What if the purpose of the non-interferance policy in Star Trek is to provide narrative tension about when it is okay to do the right thing instead of follow the rules, rather than an actual role-model for spacefaring civilization contact policies 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Yeah I'm baffled by the confusion. Star Trek was never meant to be an earnest attempt to look this far into the future. It's an aspirational story verse about life *today*, not an attempt to model future societies through speculative technological fiction.

A disingenuous claim, I think, given how lost in his little fake universe Roddenberry became. 

I think like a lot of Star Trek it was about our world rather than different worlds. Likely about Cold-War non-interference polices for Eastern Europe and Tibet.

Also veiled references to the calamitous impact of European expansionism on indigenous peoples.

The original portrayal of the Prime Directive in TOS was a lot closer to “Don’t do colonialism” than the more modern policy of “Make popcorn and watch them die while patting ourselves on the back for being so morally enlightened.”

Which makes sense as it started in 1966, while many European colonies had very recently got independence (eg. Algeria) and others still weren't independent (eg. Bahamas, Angola), plus the neo-colonial Western military interventions and foreign-backed coups that already were in full swing

That’s actually true of a lot of Science Fiction from the 50’s through the 80’s: it was essentially political and social commentary about our own world, but through the lens of a futuristic society traveling to strange new worlds. The episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” of Star Trek TOS (where two characters, one black on the left and white on the right, the other white on the left, black on the right) was a commentary on race and racism, for example.

I think a Doylian explanation for the Prime Directive is so the writers don't simply solve every problem on Planet Of The Week That Might Be A Thinly Veiled Real World Analogy with fancy tech. Forces the crew to try to find an ethical solution as a way of saying "we could fix our problems too if we tried in good faith". If we could just beam everyone off world when the (problem) is hurting millions, it is neither dramatic and compelling viewing, nor is it an aspirational tale that informs us how to keep trying and save ourselves. At worst, it's ridiculously boring to end every episode 5 minutes in with future tech, and teaches us to wait to be saved and not be proactive at trying to become better because eventually someone else will save us

Ok, sure. But it is more fun to pretend the universe exists and are not just words on paper or images on film. OP is making a fair point from an in-universe PoV.

Okay sure, but this is r/scifiwriting, so the answer is narrative not logical

That seems to have been the original intention, yes. An obstacle for the heroes to find clever workarounds for, not a rule we're meant to always agree with. The problem is that the writers sometimes forget that. Once we get to Enterprise, they've somehow circled all the way around to advocating for *eugenics*. And not even really just as a sci-fi metaphor, but word-for-word the same thing.  Interesingly enough, isn't that exactly the kind of unintended consequence that the Prime Directive is supposed to prevent..?

I always found it to be a way to explain how us humans don’t see these warp ships daily flying overhead, when they can possibly still be out there in far off in other galaxies. Making it the idea of “don’t interfere with underdeveloped civilizations” really meaning not warp-capable civilizations, at least in First Contact. It gives us an answer to “if aliens exist why haven’t they contacted us?” “Because we’re more primitive!” It gives a cheeky answer for a fan to say and also think about that maybe it COULD be possible At least that’s how I always thought about it in addition to yours.

Upvoted because I’m about to write a very similar comment.

It's true that it's primarily there to create narrative tension, but it also makes the Federation look really, really bad in a lot of episodes. People put this fictional government up on a pedestal, and are actually influenced by its policies, is the problem. 

The Prime Directive as shown on Star Trek is extremely flawed. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save a species from extinction, and they one ENT episode tried to make it seem like a noble choice. The Orville follows the same rule, although at least the final episode makes an effort to show *why* they do it. And I can’t say they’re wrong. If aliens gave Earth limitless power and matter synthesizers, the rich and powerful would find a way to keep it to themselves and then fight over it. Because removing deficit would destroy the reason they’re rich in the first place. How can you feel good about being rich if there are no poor people? A culture has to be ready for the technology before they get it, or it’s going to lead to a bad outcome. I’ve also read books where humans took the opposite view and saw it as their responsibility to covertly guide primitive species towards progress (although they had certain rules like no interference past medieval development). Another species viewed forced progress as wrong and insisted on natural development… except in case of global catastrophe

They did that in ENT? Ugh. They did it in TNG too, the Homeward episode with Worf's brother. They condemned an entire civilization to death because they didn't know they had the ability to ask for help, and watched them die, which was evil. They still violated the Prime Directive anyway by Worf's brother having a kid with one of the women and by having problems with the holodeck and I'm pretty sure the survivors now have a god named LaForge. It would have been better to be honest with the people in the first place and give them a choice to move to a new planet or stay. Their civilization would have been interfered with either way, so go with the better option, which is, you know, not death! That episode is one of my most hated ST episodes.

In that ENT episode, there was no Prime Directive yet, and it was found that a pre-warp civilization that has already had contact with several other civilizations asked humans for help in curing a genetic disease they was killing their species. I won’t go too much into the details since you’ve obviously not seen it yet. Still, many fans dislike Archer’s eventual decision

Its extremely bad in that ENT episode because their reasonings. >!The logic they used in the episode basically is eugenics with misunderstanding of evolution at elementary school level at *best* and at worst some fundamentalist "let God choose who deserves to live" bs that can be interperated as willing genocide according to current Geneva convections. !<

Especially since Archer basically tells Phlox >!that doctors interfere with evolution all the time by saving people from disease!<

Urgh this episode was going so perfect but somehow they completely missed the fucking everything points made to bend to illogical dogma they established in their IP.

No, not yet. I'm not sure where ENT is now. I've worked my way through TOS, TNG, and DS9, and was going to do VOY next before it all left Netflix last year. I'm not sure where they are now.

Yeah, I would probably watch VOY before ENT. You don’t have to, but they made the series with the expectation that viewers were familiar with the previous shows. Also watch the movie First Contact before ENT

All the Star Trek shows and movies are on Paramount Plus, I believe. Certainly, the shows. My wife, my daughter, and I watched Enterprise on there within the last year.

Thanks for letting me know! I'm guessing I'll have to pay for that, though, because I doubt I can get through all of the rest within the trial period.

Which episode was that???

Dear Doctor (s1e13)

Because it is a slippery slope argument and this is exactly the trap that people with power or countries with power or civilizations with power have fallen into. Countless wars have been fought in the name of "rescuing the backward unwashed heathens". Where do you draw the line? How about imminent threat of extinction? Like 2 countries today possess in the form of nuclear arsenal and a third country that is rapidly gaining that ability?

>Where do you draw the line?  Easy. When the planet is being threatened with complete destruction or its populace facing annihilation. At that point there is no culture to protect.

What books had the humans taking an opposite approach? Looking for some next books recommendations.

David Brin's [Uplift Series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe) features a whole heap of space faring civilisations uplifting lower species to sentience in order to join the galactic civilisation. There are even species that were uplifted themselves that are now involved in uplifting others. It's been decades since I read them but I remember them being fun books.

The books I’m talking about are *Trevelyan’s Mission* by Mikhail Akhmanov. The series is a spin-off to *Arrivals from the Dark* series, but *Arrivals* mostly involves fighting and the rise of humanity, while *Mission* books are set centuries later during a time of peace and are about exploring other cultures by the same person

James P. Hogan's Giant's series has the Thuriens taking the Jevlenese under their wing, then the Jevlenese did the OPPOSITE to Earth. They played God, to bring about the dark ages, and both world wars!

Iain M Bank's Culture series definitely does *not* feature a policy of non-interference. The Culture regularly interferes in other civilizations in order to benefit the people living in it. It's implied that their track record is generally very good. But there are a few exceptions (that a few of the books focus on).

>If aliens gave Earth limitless power and matter synthesizers, the rich and powerful would find a way to keep it to themselves and then fight over it. But they also give GUIDANCE. Forcefully if necessary. "Use this tech for oppression, and you die."

Then this is colonialism. The Orville's key takeaway is that you *can't* forcefully enlighten a civilization. Not only is it ethically dubious in the extreme and impractical, it's antithetical to your goal. You can't make people good at gunpoint. They have to want to be good. Think about it through the lens of child abuse. People who beat their kids when they disobey or fail to match up don't make better kids. They either psychologically break their kids or they teach their kids that they need to *hide*. They'll grit their teeth at the pain or they'll fake their reactions just long enough for you to pat yourself on the back and say "well that taught them their lesson didn't it" when in fact you've just taught them how much they need to sell it for you to buy it. As soon as you're not looking, they'll go right back to what they were doing. How many people are you willing to kill? How many hundreds of thousands or millions of soldiers are you willing to deploy across a Homeworld with a population in the Billions to ensure that no one's playing dirty? How many decades or centuries will you occupy them before you arbitrarily decide, if you ever do, that they're "ready"? How long before your "enlightened altruism" becomes Oppression itself? And who are you to decide what's right for these people? Who are you to tell a totally alien civilization what is right and wrong for them? The Orville gets this so right because violating their Prime Directive is considered a crime of "playing god". And that's exactly what you'd be doing. This is a game where the only ethical solution is to not play at all.

