If the Federation is showing up with a cure for a bunch of diseases that they are withholding because no warp drive yet, I think that people might resent that. Warp drive isn’t going to be a signal of emotional maturity. There are plenty of worthy people in a worthy culture who may die because the Federation is requiring cultures to jump through this particular technological hoop.
I always figured warp drive was a practical threshold, not a threshold that assumed societies were at a certain level of civilization to achieve warp. Once a planet has warp drive, they will be coming to you, and at that point, there’s no way to keep outside influences away.
How you square any of your proposed interplanetary do-goodery with the Prime Directive is an interesting conversation that’s probably a hijack here.
It may be a hijack, but it is an interesting discussion that’s still somewhat related to the Vulcans’ decision to contact Humanity when they did.
The way the Prime Directive is applied has more to do with the cat being out of the bag than anything else. There’s no point trying to not influence a culture when they are actively moving around the galaxy and are bound to run into someone sooner or later.
I still think the Prime Directive as it’s usually depicted is unethical. Star Trek TNG’s “Pen Pals” is a good example. Data accidentally makes contact with a member of a culture whose planet is getting destroyed by a natural disaster that Federation technology could prevent. Picard argues that the Prime Directive requires them to not get involved with this culture since it is pre-warp. Data points out that letting a culture go extinct through no fault of their own is a stupid application of the Prime Directive and Picard relents.
How many times has the Federation let pre-warp culture die off because of a disease or some natural disaster? Or just suffer needlessly through no fault of their own? Or even suffer through their own actions? After all, it’s not my fault that a few hundred people are driving this planet to ruin in the pursuit of short-term profits, but according to the Federation if I die along with everyone else on my planet then it sucks to be me. At what point does “allowing for natural development” cross over into “needless cruelty?”
Here on Earth we could cure a lot of disease endemic to wildlife with a concentrated and expensive research and vaccination effort. We don’t bother.
If we assume the whole galaxy isn’t developing in exact lockstep, the Federation could be visiting planets where warp drive will be invented within the lifetimes of children on that planet, or not for 50,000 years. UNless you want to take on sheparding every single semi-sentient lifeform across millenia of biological, cultural, and technological development, you’ll end up with some arbitrary cut-off someplace.
“Can now voyage to other star systems including our own and get in our shit” is a great time to make their acquaintance. And not coincidentally, point out to them that they may be real proud of their breakthrough, but they are very small and weak players in a much bigger pond than they ever knew. Best behave humbly, lest you be crushed like a grape. Message delivered with a smile & firm handshake, but with strong eyes.
What I’ve never seen addressed is what the Federation does if they know a pre-warp planet is about to be visited by someone who DOESN’T have a Prime Directive. Suppose some civilization on the border of the Federation and Romulan Star Empire is about to be invaded by the Romulans? Is that an allowable exception? Would the Federation warn the Romulans away, or actively defend the planet from incursion? What about an approaching Borg cube? You don’t want the Borg getting all those resources, surely?
That issue was covered in multiple TOS episodes. Basically they tried to finesse the situation the best they could. In TNG mostly it seemed like the Federation was the only game in town.
I don’t expect the Federation to intervene in some caveman culture. But growth is continuous and comes in stages. The Federation is treating things like warp drive is some hard line where you get all of the advantages after it and none before. That’s not how we raise our fellow humans, so why would we do it here? Some culture 50 or 100 years away from warp drive is plenty recognizably sentient and damn well understands if they are having their population wiped out by some epidemic that it takes 12 months for them to solve, when all of those people could have been saved by another sentient form that refused to help. There’s going to be a ton of understandable resentment.
I think the other folks in the thread who’ve suggested that warp drive means “the cat is out of the bag now, and if we don’t say hello first, they’ll just come over and say hello anyway, so now we might as well introduce ourselves” is a pretty good reason that’s their preferred dividing line. “Sentience” (in the Star Trek sense of the word) is clearly not the issue.
Roddenberry was an idealist and I think that he was using this issue to refer to the experience of the Amerind peoples, for whom contact with the Europeans was a catastrophe, is pretty obvious.
What happens if a pre-warp civilization makes contact with the Federation instead of the other way around? A civilization could attempt colonization of a nearby star system without warp and bump into the Federation. Or they could just detect a nearby civilization. Presumably we could detect an advanced civilization in a nearby star system like Alpha Centauri with our current level of technology.
I think there was a TNG episode in which a pre warp civilization is about to gain the means to detect the Federation, and Picard conducts first contact.
Also, Riker bangs an alien.
