Earth, also known as Terra, Sector 001, or The United States of America, is the center of the universe and the capital of the Federation. It is the best place in the quadrant for ribs. The Romulans have started wars over being able to try it for themselves, as their Cajun babyback ribs are noted as second best.
We're fairly certain a few characters of various "Star Trek" productions are from this planet, but so far nothing has been established in canon.
Earth was created sometime in 1776 which is probably in the late 20th century like everything else when a declaration of independence was made by those jimkirky fanboys who who were babbling something like "e plebniste" because they had to be enlightened to true meaning of shirt-ripped , heavy drinking, commie shooting american freedom. After america's founding they immediately fought world wars one, two, three, four, five and six by 1997 but never thought of all those devoted trek nerds who would have to wright memory alpha articles about the 90's in the information age (this age would be succeeded by the far more glorious plastic age). anyway, after fighting all those wars over there !!!!!!!!!! (probably one of those late 20th century brush wars on the asian continent that were an important lesson to all the people of earth, BUT YOU DONT KNOW MAN, YOU WERENT THRERE!!!!!!!!!) Eventually one particularly drunk washout dude named Zephie figured that even if earth (America, where else) was a whole load of crappy bums living in tin shacks, they still had to prove that they were smarter than all those other guys (non american humans Shhh!!! they aren't even here) so even though this guy Zephie was out babbling like a lunatic one night about elvis returning with army of scary Swedish outsourced tech cyborgs (we like swedes, there nordic like the rest of us humans). Zephie strapped himself himself to a nuculer WMD (despite considerable efforts by lesser nations to impose sanctions on his threatening program which he said was only for peaceful purposes) Zephie shot himself out into the sky and managed to got real high as he sailed across the universe maaaaaaaan!!!!!!!!!!!!!. the rest is history