Is this a solution to the Kobyashi Maru test?

Cafe Society
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61

Not sure I agree. In fact I’m sure I don’t.

IMO …

If the high tech visitors want to take over (or just make a lot of lunches), then sure they’ll trash the low tech planet’s civilization and/or species.

But what if they don’t? What if the Prime Directive had real teeth? Or what if, more typically, the visitors show up, speechify for a day or three, maybe hurt a few locals, perhaps even kill somebody really important like a local King, then vanish into interstellar space from whence they came, never to return.

Depending on the planetary tech & social level, that may disappear into local village legend and be forgotten within one or two lifetimes of the local species. For more large-scale connected societies the one-shot interference by the visitors may well alter that society’s future trajectory vs. if they’d never shown up, but that doesn’t prove the visited version will necessarily be a disaster, nor that the un-visited version would not degenerate into disaster on their own.

Maybe it spawns a cargo cult religion, altering the social path forward for many generations until it dies out for lack of reinforcement. Or doesn’t. Jeebus is still rumored to be coming back any day now 2000+ years later.

In any case, real quickly it’ll take on the social characteristics of the local species and society. IOW, even if their new god wasn’t originally made in their image when the god-Kirk was speechifying, pretty soon (a dozen generations?) it’ll be morphed into their image.

Would humans, a febrile and stupid species already under great stress having just graduated from tiny villages to a worldwide connected civilization, lose their collective shit if the [whoevers] showed up, speechified, did some damage whether inadvertently or to prove a point, then evaporated? You bet.

Would all of human society necessarily collapse into an unrecoverable heap Road Warrior style? Nope. Or at least almost certainly not.

62

Compare A piece of the action with Mad Idolatry – I think it all depends on the intent of the visitors merely observing, but accidently interacting/changing something and those visitors that really want to help.

63

Similar to @simster’s example, compare the results of “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” and “Who Mourns for Adonis” (these are fundamentally the same episode except HStaST is a TAS episode with a different ‘god’.

Wtih “WMfA” the interaction apparently made a major difference in the terms of development of Western civilization, which because the societies that followed afterwards tried (with greater and lesser success) to emulate, recreate, and preserve some of those elements, would have a more lasting effect.

But in HStaST, the society that was influenced (and while it was claimed to be benevolent, some of the societies under said influence may not be to our standards at least) was wiped out by competing human factions, and thus their influence was cut off.

I basically agree, periods of influence to an early society that if human-like enough to anthropomorphize powers / beings / etc will most likely damp out over time into just another myth figure. The closer to ‘modern’ preservation of information of information, or information culture, the more likely the contamination is to be significant towards collapsing the society.

64

I wonder why you keep misunderestimating Messi. Argentinians are weird. :soccer:

65

I agree with your antecedent. But in your conclusion I’d replace “collapsing” with “changing”.

I fundamentally don’t buy that super-tech alien visitors showing up, speechifying or even interfering a bunch, then departing never to be seen again will have collapse as the most likely, much less certain, outcome. Change? Sure. Collapse? Nope.

If causing a collapse was the visitor’s goal, then I expect they can make that happen promptly enough that they’re willing to stick around to see that project through. Through superior force of arms if nothing else more subtle will do. Modulo the relative lifespans & living speeds of the visitors and the locals.

But if they’re not aiming to create a collapse, good bet one won’t happen. Or at least it depends largely on the psychological resiliency of the local species and the social resiliency of their civilization. A species that has gone from “cave man” equivalent to an information-preserving and information-driven planetary society has already demonstrated one heck of a lot of adaptability = resilience to change.

66

Fair enough. I tend to assume, based on a society of humans (which is what we mostly generalize from of course), that at least the short term consequences would be negative. We’re a stupid, panicky lot, and far more given to illogic than I’d like. Long term, you’re probably right, and that a one-time contact would in medium-to-long term evoke change, either good or bad depending on the local POV, but not automatically for the worse.

I mean, according to my FASA Star Trek roleplaying game (TTRPG) the humanoids of A Piece of the Action were socially conforming, and tended to extreme emulation. So after ST:TOS they started emulating Federation society of Kirk’s era, based on that contact. That would be change, and not absolutely a negative one.

It would be a “collapse” of the prior society though, as would the collapse of of whatever social structure they had prior to the contact that prompted their mobster-variant.

But still, collapse is loaded, and not the best term for the circumstance.

67

Do we ever get a lot of examples of the Prime Directive causing the kind of harm the rule is meant to stop?

