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SHARKS (crossed out) MONGEESE (sic) WITH FRICKIN' LASER BEAMS ATTACHED TO THEIR HEADS
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Mostly not. The various empires and many of the various civs making them up could be thought of as 'one world governments' (to some degree, they are often rather loosely organized) but I don't find the argument made against that to be convincing since it's basically just an exercise in cynicism rather than an argument. It also ignores the fact that there are quite large social groupings already in existence that dwarf city states or tribes - so it's not clear that there's any hard upper limit to how large of of a more or less unified civilization you can get.
Combat sports do exist here and there in the setting (along with many other sports), and can get quite brutal or result in death - but between OA med tech and Backups, the results are strictly temporary and usually dealt with in time for a late dinner. So, not quite what Cracked describes.
The rule of the transapients and archai could be thought of as a machine uprising - although the people living in the Sephirotics certainly don't think of it that way and it really isn't the 'traditional' sort usually depicted in most SF.
Terragen civ as a whole isn't quite intergalactic, but it is an interstellar civilization - but it's very definitely not your 'Standard Sci Fi Setting' - even the TV Tropes wiki says so.
Terragen civ can look quite utopian by our standards - but it isn't really. There are still problems and still striving - it's just of a sort and scale that is very different from what we are used to.
My 2c worth,
Todd
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A lot of the colonies in OA start off as single polities, then quite often they split into factions and diversify - this is the opposite to becoming a world state, because the polities tend to start small then get bigger and more complex.
On the other hand maybe we should have more independent nations in OA, as opposed to planetary authorities plagued by dissident factions (and so on). A task for the future.