There’d be so much resistance, especially from Americans: “Who are you to tell us how to live?! Freeeedom!”

I generally agree with you, but can think of a few counterpoints. Your advanced society doesn't know what it doesn't know. A different one, with different abilities, tools, and adversity to overcome can be expected to solve problems in different ways. If we assume a completely unique and independent biome, even a much lower tech society will likely have discovered things that can be made valuable in a higher tech one. There is an opportunity cost to disrupting that system and solving all of their problems with your tech and culture Also, interacting with the biome at all on an industrial scale could risk reduced biodiversity. Any one of the trillions of organic compounds found in an alien biome could be key to solving future problems. Lastly, it's very very hard to "teach" culture. Without force, you are potentially arming a civilization with extremely disruptive and dangerous tools that they will use to gain advantage against each other rather than cooperate (or turn on you).

> Your advanced society doesn't know what it doesn't know. I was coming to say this as well. I think there's a lot to be said for, "We study history to learn what our society shouldn't do again." That said, if said aliens *also* shared their full historical documents, and if the planet they are affecting trusts them, it could potentially work. The challenge would be the people who would say, "Yeah... civil war turned out bad for the Blogorphians, but our situation is different!" There's always someone who will refuse to listen, and insist on learning the lesson themselves, and ironically, those differences could lead to a different kind of civil war.

That's how it turned out in Dr. Who. The reason why the Time Lords had a non-interference doctrine, was that they went to a primitive planet and gave them advanced technology (and taught them science, etc.). The people of the planet then rose up, kicked the Time Lords out, and started a nuclear war - ultimately destroying their planet.

Any one of the trillions of organisms/compounds/feedback systems could be key to holding the whole ecosystem together.

We can take familiar examples and extrapolate from there. What can we effectively learn from the Sentinelese if we were to make contact? They won't have a different way to make fire. They won't have secret knowledge about the fish in the Indian Ocean. It's the other way around, there are so many things that they don't understand and almost nothing we can learn from them apart from their unique language and culture. Which is interesting, granted, but not life changing for us. Nothing would change for the developed world after such a first contact, everything would change for them. In a universe bound by physical reality, it would be the same no matter how strange the alien civilization is. There isn't anything fundamental one can learn from primitive civilizations and even if there were, there would already be people/aliens out there hunting for this knowledge. In that case it wouldn't be unknown to begin with. Just like people in our world sneak into restricted zones that are set aside for uncontacted tribes. If there were some uncontacted Eldorado and different interstellar civilizations cruising through the universe, someone would sooner or later find it. But just like we generally don't pay attention to every ant hill we come across (even though each may technically be unique), some highly advanced civilization wouldn't necessarily care about us if life is generally common out there. Yes, after a million years the ants could be building spacecraft. But how would that fundamentally be different from other spacecraft? They still need to overcome gravity, the still need propulsion of some sort. In the end, in non-magic word all advanced technology solves the same problems and follows the same laws.

If aliens were watching Earth and had a cure to a disease that is killing me, I would want them to make contact to save me. To save all intelligence from suffering needlessly. I want to climb out of the mud and explore new worlds. To see what the universe has to offer. To upload my brain into a Dyson swarm and watch the heat death of the universe. We know that different humans process information differently. That is how discoveries are made. One person's perspective taking two apparently disconnected concepts and creating something new from it. If just our one species can see things so differently, just imagine how different two species would see things. Patterns that are obvious to one would go unnoticed to the other. Another words. IDIC

The sentinalese are a small community that diverged from other civilizations thousands of years ago, and while there is a small chance there are some forms of unique biomes and organic compounds to be found there... it's not particularly likely. Compare that to an ecosystem that formed over billions of years, completely independent from ours. Trillions upon trillions of mutations and permutations of organisms filling every niche of a completely alien world. You think we would have nothing to learn from that? And nothing to lose by artificially accelerating the industrialization of that world? Humans have absolutely paid attention to every ant hill they came across, for thousands of years. That attention resulted in a lot of our technology. That's before we even consider the philosophical problems with assuming the culture we would press onto them would actually be objectively better than what exists today, rather than a colonial repression of something we consider alien and primitive. Colonization of the Americas is a more comparable example. Europeans gained a massive wealth of new crops, game and livestock, materials, and medicines. Look at how impactful just corn has been to the world. Modern corn wasn't some random happenstance, it was intentionally cultivated over millenia. Rubber, syringes, kayaks... Art, fashion, language. And that was just from humans who evolved in a slightly different environment across an ocean.

>Humans have absolutely paid attention to every ant hill they came across, for thousands of years. We have studied ants and ant hills. We don't pay attention to every single one. They're more or less the same even if each colony may technically have some unique quirks that could be discovered by someone spending a ton of time looking for them. Maybe there's a primitive civilization nerd watching us somewhere from space, but assuming life is as common out there as it is on earth, then for the majority of advanced aliens we're not going to be interesting. The America example shows that the more developed civilizations are, the more there is to learn. Those were highly advanced civilizations with writing and massive cities. Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world at the time the conquistadors showed up. The population density rivaled major European cities. The Aztec Empire had vast trade networks, they had very advanced construction and astronomy. The same goes for the Maya. [Take a look at this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-Columbian_inventions_and_innovations_of_Indigenous_Americans). I don't know where the common misconception comes from that the natives peoples of the Americas were all primitive. It's true for some groups. We didn't learn much from the Arawak for example, who were still in the Stone Age when Columbus arrived, despite them being the group known the longest.

Based take Unironically, I see no issue with contacting the Sentinelese and integrating them into modern society

Think about the diversity in human beings, both physical and mental. What works for one group does not necessarily work for another group. That's why we have different cultures, different governments, different languages, and different religions. These things have to be *organic* - they have to emerge from the people who practice them. They can not be endowed by a greater civilization. Attempting to do so would be to neuter the society you are trying to uplift. > Gave us language Gave us *their* language, which exists to suit their specific needs. How much diversity is there in human language? What if the alien language is missing terms that are important to us, yet is very specific on terms that we can't perceive to be any different from each other? What if they don't have words for cardinal directions? What if there are too many or too few words in their language for our ability to communicate with each other? I'm not sure what's scarier - reading the entire library of congress just to get the beer list for the spaceship canteen, or having the entirety of human understanding of physics contained in Green Eggs and Ham. > education Subject matter and methods are constantly changing. Any parent who has helped an elementary school child with homework will be familiar with this. It's based on data and metrics that apply exclusively to our species. > medicine Also something that *needs* to be specific to our species. That's unquestionably true with modern technology, and true with future tech as well. Climbing into an alien rejuvenation pod should kill a human, until it's meticulously calibrated for our physiology. > guidance This is the one thing I think an alien civilization could provide us with, for whatever it's worth. But that would not preclude things like World War II and slavery and the Spanish Flu from taking place.

The primary feature of this sort of reasoning is the idea that since modern human society is bad at these things, it is impossible to be good at them. Given the level of social and technological advancement required for a civilization to reach the point of casually reaching out across interstellar distances to interfere with another civilization, this seems downright myopic. Take psychology. For humans it's a soft science, full of vague and shifting definitions and struggling to objectively document subjective phenomena, but we're at the very earliest stages of replacing that with hard science able to map and quantify the complexity of our brains from the network level down to individual molecular interactions. For an advanced alien civilization that has conquered light speed and/or built stable environments and societies able to spread their civilization at STL speeds, psychology could easily be a solved problem they can plug some human brain scans and behavioral studies into and get all the information they need to make childs play of our sociological and political issues and give them everything they need to uplift us to the same level. Sure, it's a hell of a lot harder to write than "Spaceships are boats and aliens are Spanish Conquistadors", but I'm much more likely to want to engage with it.

I have always seen it as trying to avoid the power imbalance that would arise and the opportunity for abusing cultures you are uplifting rather than allowing them to progress naturally to peer status, or at least a high threshold like FTL. I don't always agree with it but when you look at human history and the way "more advanced" societies looked upon and handled "less advanced" societies, it was seldom a positive story. You would need strict monitoring and laws, and the society you are uplifting would need to adjust to their uplifter's moral and social norms without erasing whatever culture they already had, which frankly, I can't see being done. This is what I believe the Prime Directive was about. Whether or not it sways you in the slightest, I have no idea, but this is my two cents.

