ST:DS9 - Bajoran tech level

Cafe Society
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I’ve just started rewatching Deep Space Nine on Netflix, and find myself wondering about something that never occurred to me back when I watched it during its run.

Do we know what Bajor’s tech level was when the Cardassians first arrived and conquered the planet (apparently 60-odd years before the show started)? I’ve seen enough through the first 16 episodes of the first season to suggest that Bajor may have been a pre-industrial society when the lizards showed up, while other things suggest they may have been comparable to 20th-21st-century Earth. The more advanced option, though, could be explained simply through the arrival of the Cardassians forcing them to learn and advance quickly. For example, we’re introduced in one episode to a Bajoran geneticist, but it’s not clear that Bajorans developed the science on their own, or if they learned from the Cardassians.

At the very least, it seems pretty clear that Bajor did not have a unified planetary government before the Cardassian occupation. With the Cardassians gone, we already see in the first season that a lot of old “national” rivalries are being rekindled.

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Here’s some spoilers regarding Bajor’s tech level.

They may not have had a world goverment or warp drive, but they were much more advances than were are now. They had manned exploration of the Denorios Belt by the 22nd century, and colonies on other moons & planets in their own solar system that predate the Occupation. They had solar sail technology in the 16th century (though not artificial gravity), and their earliest written records date back about 500K yrs). The Prophet relion is only around 10K yrs old.

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Yeah, the Bajorans are, in many ways, a much older civilization that humans, or even Vulcans. By all rights they should be rulers of the quadrant if they were advancing at the level of humans. There has clearly been something holding back their technological development or they would have had the Cardassians in zoos.

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Thanks :slight_smile:

I should have mentioned that I saw only the first four seasons or so during the show’s original run (real-life circumstances interrupted my viewing), and I haven’t gotten around to picking it up again until now. So I missed any information revealed in the last three seasons, and have forgotten most of what was revealed in the first four.

Jonathan Chance, forgive me if I’m reading more into your words than you intended, but are you suggesting that the Bajoran’s religion had something to do with their slow tech development? I ask only because that’s a somewhat common thought here on the Dope, with regard to our own planet’s scientific development.

I found myself chuckling while watching the pilot episodes, “The Emissary” part 1 & 2. I had completely forgotten the major impact a scene in those episodes had on me. I’m speaking of the scenes where Sisko encountered the Prophets in the wormhole. At the time I started watching DS9, I had a serious drinking problem (i.e. “drink until I pass out” every damn night). A big part of the reason for my drinking was that I simply would not let myself get over a relationship that had ended a couple years earlier. I knew I was being stupid — I stayed drunk over it ending longer than the relationship itself had lasted. But I couldn’t/wouldn’t let it go.

So I was sitting there, drunk as usual, watching this new Star Trek show, and there’s Sisko with the Prophets, and he keeps finding himself back at the scene of his wife’s death. He kept asking, “Why do you keep bringing me here?”, and the Prophets kept answering, “You bring us here. Why do you exist here?”

And man, that was like a gigantic boot to my ass, a wakeup call. I had to ask myself the same question: “Why do I exist here?” It was another year or so before I finally sobered up, but watching that scene and hearing that question was really the first thing that started pushing me in that direction.

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The caste system wouldn’t have helped.

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I can’t recall exactly but I seem to recall that an older Bajoran civilization had fallen and they were just reacquiring a higher tech level when the Cardassians showed up.

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BTW If anyone is interested in Bajoran History, I would recommend the novel Day of the Vipers by James Swallow. It is the story of the Cardassian take over of Bajor and it isn’t the story you think it is (think less Independence Day and more V).

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I imagine that the Bajorans went through multiple cycles of a civilization rising, then falling, then a dark age, then a new one rising over hundreds of thousands of years. The latter industrial civilizations must’ve been pretty slow to develop if their predecesors used up Bajor’s fossil fuels.

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The Cardassians are actually more famous victims of “civilization rises, civilization falls, survivors rebuild.”. Cardassia was originally unified by this society called the Hebitians, who were peaceful, democratic and rich, but then society fell apart because of global warming and resource shortages, which led to the growth of the Cardassian movement, which was militaristic, regimented, and austere. The big reason in canon that the Cardassians are so aggressive towards their neighbors is that their home planet has almost no natural resources left, so they’re forced to rely on naked imperialism and aggressive colonization.

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Boy…you’ve gotta be pretty bad off if you’re running out of Deuterium.

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Maybe they’re hydrophobic.

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I don’t have anything to add, except to say that I also started re-watching DS9 on Netflix a few weeks ago, and literally 10 minutes before I saw this thread last night I had the exact same question, and looked up Bajorans on wikipedia. I’d just finished watching the terrible episode with the Dalrock cloud monster and I couldn’t figure out why a species that had invented intergalactic space travel would be so dumb.

I think it would have been interesting if they’d had the equivalent of 20th century tech when the Cardassians showed up, and now 50 years later they were struggling to cope with not only 5 decades of subjugation but also a massive leap in new technology. But nope.

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Early on, the Bajorans’ timeline was pretty fluid. Didn’t Picard say they had advanced tech before humans walked erect, or something? This was pretty dramatically reduced in later episodes, I guess, in part to explain why they hadn’t taken over the galaxy long-before or something.

