Dumb sci-fi premise #137: The Earth is contacted by a galactic federation of planets, but there’s a problem: it’s literally a federation of planets. Its members are all planetary-scale hive minds, and non-hive-mind species aren’t ordinarily admitted. The Earth, however, presents an unprecedented exception: it’s the first and only known case of a non-hive-mind species artificially constructing a planetary consciousness. Earth’s inhabitants are understandably quite confused, as we aren’t aware of constructing any such thing – until it becomes clear that federation ambassador is in fact talking about the Internet.

(Ultimately, the Internet is granted galactic citizenship. The legal status of individual humans takes some figuring out, since humans are necessary for the Internet’s emergent consciousness to exist, but don’t directly participate in it in the same way that members of a hive-mind species do. Eventually a consensus is reached to classify individual humans under a term that probably should be translated as “service animal”, but for diplomatic reasons is not.)