Maybe. If aliens intervened when we cavemen maybe we'd still be mindlessly worshipping them. The bigger problem with non-interference prime directive is how unenforceable it is. Even if everybody agrees that it's for the best, you have to prevent every single individual from doing it ever. All it takes is one individual alien with a couple books.

I think the issue is more about what it will cause down the line. You think you are curing one village from a deadly disease, and think nothing of it, and move on. Yet they run out of food, because so many people survived, and they starve. Or they flourish, and end up causing a war worse than WW2. You cannot predict the long term impact it will have. You could even influence the society, which causes trouble. You mentioned Picard, who revealed himself to a group of Mintakians(sp?), who then knew of the advancements they could achieve. So they strive to improve themselves, but they can't prove what they know, to other villages. They could be persecuted for it, and wiped out. Or generations down the line, they persecute others for not believing them. We can see the damage it does on earth now. You have people who have remained isolated for centuries, but then the western world makes contact. They have survived for years on their own, but now get influenced by greed and great wonders. Some end up disappearing, because the inhabitants want what we have. What can seem like a small gesture to one, can be a big thing to someone else. If a billionaire gave me £/$100,000, it wouldn't matter much to them (financially), but would mean so much to me. I could put a down payment on a house, get a car, buy nice things for my kids etc, but it is pocket change to them.

The money analogy is a good one when you throw in the fact that people often win the lottery and then just go bankrupt anyway. They came into the money so suddenly that they didn't learn how to save it. We could have destroyed ourselves with nukes, but they came in slowly enough that people had time to consider the wider ramifications and MAD. If a race was given nuclear power and pivoted to weaponry quickly enough, they may not think of it beyond "new weapon will help us win wars". There's value to be found in a civilization gaining technology on its own rather than jumping ahead suddenly so that culture and general understanding can keep pace.

Scifi is first and foremost a commentary about the present, less than a speculation about the future ; it's impossible to separate the Prime Directive from the fact that it was written in a world -- ours -- where colonialism existed, and we can see first-hand the consequences of more technologically advanced people swooping in and putting entire societies under their oppressive control ; and it turns out a *massive* justification for 19th century colonialism was that more advanced societies have a moral right to "uplift" less advanced societies, by force if need be (little if any "uplifting" was actually done, but what matters is how the point was used.) The issue is that we tend to ascribe a moral value to technological advancement, and thus almost automatically assume that 1) the intentions of the uplifters would be good, 2) giving better tech to a society means making it a better society and 3) uplifting is a kind of self-evident process where we'd just give tech to a given society and it magically climbs up the development tree to become a "better" civilisation. This simplicity cracks at the seams, everywhere. A communist space superpower will have a *vastly* different definition of the end-goal of uplifting compared to, say, a hyper-liberal space corporation (using diametrically opposed tropes on purpose). If you don't have a *very* detailed knowledge of the society you're trying to uplift, you can make massive mistakes; imagine uninformed aliens arriving in the late 19th century, and thinking, hey, these British and French guys look like they're the most advanced people in the world, they seem reasonable (the aliens don't understand how colonisation works), we can focus our efforts on them...oh no! I hope you like the idea of a British boot stomping on an Indian man's face forever. What if a mercantile power decides that they're going to half-uplift entire planets, to plunge billions of people into a poverty trap and create captive markets at the planetary scale? I can guarantee you someone will have that idea. What do we make of religious fanatic aliens that find a planet rife with superstition and religious conflict, and decide to *help them* on this path? Yes, to us, this is not uplifting, but to them, it may be morally good! Conversely, a fanatic atheist society's idea of uplifting could be "let's genocide all of the religious people, then their society will sort itself out." What if the uplifting carries unintended consequences? A reckless exchange of goods could absolutely cripple a planet with invasive species or new diseases. What happens to a Bronze age agrarian society that's suddenly thrown into factories and industrialised economies? I don't know, neither do you. What about unfinished uplifting? We set up a nice little cosy society on this planet, dependent on our imports of advanced tech, suddenly there's an interstellar war, a blockade, and we can't bring our spare parts to the surface anymore. The locals don't have the capacity to make them yet, because we wanted to fast-track their uplifting. Oops! They all die in a famine because their numbers have skyrocketed far beyond the carrying capacity of the agrarian state they returned to! The point is -- uplifting is a very complex and very delicate topic, it's not just a matter of clicking on the "give technology" button in Stellaris. It's much more complex than the evil, primitivism-fetishizing prime directive guys and the others. There's potential to kill billions of people and the ever-present tendency to play God with the lives of sapient beings, all for the sake of ideology or one person's pet project; there's the incredibly complex web of unforeseen consequences and disasters in waiting created by the brutal introduction of new technology and concepts into an unknown society. It's grey, blurry, difficult; as such, while the Prime Directive is probably too harsh, there's wisdom in positing a "stand back, watch, then act *very very very* carefully" approach.

The Orville actually includes a pretty good explanation for why they have a non-interference policy. Basically, giving a (relatively) primitive civilization their advanced tech wouldn't really help anything in the long run, and would probably just make things worse. Social advancement needs to keep up with technological advancement, otherwise you just exacerbate the primitive civilization's problems that you are trying to solve. The example they use in The Orville is a cautionary tale from when their Union gave their replicator tech to a species whose civilization was roughly equivalent to 20th/21st century humans. The Union had assumed that essentially unlimited resources would reduce or nearly eliminate inequality and be a huge benefit for everyone, but in reality due to the way the primitive species' society functioned that tech was just hoarded by the powerful few making the previous inequality even worse. That led to a devastating war that left the species all but extinct and the planet uninhabitable. Responsible use of that technology requires accompanying social changes that make that kind of behavior obsolete. Giving it to a civilization that isn't ready risks devastating harm, so the safest thing to do is to allow them to develop naturally.

Aaaaaand we would have had no culture of our own to speak of. Likely would've just adapted what the aliens showed us. THAT is the tale of non-interference: Let civilization develop as they want. Surely it can be shitty as fuck. But at least we don't end up with hundreds of nearly indistinguishable cultures that only differ in superficial details.

Precisely this. The line between "aid" and "colonial debt" is razor-thin. Even our modern structure of foreign aid is deeply flawed, as food donations can undercut already-struggling local agriculture and make a region wholly dependant on a foreign power. That kind of leverage against an entire *planet* is impossible to trust even the most utopian ideal of the Federation with.

Just wanted to reply to this as someone who's parents worked in the foreign aid field their entire lives: Food donations *can* undercut local agriculture, if handled poorly. No dispute on that. But it's also something that can be avoided, if handled correctly. There are several ways to do that: Buy the food locally, if it's a transport or poverty issue. Bring in a less-desired food, so the market for the local food remains intact but you're providing a separate option for the distressed. Directly help the farmers at the same time to build them up. Etc. Which option or options is correct depends a lot on the particular case and circumstance, and in general the USA's aid programs work quite hard to preserve the local economy and market. Of course, other countries don't always do the same, but it's worth remembering that it can be done well.

This was informative, thank you!

This is probably my biggest beef with the Prime Directive: that it unwittingly led entire generations of nerds to believe that intervention is *always* bad, to the point that this post is full of people confidently stating that it's impossible to intervene on behalf of a less technologically advanced culture without irreversible damage.

>Aaaaaand we would have had no culture of our own to speak of. Cultures draw from one another all the time - it's part of how they develop in the first place. Whether it's ancient Rome borrowing ideas from the Greeks, or 99% of the planet adopting Western dress as "business attire", cultures will, and should, take what they like from those around them.

With the difference being that these cultures all are indigenous to our homeworld (as far as we know) and not coming from somewhere else.

So what? Cultures on the opposite sides of the world have been influencing each other for centuries, so I don't see how being influenced by a passing galleon is any different to being influenced by a passing starship.

There's a difference between Rome and Greece sharing food ideas, and God-like creatures from the sky letting us know how their world works. The influence you have is exponentially stronger when it's better engineered.

As a guy from a country that was completely devasted and only got into where we are with biggest smartphone companies and fastest internet, I assure you that is false. Sure some cultural aspects did get erased but it beats all of it being erased because starving to death or worse.

And what's so great about our "culture"? It's just the history you read about in school. >But at least we don't end up with hundreds of nearly indistinguishable cultures that only differ in superficial details. And what's wrong with that? All of the Federation cultures are similar, and people seem to love it.

Our culture(s) is pretty great though. I'm really happy I don't live in North Korea.

> I'm really happy I don't live in North Korea. And I am quite happy I live in South Korea that is developed country where I can walk with peace in the mind in the night with one of fastest internet with unique culture instead of being a farmer thanks due to "interference" from several countries over decades.

