The biggest problem with the PD is it only applies to Star Fleet. So, while the federation are sitting back waiting for a planet to get its act together warp wise, there is nothing at all to stop the Ferengi moving in and setting up a new market place, or worse, the Klingons deciding the local population would make a good bunch of slaves, and claiming the planet for the Empire.
Presumably, under the current rules, the Federation would be completely unable to intervene. The dominion could have taken over half the quadrant if they had just gone after pre-warp planets, while the federation sat around composing strongly worded letters.
It clearly wasn’t that way in Kirk’s time, since we several times saw his Enterprise interacting with pre-warp – hell, pre-industrial civilizations because the Klingons were. Of course, said civilizations always had dilithium, and they were in a cold war with the Klingons they weren’t at all sure they would win, so they may have been looser. But the point is, the PM says the Federation can’t let the interstellar-civilization-cat out of the bag; once the cat is roaming around they can show themselves, whether the culture has invented warp drive or been contacted by another of the great powers.
Yes, but he did that after consulting with his superiors, and implicitly after gathering information on the situation. He didn’t commit the Federation to anything when Gowron asked at the beginning of the war.
Here’s the thing, though: It’s hard to differentiate between “saving a civilization from certain extinction by natural disaster” and “saving a civilization from likely extinction by natural disaster.” Let’s take that disease example. How do you know for sure it’s going to kill off the entire population? You don’t know the detailed biology of that species or that planet without conducting years of analysis. Okay, let’s say the Enterprise-D has super duper scanners and medical knowledge and they do know for sure that the entire population will be dead in, let’s say fifty years. That’s fifty years for the native people to work on it. If the Enterprise cures the disease for them, that culture loses any side effects (pun intended), good or bad, of developing the cure on their own. Maybe the search for the cure would have resulted in a dozen major medical breakthroughs that would have revolutionized their society. Maybe it would have resulted in biochemical knowledge that the native people could have used to construct horrifying biological weapons, and the Enterprise has now saved a civilization with a tendency to ruthless violence.
Or, what if one of the causes of the disease is cultural? What if, as was the case everywhere on Earth until one or two centuries ago (and is still the case in many places today), disease was allowed to run rampant by poor sanitation and hygiene? The Enterprise, in stealthily curing the disease, has not removed the source of the problem, and another disease will soon take its place. Okay, you say, so you have Enterprise officers blend in with the populace and begin a sanitation information campaign. Guess what? You’re now deliberately adjusting their culture without their knowledge or permission. Or you station a Starfleet patrol to pass by this planet once every few years and cure the new diseases as they crop up. Same deal - maybe they would have figured it out themselves after a few centuries of chronic disease, as we did, with commensurate benefits and drawbacks.
Here’s the adjustment I suggest for the Prime Directive (borrowing Grumman’s language from early in the thread):
Saving a civilization from assured extinction does not violate the Prime Directive, provided it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that the civilization would not have had time to survive by their own efforts, and that the extinction event is not in any way caused by the civilization in danger.
There are still grey areas left by this. But it’s an improvement.
I agree with most of this, save that when it was an extra-biological threat – the asteroid from which Kirk saved the planet of the transplanted Indians, or the exploding planet of Data’s pen pal friend – I’d say go for it.
I also tend to think that, in cases when the planet’s inhabitants were obviously descended from Terrant stock transplated off world by the Preservers (as, again, the Indians), Starfleet’s rule was "Screw the Prime Directive. Tampering has already begun.
I never liked the Prime Directive. If I have carte blanche to change it, I would just say “interfere to your heart’s content, but do it with the benefit to the Federation in mind”
Screw the Prime Directive. If you can mess with another civilization, do so as much as you want. Who cares? They’re not humans. Exploit the snot out of them.
I’ve always wondered if races like the Klingons or Romulans ever did this on a mass scale. I know it’s just a TV show, but it seems like humans and the Federation were the only ones going around actively studying less advanced civilizations. You’re telling me no Klingon would ever conduct studies on such a world? Their only options are to blow it up or ignore it?
