Submitted 8 months ago by USSBurritoTruck@startrek.website to risa@startrek.website
I’ve always assumed the Prime Directive was Rodenberry’s attempt to explain why we aren’t being obviously contacted by more advanced aliens attempting to fix all our problems for us, and his awareness how we would likely react to such intervention at the height of the Cold War.
The prime directive came about due to his concerns about western interventionalism. i.e leave other countries alone became dont interfere in the development of non warp capable species’ development.
“You will be remembered for a week or so.”
And logged in ships virus infected logs.
Still more time than Tuvix got.
It’s an interesting space version of non-interventionism. In the real world, intervention is a very complex issue to navigate. Particularly since most forms of national intervention have monetary drivers that make the choice much more about how it benefits the intervening country rather than the intervened.
I think DS9 is the only series to really address Statfleet’s long term effects of intruding onto other cultures and forcing them to change.
I went to a panel on the problems with the Prime Directive at Chicon 8. There was a lawyer there who actually works with international aid organizations on how they intervene. His biggest problem with the Prime Directive is that it’s too simple. They have stacks of rules about how exactly they go about this. There are places where they’re not allowed to go because somebody fucked this up bad at some point in the past, and those people don’t owe them access just because they promise to be better now.
IIRC, there is a throwaway line somewhere (from Data, I think) that says the Prime Directive is followed up by a hundred little rules defining out the specifics, but it’s never treated that way.
Naomi Wildman says it has 47 sub-orders in “Infinite Regress”.
I’ve also seen interesting arguments on wether the prime directive is even moral at all, after all if space fairing civilisations are encountering you then they’re probably going to imminently scoop up all the good interstellar real estate in your viscinity, not enlightening a civilisation is dooming them to be stuck with whatever resources are left when every other civilisation nearby has taken what it wants. (Lets be realistic there’s no way every single group is going to abide by a treaty that grants primitive civilisations pre-emptive territory bubbles)
I’ve been thinking about the prime directive recently and it just doesn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things. You don’t involve yourself because “well what if this extinction level event was meant to happen?” Could just as easily be phrased as them being there with the capacity to fix the problem was also meant to happen.
Especially if they can magic the problem away without even exposing knowledge of their existence to the pre-warp civilization. Would people who don’t know about starships really notice if a teacher field was routed through the deflector dish to [science fiction jargon], causing the tectonic activity to stabilize?
If we’re having a serious conversation about the PD, it’s important to note that it’s a blanket “don’t interfere” rule that applies to all civilizations, warp-capable or otherwise.
Most of the time, it makes sense, but these edge cases are wild.
The prime directive is a great example of how even a good rule taken to the extreme can end up causing more harm than good.
But beyond that, it’s just an easy aid for the writers to add a point of conflict for their stories. The prime directive as a value within the federation seems secondary to me.
it’s important to note that it’s a blanket “don’t interfere” rule that applies to all civilizations, warp-capable or otherwise.
Where did you get that idea??? It only applies to pre warp civilizations. Not getting involved in the internal politics of warp civilizations isn’t Prime Directive- that’s just regular diplomacy.
Yeah it’s pretty stupid. If it’s a random act of nature that’s about to wipe out an entire species, why is warp capability the cut off for helping? Perhaps it was meant to happen even if they have warp technology.
I could see leaving them to destroy themselves if they invented nuclear bombs and hated each other so much they would kill themselves to harm the others, but a supervolcano or meteor or something? Lend a hand dude.
Also I found it very human-centric.
That’s an entire planet about to get destroyed. You going to condemn the other hundreds of thousands of species to death because the one intelligent species isn’t smart enough?
The Prime Directive is one of those weird artifacts of the context of the original series. When naked imperialism was starting to be challeneged in pop culture but was still very much considered the status quo in the West, the idea not to interfere in other cultures was a bold stance. However, the idea of a “natural cultural progression” is unfortunately a product of its time and wasn’t even something Kirk actually believed when it came down to it. Picard was more by the book but even he couldn’t watch innocent people die when his crew pushed back. It’s now pretty much universally regarded in canon as a stupid rule.
I sometimes think about this. Imagine you were an “immortal” being or mind in a powerful starship that could interfere with Earth. Like you could prevent the plague killing millions, but if you do we humans might not learn sanitation - or they need to learn later. Or do you prevent climate change because you know it will kill us all - but then humanity won’t learn and “evolve”. So when humanity does finally become interstellar and spreads over the galaxy, terraforming every planet and harvesting every resources, bulldozing everything and endlessly and exponentially grow - is it your fault?
As soon as you interfere you take on responsibility and guilt for every genocide or ecocide this civilization is going to commit in the future.
Outside completely cosmological threats it becomes quite iffy. Even something like a planet killer meteor could be argued that if the species knew it could happen but didn’t put effort into preventing it, then that means they don’t value survival of intelligent civilizations enough. They don’t value theirs, why would they value other civilizations they encounter?
