that's very different from saying that it serves the needs of humanity (or that India, or anyone else, should be a sovereign power).
And, relevant to the concept of "nation," there's no particular reason a person born into a high-information world should adopt the values of their ethnicity's historic culture more than any other values they may see.