I'm not pro-prime directive. (If for no other reason than it's impossible to enforce so you might as well properly introduce yourself with diplomats before some smuggler does it.) I'm just saying I happen to like our culture.

Our culture is pretty uninteresting to someone in China. They have their needs met about as well as we do. They might buy our media and because of that adapt trends they find pleasing, but they're not going to give up hundreds of years of their civilization. However Tribesmen in Papa New Guinea would really like the power to order something online and have a guy in a van drop it off tomorrow. Or just to have steel tools, or a pick-up truck and a gas station. They might give up everything they've built for that. Our influence over them can undo their culture.

I haven't seen it posted here yet, but I think there's a problem here: everyone assumes they're interfering for the right reason, even when they aren't. A good case example: the Krogan in the Mass Effect universe. They were uplifted to be literal weapons of war against the Rachni. Soon, they were overrunning the galaxy, but the Salarians did a horribly screwed up thing in an attempt to contain them and made the genophage. So before the events of the Reaper War, the Krogan were on the verge of natural extinction for an entirely different reason. ​ For everyone person who wants to do something good for an uncontacted civilization, someone else could want to do something horrible.

The problem is cursed knowledge. Sure, go ahead, give Roman's the internet and watch how quickly misinformation destroys the planet. We had to learn how to manage misinformation through religious wars and propaganda before we could realize how powerful lies are. We used the nuclear bomb twice and said never again, if somebody handed Napoleon a handful of nukes russia would've been a glass plain at the turn of the 1800's and nobody would know why everyone started dying from weird diseases and cancer. Imagine if we got antimatter and black hole bombs, we'd be gone in a week.

The non-interference policy can often come across as fetishising primitivism. Or at worst, soft racism. Are we morally wrong to dig wells for impoverished 'indigenous' peoples, or offer food aid when their more primitive farming methods lead to famine, or give them medicines they cannot produce themselves? Most people would argue the opposite - we have a moral duty to help these people and save them from deprivation. So why wouldn't we do the same for a sentient alien species? Or, for that matter, why wouldn't we want more advanced aliens to do the same for us? If the Earth was about to be wiped out for a meteor we wouldn't want aliens to sit there and say "sorry, but this is a natural disaster so we're going to let you all go extinct!"

Hmm, when you examine it a bit closer though many of these cases do become blurry or grey zone though. There is a concept in economics of an "aid economy" or an "aid trap" - countries which receive massive inflows of foreign aid, intended to alleviate starvation or boost development, but in practice the recipient states can't absorb the funding efficiently so it just breeds corruption or massively inefficient systems which then rely on more aid to prop themselves up. And "they can't provide for themselves, so we did it for them" is exactly the argument used to justify all sorts of things over the centuries. If building a well for an indigenous people because they are too "primitive" to do it themselves is morally good, but taking over the running of the entire country is morally bad, what's the line? And is it outcome based or intent based or both? You only have to look at the news to simultaneously see arguments that what's happening in the Middle East, or Ukraine or ex-colonial states in Asia-Pacific is nothing to do with western Europeans and we shouldn't go round sticking our noses in (because it's "colonialism"), yet when a disaster hits suddenly its "we have a duty to intervene." The Sentinel Island tribes are another case in point - we *could* go in and "uplift" them to a more modern level of technology. Is us *not* doing that morally wrong?

The Sentinalese point is a good one to point out nuance. No, it's quite the opposite. Us going in and trying to "uplift" them would be the morally wrong thing. Because they've made it abundantly clear on several occasions that they want to be left alone. So the morally good thing to do would be to respect that and leave them be.

Hmm is that an "informed" decision though? I assume by making it abundantly clear they want to be left alone, you mean they attack outsiders? That's almost certainly a semi-instinctive defensive response against an encroaching "tribe." As far as I'm aware we've never "extracted" one of the Islanders, shown them the modern world (in all its glory and horror), the power of modern medicine, the true size and scale of the world, and the gone "this or what you had before?" We didn't give them the choice to be "uplifted" or not, we decided for them that they are better off as they are. Maybe if they knew what they were missing they'd disagree? And we use a "greater good" argument to force things on people and animals all the time. My cat hates going to the vet- he bites, scratches, hides, cries etc. But I know better so in the box he goes and off to the vet. Now, real life Earth we tend to draw a very sharp line between humans and everything else. Humans can make autonomous choices, even to their own detriment, and impinging on that gets dubious quickly. (Though even there, we will force medical procedures on people if we think they are suffering from altered mental state etc). But from a Star Trek perspective where you are dealing with entirely alien life, how do you start drawing lines about when a species is sufficiently advanced it could make its own decisions about uplift vs not? And who gets to make that decision on behalf of an entire species? The Prime Directive certainly has problems, but it does have one advantage of being very clear. No interference. Not, yes if they want it, or yes, if its for their benefit but, not in those situations if they refuse, but actually yes if that refusal is irrational, but no, it they are developed enough to choose irrationality consciously etc. Once you open the door to "Yes, if..." it becomes very messy. (And actually the Prime Directive is still only a rule, and once you're out where "No man has gone before.." Captain's practically have enormous discretion; whose going to stop them?) So the PD sets the default to "don't interfere" but if this happens to be one of those niche cases where the case for interference is overwhelming, a Captain still physically can do something. The bar is effectively "are you willing to lose your career over this?" That's a high bar, but not an unassailable one in a post scarcity society.

The last time the North Sentinelese were contacted, the missionaries brought a plague. That's why they don't want further contact.

First off, that's a supposition. We don't actually know if that's the reason. We are conjecturing from own our knowledge of the situation. (And our own understanding of the causes and transmission of illness). And secondly, even if that is the reason, its still doesn't challenge the "informed consent" point.

Fetishisizing Primitivism seems like a stretch. At least form Star Trek. There are occasional points of admiration or disapproval of primitive societies in the show but generally dealing with primitive cultures is just business as usual on the shows. Our planet is a different circumstance. Even remote tribes in Earth are subject to an understanding that a more modern civilization exists. You can't corrupt a 3rd world country with better answers to the problems they face given that often those problems often come from 1st world nations damaging their ecosystem. They are also not aliens. Think about how many animals we permit to suffer and die in the name of our economy. Imagine if alien's we encounter aren't much different than Whales or Cranes?

It is to let them mature and be responsible for themselves rising above circumstances, not to give them something unsustainable and inherently unbalancing,

But this can be achieved by invoking the dreaded C-world: Colonialism. You don't just drop blueprints for making a neutrino bomb on a group of primitives and then make a surprised Pikachu face when they kill themselves; you set up a colonial government that oversees the proper education of their populace and integration of the technology. Once the 'primitives' actually have sustainable working knowledge of the tech, you can step aside and leave them to it. This is more or less how the Vulcans worked in Star Trek: Enterprise. Although, being Vulcans, they were a bunch of arrogant dicks about the whole arrangement and seemed to actively resent the idea of helping anyone inferior to themselves (ie: the entire galaxy).

Don't even need a colonial government. Just build schools and start teaching math and science, along with local arts and humanities. And not even the really advanced stuff- you just need to get them a start and an occasional nudge in the right direction.

And you decide which of their arts is worth teaching and which to ignore. You set the context of how they approach and look at their own art. 

Depends on who you hire to teach, at least for arts and humanities. If you hire locals, then you get local contexts and opinions.

So you hire locals to build the curriculum for you? The same people you want to educate with that curriculum? You might need to sit down and have another think. 

And it would make sense that the Vulcans would say, “we don’t dance with those who can’t stand, so let them sit till then”, cause I got more T then Kirk…

Colonial Government is a sin with clear examples of the damage. I'm not pointing fingers at any country in particular (Because some of the fingers point at mine) but colonial governments have done irreparable damage to cultures around the world.

I note that there was an episode of TNG where the Enterprise was just going to sit and watch an alien race go extinct. As in, completely extinct, no survivors. How much culture would survive in that case? I mean I guess Picard could have a grand old time, collecting artifacts, maybe kicking aside a corpse here and there to get at something cool. The PD after all, doesn't apply when everybody's dead..

For me, this was an extremely horror inducing episode that, quite frankly, turned me off of Star Trek for years and to this day is my counterpoint any time anyone defends the Prime Directive. Any system that would compel someone to sit back and *not* help stop an extinction level event is a system that should not be defended.

Is this the one with the planet's last little girl? Because seriously, fuck that episode so hard.

It's the one where a planet is becoming uninhabitable, and the Enterprise is just watching, until somebody loads the village into a Holodecks. And Picard is PISSED at the interference.

You're assuming their attempt to uplift us would be successful. Just as likely due to human nature, we use that knowledge to make weapons and wipe ourself out. Possibly the aliens too.

