I’d find a Bernie the Faust to bargain with.
(The web formatting is ridiculous, but the story seems to be all there - just copy and paste it into a document).
Wasn’t this the basic plot of Star Trek: Insurrection?
Star Trek: Insurrection had a plot?
I install replicator tech in every household at gun point. If i just give it to them, the oligarchs will make sure it isnt disseminated.
Then after all the worlds problems are solved i take their dumb worthless dilithium as payment.
Maybe you do not make yourself known, until you have completed the same shady methods we use to grab resources from each other today. Find out what they do value, that we have, and start buying off the right people. Find out what embarrasses them and conduct blackmail on the right people. Start a color revolution and put the “right” people in power.
There are countries here on Earth that have subverted their economies and governments in service to others by such means.
Export our corruption. Import their goods.
“See what this says here?”
“May Cure Cancer.”
“Right, it’ll remedy yours until at least June.”
You’re going to be free from need and want whether you like it or not!
I am just saying there are various ways to prepare the situation, before a public first contact and quickly showing desire for an asset. As others have noted, if we want the thing, then the thing takes on more value. Prepare the situation most favorably for negotiations to take place.
And I am of course taking a cynical and unfortunately realistic strategy. I wish the usual course of things were better.
So they have space flight? Then I set up a very visible station on their moon, and start spamming their TV and internet with adverts for replicators, miracle medical cures, androids, advanced AIs, holosuite entertainment, - everything but weaponry or ships - with the prices listed in tons of Mineral X. Make them come to us.
A cunning negotiator like JT Kirk always tries to stand in his opponents’ shoes and understand how they’d think. Fortunately for him, I am his puny Earthling opponent and he will soon understand that while I think I am god’s gift to the Art of the Deal, I will probably be, along with most world leaders vain, short-termist, easily pleased, having Dunning-Kruger level delusion about my negotiating skills and generally be an idiot.
Kirk comes down. He flatters us with ‘even though we’ve conquered space, we’ve forgotten so much of the wisdom of you who live so close to Earth etc etc’. Soon he gets the Planetarians to start thinking we are rubes in spacesuits for all our inter-galactic smarts. Once that foundation has been laid, Spock carefully cajoles the Planetarians to develop a scam to sell us ‘useless beach sand’ in vast quantities to beam up. For which we will happily give them these magic beans.
Complex, but it caters perfectly to Planetarian hubris, and is nothing that wouldn’t cost more than the death of a few red-shirts at some point. And the magic beans are tic-tacs.
It seems to me that all the ways that would help prevent the harm to the society in question and its economy would all involve things you have disallowed. Our society has the greediest people on top, and they would use any attempt at trade to enrich themselves, damn the consequences. And our society wouldn’t stop them. Even if you make a good deal, they won’t keep to it without enforcement from Starfleet, and that would mean a form of imperialist takeover.
No, the way to do it would be to not only use some level of secrecy to get the substance, but also secretly embed people to shape the society away from the issues. And the fact that this is so complicated is a good reason the Prime Directive exists.
The problems with it come from the fanatical devotion when there are other, more pressing moral concepts that should take precedence. And, sure, it’s possible that the need for this “invaluable mineral” is one of those. But then you need to take the complicated route to avoid fallout from the decision.
It’s a good thing for them that the planetary societies in Star Trek are significantly less complicated than ours. Or else they’d never have been able to get items from a pre-warp world without causing tons of problems on those worlds. They couldn’t keep the socialist utopia concept if they had to be financial imperialists.
If it was Zapp Brannigan as captain not only would he fail in the mission but he would manage to destroy his own ship and all the mineral in the process and have to be rescued by the Planet Express crew.
He then finds out an alien pet the Planet Express found excretes the mineral as poop.
Well, if I am the captain of the original Enterprise, I beam down with 3 or 4 senior officers and a couple of red shirt security ensigns without first names, and I meet with the Leader of the planet.
