He probably couldn’t make the payments anyway.
Why not save them?
Oh, I think Mudd would certainly find something worth trading for in a primitive-to-him civilization. Those miners he had contact with are probably still lonely for female companionship, and really, isn’t handing over a few hundred women to a spaceman worth it if you can get yourself a batch of phasers to, ahem, “defend” yourself against a neighboring tribe or country?
The Prime Directive exists for dramatic tension. Given that, and assuming an actual real United Federation of Planets, I would discard it. There should be a well-established method of scouting pre-Warp cultures and slowly incorporating them into the Federation even if only as ‘associate’ members. That would decrease the social shock of encountering an alien species and technology that approaches magic in its abilities.
I agree. It always seemed much more like “Let’s see if they’ll give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.” directive to me.
I particularly never liked the non-interventionist ideal in situations where intervention was patently in the interest of saving hundreds(thousands, millions, etc…) of sentient beings from natural disasters, avoidable wars, etc… but Starfleet wouldn’t intervene because it was against the Prime Directive.
Think about it this way- if there was some sort of Starfleet out there now, and there was a planet-killer asteroid headed for Earth, would you want them to not intervene because it might interfere with our development? Or for that matter, let’s say a technical glitch in 1985 actually started WWIII, and these Starfleet jerks could have stopped it but didn’t?
Seems kind of morally bankrupt to me.
Most of what they could give us is information, which is free. But it would be a disaster for us. AIDS is terrible, but we are making good progress and studying it advances our knowledge of our bodies. If aliens dropped in, all scientific research would immediately become Googling the galactic web to find articles giving the answers to any questions we have.
I’m sure we could make money selling knockoffs of the Mona Lisa and the Pieta to alien tourists. Is that a good future?
Trade is good, but is best between more or less equals. If contact is delayed until we achieve warp or other ftl technology, we can get inducted into the galactic culture due to our own achievements, which is going to be a lot better for our egos than someone dripping in for a potty break.
Also, consider what would happen if they dropped in around 1962. Should the aliens watch us almost kill ourselves, or should they interfere to stop it? If we really did kill ourselves, would we be suitable for polite company?
Keep the Prime Directive, but tighten the language and change the stated rationale. The reason they always give in the series is that interference would alter a culture’s “natural course of evolution,” which indicates a horrendous misunderstanding of the undirected way evolution actually works.
However, I can easily imagine why a spacefaring civilization might not want to announce itself to a pre-warp (or worse, pre-industrial) civilization. Such a culture may not even have the basic knowledge of astronomy to even comprehend what is happening, much less be able to deal with the Federation as anything remotely resembling equals. And even if they do, there are likely cultural issues that would require, at the minimum, extremely careful diplomacy to avoid incident. The TNG episode “First Contact” did an excellent job illustrating how this sort of thing could dissolve into chaos even if the civilization in question is relatively advanced.
IOW, reframe the Prime Directive as a means to avoid cultural imperialism on an interstellar scale, rather than some sort of wishy-washy notion of natural evolution as applied to civilizations.
In 1800, Asia was far behind Europe, technologically and economically. Today, Indians and Japanese win Nobel Prizes, and Chinese millionaires buy mansions from Americans with underwater mortgages.
If they value peace, they should interfere to stop it. Most likely, they would pick one side, and squash the other. The survivors would eventually become civilized. And their grandchildren would whine about how imperialistic the aliens were.
Perhaps they do, and don’t tell us.
Exactly. Like Apophis just missing us was pure chance. Pffttt! :rolleyes:
I rather like The Culture’s approach to dealing with less advanced civilizations: “Yes, it’s a very complicated process, and unintended consequences are possible. However, we’ve been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, and we’ve gotten very, very good at it.” They don’t always make contact, and they sometimes limit themselves to clandestine interference (at least for a while), but they generally go for full-blown uplifting.
In the case of The Culture:
- Because they can. And they don’t like it when people suffer.
- Insofar as an economy is a system for the allocation of limited resources, the word will no longer apply. There is no “economy” because providing all humans with effectively unlimited free goods and services consumes only a fraction of their “GDP”.
- Perhaps the biggest complaint that Culture citizens have is that, with no sources of suffering in their long, luxury-filled lives, they can’t produce “real” art. It kinda puts “First World problems” to shame. So I guess there’s that drawback.
As far as I can tell, this would apply more or less equally to uplifting by the Federation.
Trash it. It was mistakes that led to the disastrous first contact between humans and Klingons, but mistakes are fixable. Nobody would think that if you screw up once, you can never try to fix the problem again.
I would hope you would enjoy the buckets of blood that would be on your hands, because that is a cold and heartless way of thinking.
What if people don’t want to be uplifted?
Hell, we say that.
Remember the Opium Wars? Colonization? There was an article in the Times last week about how Chinese policy is still strongly affected by the impact of Europe during the last two centuries.
Eventually, if the aliens let us attend their universities, we might be able to contribute. But the technological gap is likely to be much greater than it was between Europe and Asia.
Or maybe the aliens wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and squash both. We learned something from that experience - it would be shame to have lost it due to intervention - especially because we managed not to kill ourselves.
Luddite.
How many people are you willing to see die for the sake of this misguided nationalism? And why is the technological development of FTL (the point at which they are physically incapable of continuing the deception) a relevant threshold? Civil rights would be a better standard, on the basis that anyone in favour of lynching blacks isn’t going to play nice with the twelve-armed cephalapods who want to say hello.
Like I said, you can make an argument for non-interference in war, because you don’t necessarily know who if anyone is in the right, and because there is more likely to be substantial opposition to your involvement. But that does not excuse the scope of the Prime Directive as written.
Profit.
I believe that my way would be bloodier in the short run, but less bloody in the long run.
I believe that your way would give the illusion of less blood in the short run, but would be bloodier in the long run.
If an E.T. civilization is even contemplating the Prime Directive, then our odds of avoiding colonization are pretty good. If they are aggressive, then we get colonized, regardless of what directives they may or may not have on the books.
Short-term, we won’t contribute.
Long-term, why wouldn’t we be able to contribute?
It’s good to learn from one’s own mistakes.
It’s better to learn from other peoples’ mistakes.
Why not? We wouldn’t have anything worthwhile to give them in trade, even assuming they still think in terms of trade. If they aren’t interested in giving stuff to us then they probably wouldn’t bother to contact us at all.
It gets replaced by better technology & a better economy. With Trek or the Culture we’re talking more-or-less post scarcity.
It adapts. The idea that relatively primitive cultures are overwhelmed and destroyed by contact with more advanced cultures is largely a myth, a matter of blaming the victim. In reality they are perfectly capable of adapting - for which crime historically the more advanced culture has attacked them. Then claimed that the results of them smashing any part of the primitive culture that adapted was an example of how more primitive cultures can’t handle contact, rather than the result of violence.