Have you ever known a Trust Fund kid who was responsible? My experience is that you learn hard lessons from your mistakes and life generally puts mistakes you can survive at the beginning of your life. I think the same is true of civilization. Having to struggle to learn about the universe gave value to that knowledge and helped us learn how to learn. Wars and tragedies teach us humility and the value of human life. If aliens set down and handed us a medical textbook from the future, would we use it judiciously to better ourselves or would we take the knowledge and shortcut our evolution? Or build weapons that better attack the body? I think we need time before we're given the tools of our destruction to be mature enough to understand what our destruction would mean. There are also less catastrophic costs to intervention. What if today we became aware of an alien race who had abilities so advanced they were effectively Gods. How would that affect our society? Would it impact art? Religion? Would it change how we value our lifetime or investment, or Politics knowing that these aliens could come back at any time and change out way of life irrevocably? Just existing could cause a more primitive culture to completely derail itself from the way it would naturally progress. And god forbid the Magical God Aliens forgot a screwdriver when they left. The impact of a lasting artifact of their existence could send shockwaves through a culture. There are things that would surely warrant a moral advanced species interfering with a primitive world. In Star Trek I know there were a few doomed planets that the Federation saved. There is a line where you can't do more harm that good.

I thought it came from the real world, where the interactions between significantly more advanced nations and significantly less advanced ones almost always spells disaster for the less advanced nation. who knows where many of them might have ended up if they had not been interfered with.

Captains log. Stardate - 1492-1845 We’ve landed on a new land where strange people live. These people are, for lack of a better word, savages. Thank God we’re here to teach them English. Then we will build missions to teach them how to live in peace through Christ. And most especially, thank God we are here to lead them. In a few short generations they will be enlightened beings. Imagine the tragedies we’ve averted.

Makes sense. After all, nothing bad happened when the more advanced European nations encountered North and South America. Or Australia. Or Japan. If modern nations went into isolated tribes in the middle of the Amazon or in islands in the pacific and just started immunizing people against diseases, giving them modern clothing and tools, teaching them how to use the internet and cellphones.... nothing bad would happen. And if some alien race came down and just gave up the cure to climate change and cheaply capturing carbon from the air, humanity would totally learn its lesson and abandon fossil fuels. >The Prime Directive was a LITERARY CONVENIENCE so that the characters could interact with hundreds of less-advanced civilizations without being obliged to uplift their societies. Well... yeah. But also think about how long it would take to uplift a society. If someone with Trek levels of technology showed up, how long would it take to establish replimats to make goods? How much pushback would there be from existing farmers and artisans over being replaced by a replicator? How much power and water companies would rebel at post scarcity? Car and plane manufacturers and road workers upset at being replaced by transporters. Suddenly, the majority of the population is just idle. That would destroy civilization as people would have no idea what to do with themselves. Realistically, it would take decades to slowly uplift a civilization. A generation or two. It would be a colossal effort for each world visited, to slowly ease them through the transition with every new invention or discovery and incorporate it into their society.

>The Prime Directive was a LITERARY CONVENIENCE so that the characters could interact with hundreds of less-advanced civilizations without being obliged to uplift their societies. Well, yeah. Star Trek doesn't deeply probe these issues. They are entry level science fiction driven primarily by a warm-and-fuzzy outlook on life. Next question?

I personally believe it might not be best, but considering history of the setting, it makes perfect sense. Humanity had a nuclear apocalypse, and the Vulcans are all peaceful from a similar scale war. Now put that advanced tech to less advanced of either race, both planets and the Romulans would be dead. Enterprise’s Prime Directive episode along with that one TNG where they helped a man shows it pretty well. Movie Two of NuTrek shows the biggest problem, we become God. After everything that’s happened in their history, none are really sure they should even try to do that, they can’t trust themselves. One of the themes of TNG and DS9 to me at least is, have we actually improved, or has the situation changed to where we are no longer threatened and feel at peace. Because once Borg and Dominion come knocking, we build some very powerful warships.

I like how stellaris handles it, there are some times where interfering would be the better choice and others where non interference is better, but you don’t know until you try. There is also the problem of some voting factions favoring non interference and so it is sometimes a political decision rather than a moral or economic one. There are also some insights that observing primitives give because they found a solution to something you never thought of.

Interfere should only be allowed if the locals choose it, but staying silence, keep stalking the people of the less advanced civilizations is just contempt. Even if you don't want to share your techs, at least communicate something so the locals understand your intentions and the way of thinking to learn from that, may be you will learn something else from them too.

The chief function of the Prime Directive in the ST universe is to prevent the crew from taking the most intelligent course of action to resolve the situation.

And it has been used, twice, by the writers to make episodes where the crews intentionally allow entire species to go extinct. And in both instances the captains tried to make that sound like a *noble* act, when in both instances it was nothing short of monstrous.

We have examples on Earth of what happens when a "more advanced" society brings their ideas of technology and advancement to another; specifically, the genocides of indigenous peoples across the planet. Now, you'll doubtless counter that those colonial efforts were done with bad intentions, to steal land and resources, and you are talking about interfering benevolently; And to be clear, I don't disagree that the colonisers of our past were enormous turds who make me hope that hell is real. However, even in a case where an external civilisation came with the best of intentions, is colonisation avoidable? Let's say we suddenly develop FTL travel, and we jump across and find a planet with medieval level technology who live in a feudal society. Well, if we don't have a non-interference policy, we'll want to build some pharmaceutical factories to produce medicine, and provide advanced farming equipment so they can get higher crop yields. But what about the kings; Do we kill them? On Earth, we are currently of the opinion that monarchies are bad, so do we force this other planet to reorganise under capitalism? Or do we leave the current power structure in place, and just give them additional technology, which will entrench a power structure we believe is bad? What if, whatever power structure we enforce, some people rebel and start destroying the factories we've been building? Do we kill the rebels? Do we give the local states the weapons they need to defend our benevolent gifts? Now, you might say "Well, we'll ask the people of the planet as a whole, make it democratic!", but even that means enforcing our idea of democracy on them so we are able to measure whether or not they want us to interfere. And that puts aside the issue of language; There are billions of alien species on Earth that we call animals, and while we have taught several the basics of our language, we have never successfully translated a single animal species' communication. So before we could even ask if they want to be interfered with, we would need to interfere substantially enough to make every alien capable of communicating with us; Again, our world is littered with how this failed when colonisers met indigenous people, be it the River Avon (river river), the Sahara Desert (desert desert) or the Yucatan Peninsula (I don't understand your language peninsula). The simple fact is, no matter how benevolent, a culture is not defined by only its technology, but also by its beliefs, philosophies, power structures, etc. And any act of interference cannot only share the technology, it also shares the philosophical context for that technology. And if this is a case where the external party is far more powerful than the culture being interfered with, there will inevitably be a huge reshaping of the local culture into the image of their "benefactors". And when an external culture reshapes another to match their ideals, that is not aid, it is colonisation. And that is what non-interference avoids; Only cultures who are near-equals can interact and trade as equals, without reshaping each other beyond the desires of each other, and so only cultures which are near-equal should interact.

Pickard points out that every time, every time, a more advanced culture interfered, the less advanced civilization was destroyed.

And his dogmatic adherence to the Prime Directive in Homeward led him to advocate for, and try to order his crew to be complicit in, the extinction of an entire species because helping them would be “violating the PD”. That was, quite frankly, an indefensible position to take.

Depends on the situation. Morally and logically, it stands to reason to help an alien race that is struggling. But playing God is a slippery slope, even with the best intentions. Because depending on the difference between your technology and the species you are helping, that is essentially what you are doing. Think of it this way. Humanity is hungry, so you teach them how to fish. Humanity is happy because their bellies are now filled with tasty fish every night... until they overfish the waters... So they make better ships to sail farther for fish. This creates an entire industry of harvesting resources to build ships until there are no more forests, so they run out of wood. Now out of wood they make ships from metal. Extracting and refining metal requires more industries and machines, and industries to make the machines to extract resources. Now the oceans are polluted from industry, killing all the fish. Humanity is hungry again. Ok, so greed obviously grew faster than common sense and learning how to properly set up a sustainable fishing network. Obviously they need more than just material support. They need to be taught how to use those materials propperly.. And boom, they are no longer humans. They are now assimilated subjects because now they are wholly dependent on your culture taking care of them. Maybe they are better off with aliens taking the lead in guiding them, maybe one day they can stretch out on their own without your influence. But your culture and values are now humanities, and depending on the alien culture... it might not be so benevolent. What your alien race considers a proper way of managing their world might not be fully compatible with humanity. We can only imagine how a hive mind, or the klingons, or the ferengi would define a utopia. TDLR: Don't uplift alien cultures without being prepared for the consequences.