It’s canon that the Klingons were interested in pre-warp civilizations at least during their cold war with the Feds, and there’s at least one reference to them having conquered another planet in TNG.
I see it like this. For one thing, I doubt the Federation explores sectors which they could only get to by passing through Klingon space, and they certainly don’t if they’d have to pass through Romulan space. (Yes, I know space is not two-dimensional, but we’re talking about how the various series treat the galaxy.) So both cultures could be exploiting the hell out of the sundry inhabited sectors nearer them than the Feds, and we’d never see it. I would even expect that the various treaties between the major powers of the Alpha Quadrant specifies which “undeveloped” sectors may be explored only by a given nation, empire, or confederacy, and which are fair game for whoever gets their first. The conflict comes from the fair game sections.
This works if the three dimensional spaces are not congruent, or at least that the configuration allows some interstitial region between the treaty boundaries. Imagine two ovoids with irregular appendages that are near but not intersecting with those of your opponent. The area between is the arena.
In the case of the Klingons, we rarely if ever got any point of view on them save that of Kirk & company. But I recently re-watched the first episode with them – “Errand of Mercy,” with the Organians – and, when the Organians finally get irritated enough with the children and lay down the smackdown, Kor begins to rattle off his problems with the Federation: cutting off their trade routes, benignly intefering, and so forth. So I don’t think it fair to say TOS-era Klingons were honor-less (Kang certainly wasn’t); just that Kirk, in a cold war with them, saw them as such.
As for the Romulans: they get a lot of praise for being honorable in those days because of the first Romulan Commander, the Mark Lenard character. But he is clearly presented as being exceptional. We DO get his point of view, and it was clear to me that he was on out outs with his hierarchy, that he didn’t like the way the Empire’s policies were going but that history had left him behind. If the Romulans were a proud warrior culture who eschewed deceit and manipulation, they had stopped being so at that point.
The Mark Lenard character was closely copied from the Curt Jurgens character from “The Enemy Below” who was also no fan of the government sending him out.
That movie, by the way, is excellent on its own and not just as the source material for this episode of TOS.
Kor himself may have been honorable in the “Errand of Mercy”, but Kang in “Day of the Dove” had his men (according to McCoy) “hacking at a man after he’s down”. By Human standards (wink), that’s not honorable. (He did agree to an armistice with Kirk, but only because he didn’t like the thought of being manipulated by an alien.)
Besides, Kor may have been lying to the Organians. Though I suspect he was not. (I like the dinner scene in Star Trek VI. How Star Fleet was a “Homo-sapiens only” club. The phrase “inalienable human rights”.)
How about how the Klingons were arming a pre-warp/pre-industrial culture with flintlocks to dominate others? Honorable?
We don’t see this “evil” in “The Enterprise Incident”. The female Romulan Commander grants Spock his Right to Statement. (Granted, she was hot for him.)
Which is kind of my point. From Kang’s point of view, making sure a fallen foe is dead is an honorable act. If he respected his foe, he’d want to show that by making sure his foe died on a battlefield, honorably, instead of lingering in a sickbed and dying thus. Which is what he’d expect to happen with a grave wound delivered by a sword, Klingon medicine being what it was.
I think (and of course this is a fanwank) a major reason the Fed-Klingon civil war went on as long as it did was major cultural misunderstandings on both sides. To a Klingon, if you spare a fallen foe and return him to health, you are deliberately humiliating him. I can truly believe the Klingons thought Terrans were monsters. And even though they might have detested Romulans for their being willing to break their words, they could, at least, respect the fact that they didn’t humiliate enemies by denying them a proper death.
I don’t believe Kor was lying to the Organians. He was too angry.
I didn’t say the Romulans were evil. And she was planning on killing Spock after he finished his statement. Killing him with fire.
Not that she didn’t have reason. There were no good guys in that episode; just competing interests.
I have to quibble with the Klingon who took exception to those phrases. They developed in the distant past, before humans contacted alien civilizations. How else were they supposed to refer to rights as?
Though I suspect he was not. (I like the dinner scene in Star Trek VI. How Star Fleet was a “Homo-sapiens only” club. The phrase “inalienable human rights”.)