The Leader has an impossibly hot daughter who somehow also happens to be also involved in the day-to-day operation of the planet. She immediately falls head over heals for me to the extent that she will betray her whole race, her entire planet, and everything that her father has raised her for, just to fuck me.
The red shirts get eliminated one by one because there is apparently no security training in this time period. Spock and McCoy are too busy arguing about trivial things, so I go it alone. Getting trapped alone with the impossibly hot daughter long enough to convince her of the rightness of my plans.
We steal the valuable minerals or whatever, with her blessing, on the hopes that I will come back some day, after she is old and twice divorced and still dreaming of me. But I never do, I never even think about her again once we, the remaining officers, get back to the ship.
We make light hearted jokes about the planet and we are off to the next episode, cause our 60 minutes is up.
A lot like the European contact with the Americas. But that will be a different episode.
All apologies if I’m spoiling the OP’s joke, but: were you hoping one of us would come up with a plan that (a) fits the oft-derided money-losing business model of a well-known real-world corporation, and thereby (b) gets us all gasping, wait, you don’t suppose…?
Are you asking me if I think Bezos or Musk are aliens or somehow involved with Aliens?
If so, no.
Otherwise I have no idea what you’re asking.
Honestly, neither do I; if anything, I was thinking you might be thinking of those TV pitchmen who excitedly say something along the lines of Send Us Your Worthless X And We’ll Give You Y — leaving people to scratch their heads and say, man, how do those guys stay in business? Seems like a surefire way to go bankrupt.
Hey, it worked for New For Old, Inc.* during their heyday. OK, that heyday ended with the next rain shower, but until then it was great.
*See “Bridle Shower” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr for details.
I send my chief engineer to trade them the formula for transparent aluminum.
So, I’m going to treat this semi-seriously, and go with an answer based both on the hypo, and the ideals that the Federation often fails to live up to (esp. as we’ve just decided to void the Prime directive as a start).
So, first I transit to the system, say around Neptune-ish distance, and proceed towards the pseudo-Earth at impulse, at speeds where it will take approx 4 weeks to transit, all the while broadcasting our intentions in all languages and frequencies used by the target - obviously we already have this information by whatever means we used to secure the knowledge of the resource.
This will cause a major upheaval, but the times involved are short enough (IMHO) to not let people work themselves into a frenzy, but not so short as to leave them panicking and unprepared. Ideally, the pseudo-Earth will try to put together a unified front given that timeframe, but I’d expect quite a lot of jockeying for dominance anyway.
Still, the 4 weeks gives them time to realize they still have to live their lives in the meantime - pay rent, buy groceries, take kids to school, so while there will be some chaos, it should be mitigated (or so would be my hope).
Okay, onto the details of what I’m saying and what I’m offering. First, I’d be providing among my many transmitted streams, a more-or-less honest history of the Federation, our culture, our technology. Unlike some posters, I’m not going to try to BS the planet, because I’m going to actually intent to pull (long term) the planet up to our level.
I will explain that we need the Macguffin material, and that we are happy to mine it ourselves or let the owning species do so. That since we recognize it will be valuable to them in time, that they will keep 10% of it for themselves and trade the rest to us. In exchange, we will give them the technology in stages to bootstrap them to Federation levels over, say, the next 40 years to allow time to acclimate and adapt, during which we will happily accept a number of exchange students / diplomats / sociologists.
It will be messy, there will be people on both sides that act in poor faith, and even though I’ll teach them about defenses such as shields long before phasers, I bet that some groups will attack each other despite all best intentions.
Hopefully, the fact that I’ve preserved their rights to some of the valuables as well as giving them time to educate and adapt will leave us with a valuable member of the Federation in the future, but better to try with good faith and fail than bamboozle the natives with beads.
Im going full Betelgeuse Bridge here.
Give the natives whatever shiny tech catches their eye. Medbeds, genetic restructuring, anything to make their lives healthier.
In exchange we only ask for their unobtanium.
Kick the problem down the road. By the time they realize we swindled them (and can do anything about it) i will have been long retired on Risa or dead.