I get that they were supposed to be an “ancient” culture long past its golden age (in some way analogous to the Israelites or Egyptians or Philistines/Palestinians or whatever they were supposed to symbolize in their first appearance), but the Paul Bunyanish exaggeration - where it’s not enough that they’re merely ancient, they have to be SUPER-DUPER ancient - doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful analysis.

If anything, I figure it’s a clear cautionary tale about a culture that got too religious.

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And that’s exactly the episode that finally pushed me to post this thread :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m going to hijack this thread to post more rants about DS9 as I make my way through. Hope that’s OK.

Open Spoilers Below

I just watched the episode Sanctuary, in which the Skrreea come through the wormhole looking for a place to escape their evil overlords. I think this had the potential to be a pretty great episode, considering the parallels between the Bajorans and the Skrreea. But first of all, Skrreea? If we’re making up spellings for languages which we not only don’t know the alphabet for, but that stymie even the universal translator, do we really need to throw in all of those silent extra letters?

The universal translator bit was one of the things I clearly remember from watching DS9 as a teenager. At the time, I thought it was really cool how they showed a piece of technology not working as intended. As an adult, it just raises more questions than it answers. Like, how can it start translating immediately for all of those other brand new species that came through the wormhole? Surely language patterns for the gamma quadrant haven’t really been documented, especially if the Skrreean language, which sounded basically like Italian, was too strange to interpret. Shouldn’t it take a few minutes of data collection before it starts working for any new species? And for that matter, how does it work when they go into the gamma quadrant?

On top of that, the entire crew seemed helpless in the face of a non-functioning translator, hardly believable for an organization like Star Fleet. It was no Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, that’s for sure.

On to the Skrreea, who, we’re told, are a race of farmers. Farmers? Even at 21st century tech levels, humans are no longer a race of farmers. How can you pilot interstellar spaceships and still consider yourselves primarily farmers? Even if you weren’t replicating your food, what would you need, 3-5% of your population to actually farm? If that? I think the US is even less than that.

So maybe they’re not really farmers but slaves who have been forced to farm to feed some massive population of Dominion civilizations. Would they still identify as farmers? Wouldn’t they be sick of farming? If they were slave farmers, then I’d assume they’d been exporting something like 95% of their harvest. So how can they all expect to continue to be farmers on Bajor?

For that matter, why is Bajor having a famine? Can’t we just replicate some replicators? Is this a power generation issue? I’m still having a hard time coping with a species that’s supposedly as advanced and enlightened as the Bajorans who still believes in prophets and can’t feed its population. It would have been an interesting show if they were basically like 20th century humans who’d been occupied by a much more advanced race and were now coping with all of this new technology, much like many former colonies here an Earth after their European occupiers left. Making Bajoran society so ancient and advanced seems like a huge mistake.

And lastly, how small is Bajor that they can’t absorb 3 million people? Did the DS9 writers not know that there were roughly 6 billion people on Earth when they were writing that episode? I feel like the “great idea” of this episode was to put the Bajorans in a situation where they had to make a decision concerning a species that was much like their own. Would they should compassion and understanding, having gone through a similar experience? Or would they selfishly decide to protect their own interests now that they had the upper hand in a negotiation? Despite the promise of this potential conflict, we’re treated to about 90 seconds dealing with the issue, and we don’t even get to see the debate which was supposedly very heated. Instead, the 90 seconds is spent saying “no” to the Skrreea in about 5 different ways. No. Really no. I’m sorry, but no. We thought about this a lot, and the answer is still no. And if they thought about it so much, then why didn’t they come to the obvious conclusion that 3 million people is about the size of the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Bummer. Since this is one of the episodes I remember enjoying as a kid, and now I can’t get past its flaws, I have to ask… when does DS9 get good? I see so many glimmers of goodness, but overall I feel like I’m slogging through junk writing.

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You’re laying some cultural bias about what “farming” is onto that episode, I think. What’s to say they were farming only food crops? Maybe a lot of their tech is essentially bioengineering. Maybe agriculture is an art form.

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Perhaps, but the Skrreean woman made a big deal about how their farming skills would make them self sufficient and could possibly help end the famine on Bajor, so it was clear that they intended to be growing lots of food. Perhaps the other 95% of the population would farm for pleasure, or as an art form, or maybe they’ve figured out how to grow self-sealing stem bolts. The writers had every opportunity to explain themselves but the only angle they actually put into the episode was the food one, so that’s what I’m going with.

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IOW, a not uncommon *Star Trek *“we want to make a point, but everything we’ve previously established in-canon would make the conflict we chose to drive it home be moot… let’s do it anyway” episode?

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The “Bajor can’t grow enough food” thing comes up in a few episodes. IIRC, they mention something about the soil being screwed up due to Cardassian mining operations, but they (probably wisely) never try and explain it in any depth. IIRC, the Federation gives them some sort of tech to fix the soil, but it takes a long time and they don’t have enough (I think there’s an episode where Bajorans are arguing over who gets to sue the soil fixers first)

I always thought the DS9 writers were pretty smart to leave what was going on on Bajor as vague as possible. Giving clear answers to everything would a) probably not make sense anyways and b) end up getting contradicted when a new writer decided it didn’t work with a new story idea.

So Bajor can’t make enough food. Presumably there’s a reason, but the audience never finds out what it is, but we know its true because the characters say it is. The writers are trying to communicate a story, not give an extended economic treatise on how technologically advanced societies might work.

ETA: looks like my memory was more or less correct

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:stuck_out_tongue: (bolding mine)