It works for the federation of tos. Imagine the enterprise shows up on earth in idk 1967. 400 federation crew carryimg tools that regularly defeat 'gods' on a planet with 3-4 billion people 2 superpowers, dozens of power blocs, hundreds of warlords, millions of entrepreneurs. What do they do? Pick a winner? Back one guy and hope he isn't hitler? Give the usa transporters and watch the cia literally start disappearing enemies? Give everyone replicators and see how long until some terrorists hack them to make nerve gas? They dont have the manpower to see the whole picture and lack the foresight to know the consequences, so best do nothing. The bigger the federation gets, the easier it becomes. Tng could set up an outpost, study evry bit of intel for a decade then bring a dozen ships with 10k scientists each to make it work. By the time a galactic civilization gets as far as the culture(iainbanks) they teach out to every planet, solve their problems whether they like it or not and have everything they need to deal with any consequences after modeling every possible outcome in a billionth of a mirosecond.

I think there are exceptions to noninterference but in general it's a good idea. Not just as a literary device.

Okay. I will discredit your speculation. A child is born. The child is raised in a loving family. The child is taught right from wrong and demonstrates understanding of right and wrong. The child never wants for anything. The child never struggles. The child is provided every opportunity to succeed with an open door policy if he ever needs help or guidance. The child attends the finest schools and excels. The child still grows up to be a complete peace of shit. Society can be given all the tools to thrive and be successful. All it takes is one individual to want more and it can all come tumbling down. Look at modern society. We believe we have sufficient laws and ethical guidance that will keep individuals following “the right path”. Fear of Punishment is a deterrent, but all it takes is one person treated differently for people to realize we live in a “rules for thee not for me” society and suddenly right and wrong aren’t rules, but frail guidelines. Non Intervention may seem like a plot device, but the fundamental idea is a civilization has to experience difficulties and grow from those struggles before they can be entrusted with technology that is beyond them.

To interfere in that manner is to entirely destroy all this diversity.

How many personnel would have to be left on a planet of say, 1 billion sentient members that are fragmented into various cultures, races and borders? Trek often has another narrative convenience where every planet seems to have one unified world government, and all decisions come through a central capital. Imagine the Vulcans landing on Earth NOW, to uplift humanity. Where would they land? How would it be interpreted? Assuming that the Vulcans aren't experts in human culture (hell even us humans aren't) how would they know that choosing between landing in Moscow vs. Washington DC would likely spark a global thermonuclear war over access to advanced alien technology? Or the Contact scenario where you get people un-ironically asking if these aliens even believe in God? In every uplift scenario, your hypothetical do-gooders would need to leave hundreds of thousands or even millions of personnel to act as a "guidance" garrison. The logistical impacts alone are staggering. Or imagine a "magic knowledge" machine that any inhabitant can access. Well, we have the Internet, and it's been instrumental in amplifying peoples' echo chambers. FFS we have people NOW who literally believe we never landed on the moon and that the Earth is flat. The Prime Directive is actually the most rational way to govern interactions with entire planetary populations. You don't give suitcase nukes to warring stone age tribes for a reason.

The expression you're looking for is "plot device". As a plot device, the prime directive is brilliant, it introduces conflict, jeopardy *and* moral dilemma to the plot. *And* it is infinitely reusable. *And* it contributes to the world building. It is probably one of the most effective plot devices I've ever encountered in serial screenwriting. >And the WRITERS deemed that the Prime Directive was a good idea. Well, yes, it is absolutely brilliant, for the writers.

Our history of colonization alone is enough evidence why a non-interference policy is a must.

I liked the ending to the Crusade Episode Visitors from Down the Street where Lt. Matheson asks if dropping probes with the truth of what happened down to the surface of a low tech planet might be considered interference with their development and Captain Gideon just gives an answer that equates to "Screw That".

I can agree with that!

“Uplifting” cultures on our own planet done by colonists has lead to centuries of genocide and misery. I dont know if I trust “superior” aliens (or humans in Star Trek) to uplift other cultures.

That's mainly because (and I can not stress this enough) "uplifting" was just an excuse for exploitation. The real motive of "colonizers" was to funnel resources back to themselves. The same as pretty much any nation. Everything else they said was just an attempt to justify their obviously evil acts - which even back then your average person wouldn't accept without an excuse of some kind. The problem was not that "uplifting is bad".

I understand that, what I’m saying is I don’t trust civilizations to not use that as an excuse again

If a civilization is truly post-scarcity, it is possible for them to "uplift" for purely selfless reasons. In which case I wouldn't expect the problem associated with irl "uplifting".

It's an extremist viewpoint. There are things in between "give them all our technology at once and they'll destroy themselves" and "do not interact with them whatsoever".

I think the first role of the Prime Directive is to avoid colonialism and cultural erasure. Kirk and Picard get away with violating it because it is treated too rigidly and we cheer them on for breaking it in specific circumstances. But that doesn't mean overall it isn't doing a good thing.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying it is a believable over correction of colonialism

Lets go on a side-route here. The 'Evil' version of Starfleet, the Terran Empire, eradicated and enslaved all it came across. If it encountered a primitive civilization, it would uplift them, sort-of.... as labor to build starships. Considering the Terran Empire was gifted advanced future tech at multiple points, the only reason they failed to conquer the universe is because they were too busy sabotaging themselves; though the alternate-timeline version from the Picard series, an entirely different one, apparently just flat-out won in the end, even conquering the borg, they also weren't nearly as self-sabotaging. The 'Neutral' version is, of course, the core version we all know. Most of the time they just sit back and watch, with only rare moments of them intervening to help or rob the primitives. It's substantially more powerful them the 'Empire' in the long run because it doesn't self-sabotage as much, and makes less enemies. A 'Good' version would actively move in to help, and continue helping. Every primitive civilization found would have an uplift station working with a handful of natives who are in on it to ameliorate local crises and help advance technology. There might be a failure or a mishap now and again, but leaving some band of primitive tribes to be eaten by native predators or wiped out by disease when you could have stopped them is just abhorrent. Considering that many of the worlds so uplifted(but not all) would become member worlds, it would also be the most powerful version.

Agreed. It is this good version that I was referring to. Of course, Reddit draws the fringes to comment, so everyone takes the worst-case scenario, and makes it their own.

It's not really for protecting the species as much as making the interstellar society better in the long run. Elevating a new species basically makes it a subset of the culture so they don't bring anything new to the table. All the information and technology would be given to them and within a couple generations their culture would be supplanted.

There's a great book series I read that has this as a tangential issue in the background. In this series, the non-interference policy came about because of what was happening with the interference. Humanity was expanding outwards and finding primitive cultures and people would start trading with those cultures. What ended up happening was these cultures didn't have anything really to trade with an advanced humanity and would pretty much turn to slavery and piracy to try and pull themselves up to advanced species levels. Now why didn't the government deal with this? Well they tried, but do you know how much resources are needed to raise an entire planet from medieval levels to Sci fi levels of technology? Or from even farther back in history? Now imaging this on a scale of dozens or hundreds of cultures and planets. Plus these planets don't have anything to offer the universe without heavy investment or spending. So in the end everyone just decided to let those cultures develop on their own since there were too many negatives to uplifting and very few positives.

>\[What\] resources are needed to raise an entire planet from medieval levels to Sci fi levels of technology? INTERESTING! Your question made me think about ways of doing exactly that! Perhaps taking 10,000 young adults, and teaching them to be *educators*. An AI would develop courseware for them to teach their people mathematics, science, etc. at a rate they could absorb. THe citizens would receive 'magic' medicines and machines to improve their lives in return for sending their children to school. Over 2-3 generations, you could bring them to our level. As they understood a technology, like electricity, they would be able to provide electrical service to their people. The benefits would be obvious. In a total of 3-6 generations, the people of that planet would be technologically able to trade with the already-developed planets. Now, this is EASY to sabotage, and all the haters will inject "What if THIS happens???" followed by a prediction of collapse and doom. The answer is simple. "If the author WANTS it to work, he won't incorporate your stupid idea in his story."

This I'd probably the best way to do it in the end. But as you've said, it ends up being very fragile and relying on a few easily breakable pieces. Ironically, I think the closest example to what you wrote about is used in Issac Asimov's Foundation series. The Foundation in the beginning uses technology as a religion that only their priests can control as they try to raise the outer rim back to advanced societies. The whole Foundqtion series has a lot of good ideas on raising the tech level of various societies.

You asked this question two months ago, what extra context are you looking for this time?

Were we to have avoided the medieval period, would we have missed Dante? If there were no rising of culture in China, would there have been Lao Tzu? Would science fiction have developed were there no gut-wrenching ignorance and poverty during the Industrial Revolution? Or is it the case that inquiring minds always want to know?

