You’re the captain of the Enterprise (take you pick). Starfleet has found an inhabited planet that is pretty much identical to early 21st century Earth. On this planet is a mineral. It’s worthless to them, but invaluable to us. So much so Starfleet has decided to forgo the Prime Directive to establish trade relations.
How do you make yourself known to a planet of people who have never seen a confirmed ET before?
How do you establish trade relations with out sending their society, economic stability into chaos? (Do you even think it would cause chaos?)
Are you willing to trade technology? Or just gold or other valuable minerals?
One last thing: Mining these minerals surreptitiously is NOT an option.
Harry Turtledove’s juvenile novels deal with this. Establish a store on the planet, but dress and act like the inhabitants. Trade for minerals with technology only slightly ahead of what the planet already has. (For example, if the planet is in the 1500’s, bring in simple pocket watches. If the planet is about 1800, telegraph equipment.)
By the way, the “Prime Directive” was a rule deliberately established to be broken or ignored. I believe there were several times where breaking the directive was justified in some way – “We’ve put them back on the right track” etc.
But can the trading be relatively surreptitious? Like, can I reach out to maybe one guy, and tell him I’ll give him $X+$Y+$Z worth of valuable minerals in exchange for $X worth of worthless-to-them stuff that it’ll cost him $Y to gather up, plus whatever $Z makes him a decent profit, and — that’s it?
Screw it. Do a full The Day the Earth Stood Still reveal. Land a shuttle in front of the U.N. building, and open regular diplomatic and trade relations.
That’s actually a pretty clever idea (You too @Bonum_Legatum ). But it sidesteps the actual goal of the hypo. I’m trying to see how the captain would establish open relations with out f’ing up their society.
Societies are not pristine virgins, never to be touched. When two cultures come into contact, they get changed in unpredictable ways. But if they treat each other like grownups, everybody benefits.
That throws out my initial First Contact solution, which was more along the lines of Independence Day rather than The Day the Earth Stood Still. To be precise I was contemplating the mission (and preferred solution(s)) shown in Mirror, Mirror.
Well, if it is Kirk, he goes down to the surface with all bridge officers in one nameless ensign from Security in tow, has a formal dinner in which he casually seduces the daughter of the leader of the most powerful clan with looks along, gets caught banging her after she sneaks into his room, has to do a dual to the death with her would be suitor by going into an exotic forest where each side prepares weapons and traps using their ingenuity while the Enterprise is rendered helpless to rescue by some previously unsuspected technology left by an long-vanished alien race, then vanquishes his foe by improvising a blunderbuss powered by propellant from the seed-shooting flora. Kirk wounds his opponent but refuses to kill him despite the social mores requiring that one opponent must die. The leader recognizes the superiority of the United Federation of Planets, rapidly negotiates a trade agreement during commercial break, and the daughter and suitor get together and become trade representatives. Kirk, Spock, and Bones have a brief but poignant conversation about how Kirk almost died to protect the principles of Starfleet (again) and then they all have a big laugh except for Spock who just raises his eyebrow, causing Uhura to sigh wistfully into her coffee.)
Picard has days of trade agreements punctuated by conversations with ‘Counselor’ Troi about how the representatives are feeling in which she provides vague, non-committal assessments, and then spends hours hiding away in a Jeffries tube playing his flute and wishing he’d never joined this Mickey Mouse outfit and had become a vintner like his brother.
Sisko injects poison gas into the atmosphere of the planet and informs the population that if they don’t comply immediately they will not receive that antidote and will die horribly deaths of suffocation while their skin peels away from their body.
Janaway makes a tripartate treaty with the Borg and Species X-Delta-5392 (interdimensional worms that attack humanoids to suck away their lifeforce) which has nothing to do with the securing mining rights to the minerals but offers plenty of opportunities for dramatic betrayals and morally ambiguous consequences. Neelix eventually comes up with a boiled astrocabbage dish that is also a lethal neurotoxin to all cyborg and non-humanoid life which she threatens to deploy unless she gets her way. The Borg also offer her full access to their intergalactic transport network so the Voyager can travel immediately back to Earth but she refuses because that would be taking the easy way out of this plot complication that she created for no reason.
Just the knowledge that there are aliens out there, not just somewhere out in the universe, but at your doorstep, is going to completely change society, more or less whatever you do. Whether it gets f’d up or improved depends on the people of the planet, along with your approach to contact.
That’s the reason for the Prime Directive in the first place.
Now, I’ve never been a fan of the PD, and since the Federation is kindly allowing me to ignore it for this mission, it will not factor into my decisions.
Anyway, I’d spend a bit of time getting to know the political structure of the planet, then approach the groups that seem the most marginalized. Put them in charge in exchange for very lucrative mineral contracts. Offer them some of the more successful templates for a constitution, and then give them the technology to enforce their new world government. Stand aside, but use your technology to enforce that they hold to the constitution that they chose.
Start up a cultural exchange program, where members of the Federation can come visit the planet, and the inhabitants of the planet can go off and see the galaxy.
Oh, in that case I’d put on a foam-rubber costume with some blinking lights and use my phaser on ‘stun’ to make them believe that I am a god so that they will provide the labor to extract the mineral in order to assuage my anger and prevent my vengeance from reigning down fire and hail upon them.
Don’t judge me; I’m just trying to get this tiresome task done so I can get back to mapping gaseous anomalies in the Epsilon quadrant. I like boring tasks that give me plenty of time to read and play four dimensional hyperchess.
He was killed in the rough cut but the episode went long so his ‘story’, such as it is, was dropped and he just disappears halfway though the episode with no explanation whatsoever. Don’t worry, the actor returns five episodes later as the adjunct to a Romulan senator who is poisoned surreptitiously by a disguised Klingon spy.
Here I posit that 21st C Earth is already economically unstable bordering on chaotic. But I agree that if backyard dirt suddenly became worth $20 a lb. it would cause disaster.
Therefore, I’d make massive investment in affordable housing construction (the chaos this causes will only be suffered by the large investment companies, who themselves have caused chaos since 2008: so I’m actually reducing chaos)
And as a lagniappe I’ll beam away the dig waste (containing the coveted minerals)
If the planet has an abundant store of X, it stands to reason that other objects in the system do too. So mine its asteroids, moons, and uninhabited planets and leave the still primitive civilization to either develop or destroy itself. Whatever it does, the Federation will eventually gain access to its mineral wealth.
I googled “worthless minerals,” and the top result was Gangue. It’s essentially the crap in which more valuable minerals are embedded prior to processing. According to the Federal Highway Commission, gangue is usually piled up next to the excavation site, like big dirt mounds.
So, in this scenario, the mounds of gangue would be easily accessible, and if we have ST technology, we could simply beam it into the cargo hold. The miners may wake up one day and notice the gangue piles missing, but it wouldn’t be a major cause for panic. Maybe the government confiscated it to make earth dams and didn’t tell anybody at the mining site. Wouldn’t be the first time there was a communication lapse at the government level.
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