I was thinking catalytic converters. The first warp drive probably put out a lot of “smoke” compared to later models. The nearby ship made a difference too, but a quiet, efficient drive would only have been detectable at a much shorter range.
I believe the principle for establishing first contact is that a civilization has achieved warp drive technology, not that someone in the vicinity went into warp. If you detected a warp signature near a planet with developing technology, you’d have to look into it before deciding that the civilization could be considered a star-faring one.
In the case of Earth in the 80s, if in fact the Vulcans had caught the warp signature, it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to figure out that it was an anomaly and not the result of something that had evolved technologically. When Cochrane did so, you’d see that they had built and developed it at Bozeman, and so this would be considered a society about to enter the space-traveling community.
I would speculate that if some super-genius on a planet had independently built a craft capable of warp, didn’t share the plans with anyone, and then warped away to never return (or died), and nobody else on the planet could replicate it, that planet would also be ineligible for first contact even though they technically could be said to have developed warp technology.
Elon is that you and your Roadster?
I think drawing the line at a civilization developing warp drive (or comparable interstellar propulsion) makes sense for all the reasons listed above. What doesn’t make sense, and has never really made sense, is the Federation refusing to make contact with cultures that very badly need Federation assistance. When the choices are “Culture is permanently altered by early Federation influence” or “Culture is obliterated by a preventable catastrophe” I can’t imagine why you would ever pick the former.
Just looking at the history of colonialism and imperialism on Earth is more than enough reason to want a policy favoring non-intervention, but there’s a big difference between “Hey we like your planet and want to move in” and “Hey your planet is about to explode, want some help with that?” I know there’s instances of the Enterprise helping cultures on the down-low to minimize exposure, but for instance in TNG’s “Homeward” Picard insists they have to stand by and watch a pre-industrial civilization die for no reason other than their planet was losing its atmosphere. They end up going through a big rigamarole after the Federation observer breaks protocol and beams a group of survivors on board. It would have been so much simpler to say “In this case, these people finding out about the Federation and being evacuated to another nearby unclaimed world is preferable to them being eradicated for no good reason.”
Planet-killing mishaps, whether physical or biological are probably very very rare. Yes, a screenwriter could contrive such an episode. But over thousands of years of some real Federation-equivalent history they will probably never encounter a planet in the process of rapidly dying. Much less get there at the magic moment where the Federation can resolve the problem.
Let’s imagine something bad is happening to Earth now and the planet’s carrying capacity is going to crater within 100 years. So we need to lifeboat off 9 billion humans. And probably need to parcel them out among 10 (20?) similarly sized Class M already-inhabited civilized Federation planets so as not to utterly disrupt their economies and societies with this influx of unwashed primitive rubes from Earth.
That sounds hard. The Federation has some advanced tech, and the combined taxpayer power of many home planets, but they don’t have magic wands.
The TOS Enterprise had some 400+ crew, and could probably support another 100 refugees in a pinch. Let’s go super generous and say it’s 900 refugees, roughly 2 per crewman. Great, just 10 MILLION such trips between Earth and the refuge planets and we’ll get all the humans to safety. I hope it doesn’t take more than a couple Earth-months per round-trip.
I know it would make for a really crappy story not at all in line with the concepts of TOS. Inventing a rock much too large for the Federation to lift does not play into the triumphant 1960s TOS narrative.
And “Errand of Mercy,” “Friday’s Child” and “Elaan of Troyius.”
True, “Evacuate the entire populace of a planet” is rarely the solution in Star Trek, unless said populace is small enough to fit in one holodeck or one cargo bay. Usually the answer is deploying some applied phlebotinum to the atmosphere or whatever that triumphantly reverses the planet’s demise within 45 minutes (plus commercials).
Notably, in “Homeward” nobody ever asks about other villages that didn’t get spared destruction because they didn’t have a secret Federation observer among them, or if one village worth of people is enough of a breeding population to ensure their civilization will actually carry on.
Too true. A very flawed episode IMHO.
In our RPG, a remote but sizable Federation colony world was endangered by a very severe solar flare. The USS Yorktown couldn’t fit all the colonists aboard. The captain reluctantly had the ship’s computer choose the evacuees at random.
There was one TNG episode (“The Ensigns of Command”) where another starfaring power demanded the removal of a colony (in what the Federation recognized as their territory) that was large enough that the evacuation was going to require more time than was being granted. Picard managed to resolve that one with a bit of rules-lawyering that would force them to either wait a long time or grant a modest extension on the deadline.