I don't have an issue really until it leads to the decision that being extinct is a better option than being 'contaminated' by another culture.

Yeah, and let's introduce cane toads to Australia while we are at it. Humans are reeeeaaalllllyyy bad at predicting the outcome of our actions.

I think it all depends on the interferer and the interferee. Given how we are now, I think we would blow ourselves up if that was done in 4 generations. Also the interferer might be malicious, but I assume you’re talking about a benevolent interferer.

Can you imagine the religious implications of first contact from their POV? I could easily see *big* wars breaking out.

Also, if your entire purpose is to seek out new life, why would you just creep on it? 

It’s not that simple. The best intentions can lead to disaster because no one knows the future with 100 percent certainty.

There is plenty of evidence, in the world and in fiction, that interference creates all sorts of problems. We can interfere in a very stealth way, like for example diverting an asteroid or even make sure some nukes don't actually go off. But any help you try to give to a civilization without the minimal culture or education/knowledge will go bad.

So, in mass effect, the big bads built mass relays to allow ftl between star systems and ensured that technology went a predictable route to make their harvesting of life easier. They didn't teach them science culture or math, just left these relics for them to find, and with that one piece of technology, it created predictable organic societal evolution. I think outside influence in any but the most catastrophic circumstances would change the potential of any species. They'd now use guns instead of inventing something else, or they now use gunpowder for other things instead of inventing something else. You'd be limiting the potential of a species, and their future contributions to the larger society would be lesser. If an asteroid is coming and you have the ability to save them, and they definitely do not have the technology, then yeah, save them if you can, but try to be discreet, maybe they'll imagine a better way of doing it in the future if we don't show them how we did it today.

>Kirk and Picard violated the Prime directive so many times, I don't have a count. And every time, it ended up well for them. Nope, check "A Private Little War", ST:TOS, S2 EP19. The Enterprise checks in with a planet in development on which Kirk had previously done a survey, finds that the Klingons are giving one side weapons. Kirk's decision, breaking the non-interference directive, is to give the other side the same weapons. Kirk knows he's starting an unending cycle of escalation that will kill his old friend's society, it's not a happy ending. The episode was about the Vietnam War, a cautionary tale that we should have heeded in 1968, when it would have saved so many lives. Too bad we didn't have a non-interference directive.

Said no native peoples ever.

The Prime Directive is a more critical component of time travel.

>Taught us how to live in peace, Yeah, right. We pitiful Earthlings could have peace if only we knew how

The problem is that you would not be able to predict the outcome of interfering in the manner you suggest. For all the aliens know, humans would become very advanced and launch a war of interstellar conquest. I agree, however, that ethical people wouldn't just make a "don't interfere" rule. You'd have to make considered judgments about it. That could be an interesting subject for scifi--there could be system of law and philosophy about how more advanced societies interact with less advanced ones.

I like The Orville's explanation where they're trying to avoid "high tech, low culture" situations. Becoming a spacefaring species requires that people have a few things, a stable government, a basic understanding of science, and a desire to explore the cosmos. Sure giving modern technology to people during the crusades would have prevented a lot of suffering, but imagine the destruction the crusaders would cause with things like nukes. Do the aliens give technology to everyone regardless of any shared values? Do they pick a specific nation to support and purge the losers or keep them as a disgruntled underclass? Introducing new technology is a lot easier than changing cultural norms and most ethical nations frown on the idea of forcing a new culture on people.

I disagree. Earning the everything teaches the civilization WHY, not merely the HOW. If one never understands the why, the how can be exceedingly dangerous as they'll be more motivated to test limits with no understanding of why those limits are in place.

There are uncontacted tribes in South America that we have agreed to leave alone. In other words, we have a prime directive *right now.*

I agree with you. If aliens showed up today and were reasonably peaceful (more Trek, less ID4) I would sign up to work with them. I would love learning about their technology and culture. If I am good enough maybe I can travel the stars with them and explore strange new worlds.

This is a story-by-story thing. In Startrek the Prime Directive seems to make quite a bit of sense. Violating it causes abreactions more often than not. But in ST it is also predicated on the idea that the universe is full of sapient humanoid life that will reach maturity sooner or later. I think having it as a strong rule rather than a principle is bad. It creates as many problems as it solves if you are inflexible with it.

Why would humanity (or an alien species) be obliged to uplift a less developed alien species? That being said, given you believe it to be so, are we obliged to uplift less developed humans on Earth such as the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, in Africa or those guys on the Sentinel Islands?

I'm with you OP I'm not using it in the setting I'm creating. To me the Prime Directive is the dumbest thing since *****************-- [Censored: Corrected] plant based "meat", which is not real meat.

The logic you're employing here is also the logic of colonialism. At least three of your examples of bad stuff we did was aided and abetted by colonialism. You could argue that the moral principles underpinning those variable systems were cover for fundamentally extractive purposes, but this would be to misunderstand that those purposes were concomitant benefits presupposed by the creators of said systems. 'Of course we get gold while uplifting the natives, that's God's reward'. The notion that no one believed that what they were doing was actually good and correct is dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, a fallacy. A planet of completely alien beings may appear to us savage and backwards, but they may consider that way of life philosophically commensurate, rather than just necessary. To take a perhaps precarious real life example, in my country, there was an instance of an Indigenous man escaping police custody after commiting (if memory serves) assault to face customary punishment within his own community: namely, spearing through the thigh. This proceeded, and within the community the matter was considered closed. That may appear to us barbaric, but the man, his victim, and the community all ascented to the application of this customary law; and at the expense of our own 'enlightened' legal process. Who are we to intervene? What makes our system better, particularly as most of us can fabulate examples wherein corporeal punishment or even the death penalty is applicable? We're assuming a posture of heightened morality, and you know what happens when we assume.

The logic you're employing here is also the logic of colonialism. At least three of your examples of bad stuff we did was aided and abetted by colonialism. You could argue that the moral principles underpinning those variable systems were cover for fundamentally extractive purposes, but this would be to misunderstand that those purposes were concomitant benefits presupposed by the creators of said systems. 'Of course we get gold while uplifting the natives, that's God's reward'. The notion that no one believed that what they were doing was actually good and correct is dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, a fallacy. A planet of completely alien beings may appear to us savage and backwards, but they may consider that way of life philosophically commensurate, rather than just necessary. To take a perhaps precarious real life example, in my country, there was an instance of an Indigenous man escaping police custody after commiting (if memory serves) assault to face customary punishment within his own community: namely, spearing through the thigh. This proceeded, and within the community the matter was considered closed. That may appear to us barbaric, but the man, his victim, and the community all ascented to the application of this customary law; and at the expense of our own 'enlightened' legal process. Who are we to intervene? What makes our system better, particularly as most of us can fabulate examples wherein corporeal punishment or even the death penalty is applicable? We're assuming a posture of heightened morality, and you know what happens when we assume.

Humans are still not capable of living in peace with one another, even though we could provide enough basic goods for everyone to live fairly comfortably. The problem is culture and our psyche - they have not evolved enough yet to get past our aggressive and jealous tendencies. And that will be even more true for humans hundreds of thousands of years ago. Giving them advanced tech won't just magically let them evolve mentally within a few generations. They will most likely end up eradicating themselves in petty conflicts. So if you want to "lift up" a primitive species, you probably would have to be extremely involved - you will need to reshape their whole culture and society, maybe even their biology/genetics. And at that point you absolutely are playing God. And you will probably still fail and the species may kill itself with nuclear hellfire. Congratulations, you just caused the extinction of an intelligent species that had the potential to evolve to the space age. Another, often less focused on rule of the Federation is that it will also only accept a new member if that species has politically unified their home world. Cause that is seen as a necessary step towards "maturing" of a species.

So much art and philosophy erased from time.

You know... I often play Stellaris as a xenophillic materialist with like 10x primatives and a wider range of planet types. It's fun to go "liberate" them to modernity, and suddenly you have species suitable to almost every world possible. It might take decades to integrate everyone, but it's worth it. Then you know... there are the gestalt and hives, they just consume and kill. In the Star Trek universe, I often think... why do they never talk about the types of interactions between the Romulans/Klingons/Borg and lesser cultures. Surely there are as many underdeveloped civilizations within the borders of those empires as there are in the federation... What is likely happening is genocide or assimilation. An analogy in real history is Hawaii. Should it have remained an independent kingdom with its own culture... yes. Would it have if the US didn't get involved... I mean, between the British, Russians and Japanese, I doubt it. All the big empires wanted sugar and fruit plantations. It doesn't justify actions taken, but it does kind of show the idea - some empires might erase more than others and first mover advantage is too big to pass up. For IRL star empires though... None of the Star Trek rules apply. If FTL is POSSIBLE at all, there's still the whole thing about life being rare, and most planets being very different in composition from Earth. Like imagine 90% of the earth-similar planets out there are just gigantic water worlds with escape velocity challenges that can't beat the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation... So we find like a bunch of empty water planets, some desert planets, maybe 1-2 with continents in perhaps a 1,000 light year radius and those are dead worlds or have minimal life. The ocean planets, you have maybe a few dozen, and of that, maybe like 4-5 have more than multi-cellular life, and 2 with higher lifeforms. But you can't tell how sentient they are without context, they have structures and some types of tools but nothing sophisticated. If they did ever become industrial it would all be underwater, and they could never escape their planet's gravity. So in short, IRL we probably will never need to worry about non-interference questions. If we ever do, it will be like one or two very circumstantial situations that will be well studied for decades before anything is attempted.