68

never mind

69

Sorry, I haven’t read the whole thread if that’s what you were going to say. I’ll do that now.

70

Because Messi wouldn’t have cheated to win the Kobayashi Maru scenario, Diego would’ve used His hand on the computer like Kirk.

71

You are right, I bow to your wisdom. Messi would not have needed to cheat.

72

To win the KM Maru? it’s the only way by design.

73

Open fire on the Kobyashi, impressing the Klingons with your aggression, and using that as the basis of new alliance talks.

74

I don’t believe that gods ever walked around the Earth doing things. But billions of people throughout history did.

A generation after Captain Kirk comes down and kills an evil warlord before giving a big speech and leaving, when there is no one left alive who actually saw Kirk do this, there is little functional difference between it actually having happened or not.

Since in our world there were many societies that thrived for millennia while believing that Zeus sometimes came down to knock a woman up before turning her into a cow so Hera won’t find out (or the like), I don’t see why a society that believes that Captain Kirk once came down from space, shot an evil warlord, and gave a big heroic speech would necessarily fail to exist.

75

Just to be clear, my quote was from a section in which @LSLGuy (most likely correctly!) disagreed with the use of the word “collapse”. What’s missing from the section you quoted is in the prior post, where I said:

Please note the modern preservation of information or information culture caveats, the “more likely” and (in the section you quoted) “Short term”. :slight_smile:

But still, it also depends strongly on the nature of the exposed culture. On earth, we’re (despite many efforts, and IMHO for the best) a mesh of many different ones. I suspect the response of fundamentalist Christians would be different from agnostic technocrats to such an event. But (taking us back to Star Trek) those societies that were exposed either fit them into their existing mythos (the terrible Paradise Syndrome for example, but note, that’s a pre-information society), possibly enable a faction of a society at a tipping point (for good or ill) such as in Cloud Minders, or indeed cause a collapse, but possibly a beneficial one such as in one of my favorite episodes A Taste of Armageddon.

We’re going to have a lot of generalities and caveats, because the societies we encounter in ST (TOS especially) are often extremes, or parables, or otherwise operating in ways that defy (human) common sense. And of course, speaking IRL, we can react as individuals, groups or societies, and often in very different ways from the norms under stress.

Which, via a looong digression, brings us back to the OP - the Kobyashi Maru. In an idealized (and ST is this) world, the Kob yashi Maru is just another parable - when faced with the “no-win scenario” there isn’t supposed to be “A solution”. The test is evaluating how the officer involved attempts to find a solution, adapt to the changing scenarios, and if such efforts are in keeping with the best interests of the Federation, the people of the Federation (making a distinction here), and the proverbial honor of Starfleet and it’s regulations as well as traditions.

In the various media (multiple eras, books, etc) each of the crew that have attempted the scenario did so in ways that (with greater and lesser success) reflected their own characters, knowledge, and understanding of Starfleet. Which is what makes it more interesting that -just- looking at a way to beat a no-win scenario.

-ASIDE-

Personally, I can’t believe Kirk was the first to cheat. I bet it happened every few years, but had been better covered up before. Or considering Starfleet in the TOS era is still pretty young, and we don’t have an exact date on when the Kobyashi Maru test was instituted, being the first (and last) to break it makes at least some sense, in that he was one of the first to have the opportunity and audacity to do so.

76

Keep in mind the vast majority of PD eps in TOS* seem to revolve around the trope of:

“The entire civilization seems to be localized to where our heroes are.”

Probably not A Taste of Armageddon and probably not Bread and Circuses, but yots and yots seem to.

*See also Planet of the Apes AND the actual Haldeman novella i mentioned above.

77

The most unbelievable part of the KM test is they could still use it. Between Kirk and Savik there was what, 50 years? And the particulars aren’t leaked to every cadet for the last 50 years? Inconceivable

78

May be the cicle them every 25 years?
Kirk got the last years of the KM test.
New cadets got a different unwinnable test for 25 years and Savik got the KM’s next cycle first year…
One would think they ar least would change the ship’s name…

79

Or they make 'em swear not to tell. They’d be able to winnow out who blabbed eventually. And if “talking = huge black mark on your record” it might work.

80

Yeah sure that will work. You ever meet people? Most might not tell. But that one guy has a younger brother about to do it. And that other guy has a best friend. And someone hopes to get laid by someone else. Those couple of people didn’t swear to tell so pretty soon the whole class knows and the class after that…

That’s not even mentioning the fact that we see officers that went through it blabbing in public about it with non-Starfleet people. Apparently they have no problems talking about it.