In reality Star Trek colonizing all these planets would eliminate future intelligent civilizations too. Imagine some star trek people would have stepped on Earth a hundred million years ago and found no signs of intelligent live, terraformed it. Or even just introducing countless microorganisms on your shoe. You wouldn’t be able to read this stupid comment of mine :D It would be a kind of temporally displaced genocide. Of course NASA is already thinking about this and no colonization would make for rather boring drama, but a modern “hard sci-fi” would have to have artificial space habitats (orbitals / halos) as the main living spaces and leave any potentially live giving planets alone.
Then another argument would be about diversity. For an immortal being, planets could be seen as bio computers creating incredibly complexity and irreplaceable wealth of information. A new way to exist or how not to exist. As soon as you interfere you taint that and have removed some of distinctiveness of their culture with your own culture.
The main problem I have with the prime directive is that it has been broken over 30 times so far but also upheld to the point that entire species are allowed to be snuffed out. Sometimes they intervene in natural disasters without the species on that planet knowing and sometimes picard lets an entire planet get snuffed out while he makes a big sad speech about how it is more important to uphold the prime directive. It is applied inconsistently and callously. I would have had more respect for it if they picked a lane. Either never intervene or stop hiding behind it.
So the question the Prime Directive poses is: what aspects of the Great Filter do we leave in place?
Do we save a developing civilization from an asteroid they have zero way of stopping?
Do we defuse a political situation that will end in nuclear war and destruction of their civilization?
Well, the second one is a direct result of their own and controllable actions. The first is entirely out of their control and just got dealt a bad hand lol
Yeah, I was presenting two opposite ends of the spectrum. But the Prime Directive is often interpreted to prohibit acting in both of those cases. The question is where is the line?
What about a civilization that has a unique fuel source and they created a massively progressive civilization based on it. But when their technology progressed they suddenly realized that fuel source had subtly poisoned their world and they were doomed to all die? They couldn’t have known before their tech advanced and their tech would never have gotten that far without that fuel source bolstering their progress.
Do you intervene?
We can create lots of hypotheticals that do this same thing and honestly a good % of Star Trek episodes are just this question in detail.
how about: protect innocent people and dont veer into fascist “nature decided they weren’t good enough to continue living” nonsense
Great filters are strictly hypothetical anyway.
Meanwhile:
GCU The Gravitas Meme is so Last Year: I’m gonna sort out that extension event, then we should probably send a couple of Special Circumstances operatives to guide them in the right direction. In the past picosecond I’ve absorbed and analysed their global information net so know exactly what actions we need to take to give them the correct nudge.
The “correct nudge” has been determined to give a random citizen a cheese danish.
"More of a set of guidelines" Kirk and Picard in unison with a chorus of "Exactly" from every other Federation Officer or Official except any featured in anything involving a speech about the prime directive by that episode's primary cast.
Any good captain knows that’s a rule worth breaking. If your options are: a) save a whole planet of people or b) keep your fancy status job in a post-scarcity economy, then you know it’s morally worth it to get court marshalled.
And those examples would involve a speech about the Prime would they not?
Besides, federation prison is just a sunny beach on New Zealand anyway. The worst part is getting stuck in the delta quadrant but that happened like one time.
Laughs in Bobiverse
MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com 8 months ago
I like that McFarlane just said “fuck that” in The Orville. He kept the gist — leave developing civilizations alone — but doesn’t even consider allowing them to go extinct for stupid reasons.
yukichigai@kbin.social 8 months ago
Really early on, too. It was one of the things that made me go "oh wait this isn't just fart jokes in space".
Though to be fair, the reality is that no matter how advanced we get there's still gonna be fart jokes in space. That scene in the cafeteria where everyone's getting Bortus to eat random things seems like a far more realistic vision of a space-faring future.
Delphia@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The Orville is Star Trek if the federation actually had to recruit real people.
cm0002@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is exactly why I love lower decks, it’s so much closer to how we would probably act in the 24th century vs the heroized live action stuff lmao
Taleya@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Yeah ‘if the stars should appear’ was the point all of us sat up and went “HELLO”
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion given how reasonably popular Below Deck and SNW appear to be, but The Orville, for me, is the best post-2002 Trek thing.
qarbone@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve watched some of the Orville season 1 and I can’t believe that claim. What season does it get good?
hglman@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
They save them in tos as well.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 8 months ago
In TOS Kirk really leans into not interfering with the “healthy” development of a civilization. If it isn’t healthy in his judgement, he interferes. So, essentially when it comes to Kirk if it offends his sensibilities he takes free reign to change it while paying lip service to the idea of non-intervention.
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Only because Kirk hadn’t banged them yet.
zaphod@feddit.de 8 months ago
Yeah, but in TOS we also see what happens if you forget a book about chicago gangsters on a developing planet.
samus12345@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And they even had an episode that explained why the Union had a “Prime Directive” and what happened when they tried to introduce new technology to a planet that wasn’t ready for it.
hansl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Isn’t that also part of the ST lore? Or did I mix up The Orville and Star Trek canon… :/
Anticorp@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I liked We Are Legion where Bob is like “Fuck this! I’m making sure this species thrives, even if I have to kill half the planet to do it.”. Also regarding genocide, the Bobs were like “file as ‘think about this later’ on our TODO list”.
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Lol Bob went a level above genocide in the end there. Artificial stellar nova is a bad day for every species in a solar system…