Then everyone would work as tailors.

LOL!!! So true.

Beavers aside (but there is a fun discussion here about lack of opposable thumbs and acess to charged particle beam weapons by a non-sentient species.)

While there is a great potential discussion of a protracted gureilla war on earth (after all conquering the earth via orbital bombardment by the Romulans is almost a no way to resist at the convential level discussion) but setting resiting them aside; there remains two questions:

1- Did the Romulans practise genocide on planets they conquered? If yes, not sure there would be an earth with humans in the future. If no, then the door is left rather ajar.

2- Why assume the "good guys" put up a fight? Maybe the Romulans find the philosphy of Islamic Fundimentalism to their liking and through force of arms the earth turns into fundimentalist stooge of the Romulan Empire? If that isn't to one's liking then put your favorite flavor tyranny in it's place. Perhaps the old Star Trek let's bring back the Nazi's is a result?

I think if any other race other than Vulcans or a dozen or so other Federation races had made first contact with us, we would probably be enslaved or worse.

At least for the first 50 years.

We'd revolt... cry out for freedom and all things good... begin to quote the declaration of independence... and create wormsigns the likes of which even God has never seen

umm I think my WH40k video is a lot more interesting and fits better...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvx1zunZ-3k

If Ferengi was our first contact, we'd all be barmaids.

That is the video that made me decide to enlist.

Then we would have been robbed of all of our resources.:p

First think about this, vulcans and romulans are two sides of the same coin, one embraced logic while the other embrassed their passions. I always saw the two factions as the two extremes of what the humans were possible of being. We can be extremely passionate (not just sexually :p ) and we can also be extremely logical, and most of us tend to sit somewhere in the middle.

The federation formed when vulcan logic tempered human "passions" and lead to a civilization based on peace, coexistence, and "what is best for all."

I imagine if humanity had met a "mentor" race that taught the embracing of passions over logic, ie romulans, that the "federation" would have been more of an empire founded on "the strongest rule" IE if the humans didn't join the romulans they would have been the center of an empire very similar in its creed and values. they wouldn't nescessarily be warlike such as the klingons (after all the romulan empire wasn't truely warlike), but they would be very "selfcentric" focusing on what is best for humanity, not "what is best for all" like the vulcan based federation is.