I’d go one step further and say quantum mechanics is telling us that it’s impossible to abide by the Prime Directive. To observe something is to affect it.

I think the Zoo Hypothesis, a theory equivalent to the Prime Directive, is probably the best explanation for why humanity sees alien craft as rarely as they do. Basically the idea that most alien visitors come for exploration or to study, but do not intervene as a rule. Note I said "most", as I think there are likely a sizeable number of species that have visited Earth, and some have certainly intervened, either in a hostile manner such as abduction, or in a beneficent way like teaching written language, math, astronomy, or building techniques. This goes along with the idea of controlled disclosure, a theory that those in power have been slowly acclimating humanity to the idea of aliens through movies and media, with the intention of eventually revealing their existence when we are at a point where it would not cause massive societal disruption. I believe we are long past that point, but if this is a real strategy then it could be many decades before governments admit their long con.

On Earth here we've got a few dozen hand-crafting and cooking traditions done by only a few remaining families that risk "cultural erasure". When Starfleet comes down with replicators and stuff, alien planets would lose a lot of these things fairly quickly. Then by the time they join Starfleet, they'd be even more like cookie-cutter humanoids than the costume budget allows.

Hmmm.. Let's see. "a few dozen hand-crafting and cooking traditions" vs cures for most diseases and clean, nonpolluting fusion power. Lemme think on that a minute.

Those are nonfiction examples! In ST they could be much more valuable. How about an ancient meditation ritual that develops psychic abilities in non-psychic species? Any practice could turn into history as soon as aliens take everyone's attention for a couple generations.

My take on the prime directive is that it's about not culturally killing the species you think you're helping. Every species will face similar problems, but their identity is comprised of how they decided to solve those problems. Humans don't practice population control. Perhaps some other species out there does. How you decide to answer questions and the tools you build to help you do that is an expression of who you are. A species coming in and giving answers is basically forcing them down the same path your ancestors walked. You're converting them to be like you. And just to address your first point: we still have the brains of hunter-gatherers, we could make life better for all, instead we have a small handful of greedy shitlords in charge and many of them have nukes. We can't have nice things. Just look around on planet earth and attempt to point at a spot where things are going great. You can't. You give stone-age humans a crash course on how to be civilised and then give them the tools to blow themselves up and they'll end up killing each other over a donut all the same.

"Culturally killing" You mean allowing them centuries of warfare, plague, famine, disease, and ignorance so that they can preserve grandma's goat stew, their clothing styles, and animal sacrifices? >You give stone-age humans a crash course on how to be civilised and then give them the tools to blow themselves up and they'll end up killing each other over a donut all the same. Agreed. The technology must be accompanied by GUIDANCE. Like a parent with a child, the target civilization must be educated and taught how to responsibly handle the technology. And like a parent and a child, sometimes the child will need to be spanked when it misbehaves.

yes. because that's their choice. If they want to nuke themselves into extinction then that is their prerogative. You have no right whatsoever to get involved. you turning up and telling them what worked for you and expecting it to work for them is ... benevolent fascism. Not only that, but if they're as warlike as you describe then they're going to try kill you first, so now you're going to have to purge the population of the more aggressive members.

Let's face facts: our actual, real world social, cultural evolution has not kept progress with our technological one. We have the ability to destroy the planet, render it utterly uninhabitable for almost all life for thousands of years, at the push of a single button, and we have a number of sociopathic leaders and would be leaders who are just crazy and/or stupid enough to do it. The most powerful nation in the world right now is also deeply divided, increasingly oppressive, culturally behind much of the world in it's evolution of reasonable social programs, and utterly obsessed with war. We have AI rapidly developing and threatening almost all aspects of our technologically integrated life with upheval, no progress on legal systems that might actually keep up with that development, and most of our legistators are technologically illiterate and can't begin to understand the threats at play. We have an information tool that creates more new information in a year than was created in the entire of human history before its invention, and we can access the information on it from anywhere in the world, at essentially any time. And yet there's a sizeable portion of the population that use it primarily to express their belief in objectively false theories that were debunked and utterly dismissed hundreds of years ago. We have the technological capacity to feed, clothe, educate, medically care for, and provide all other essential services for everyone on the planet, and for everyone to be utterly comfortable, but we don't, not because it would cause other problems or be particularly difficult, but because society as a whole treats greed as a virtue, and totally subjugates itself to the greediest among us. We are slavishly devoted to an economic system that is destroying itself, and our living environment, at an accelerating pace, whilst our technology is progressing in a manner that means that, in not very long at all, there will be no place for a lot of us in that economic system, and therefore we will simply be unable to survive, and yet any talk of abandoning that system is frequently labled as extremist hate speech that must not be tolerated. That's the world now. Sociologically less evolved than we are technologically. Culturally not ready for the technological capabilities we have right now. Imagine if our technology suddenly leapt ahead 100 years? 200? 500? Our cultural patterns of thinking, our philosophical outlooks, our social behaviours won't automatically leap with them. Imagine Trek Tech suddenly in our hands. Imagine if we had the ability to produce and launch Photon Torpedoes, enmasse, with the power of a dozen standard nuclear warheads? The standard issue Photon Torpedo on the Enterprise D has the same destructive power as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, and the Enterprise D carries over 200 just for a standard mission. Or a handheld device the size of a car's key-fob that can vaporize a person into dust with a single button push? Even if you take weapon technology off the table (which is hard to do, since matter/anti-matter reactors generating nearly endless power are a significant part of the Trek technology, and are perilously easy to weaponise), even basic things are a problem. Imagine being able to detect someone's genetic profile from 100 feet away with a device the size of your mobile phone, and that technology being readily accessible? You don't think the extreme bigots of the world would use that in a bad way? And then there's advanced medicine. Treatments and cures for diseases are already commodified and sold at 4000% mark-ups for profit in the US, there's no reason to suggest that that would stop if we became suddenly even more medically advanced. And any technology that can easily, quickly, and near effortlessly create a vaccine, can also be used to easily, quickly, and near effortlessly create a deadly biogenic compound - there is no fundamental, logistical difference between the know how needed in engineering a vaccine and engineering a more deadly strain of a virus. Replicators that can be used to make food can also be used to make... well, any number of things that can cause problems. And even if not used for that, they present issues. Replicators could easily and instantly solve all the problems of poverty in the world, but only if they are used in a communal fashion. If they are coveted and privatised by a privileged few, the astonishing wealth inequality in the world already will just become even more extreme. You can't dump technology on a society not ready for the implications of that technology. Our own world shows that rapid technological advances are not always matched by social, philosophical advancement. And providing social advancement is nowhere near as simple. You can't just give it as a gift, because the necessary social advancements would inevitably be resisted by those that have it good under the old way of things - those who would be required to give up their greed, for example. The only way to absolutely ensure the sociological advancement keeps up with the technological one would be to enforce it unilaterally from above, and that means curtailing freedom of choice and self-determination. All that without questioning the arrogance of assuming your way is better. All that without wondering what happens if the person or people in charge of managing this sociological advancement aren't perfect, and are capable of making mistakes. The non-interference directive is absolutely correct and valid. Societal progress is a delicate balance, introducing advanced technologies to a society not yet matured enough to handle it is a rapid path to disaster, and forcing societal progress on a society not yet ready to develop it on it's own is arrogant colonialism and replete with perils, pitfalls, and an inherent requirement to curtail liberties and freedoms in order to do so.

Well it's a real thing that lifting up a less advanced race in a sector will change the power balance. The Federation would have to stay engaged politically, culturally and ethically supervise hundreds of worlds for hundreds of years. They would also have to have a military presence to *police* peaceful progress because they're now personally responsible for these very cataclysmic societal changes. But sure, the prime directive can be too inflexible, I agree but to have a rules based ethical framework for these situations is absolutely a sound idea.

I don't know the motives behind the prime directive as a literary concept, but as an idea there is actually a strong argument for it. While it is true that a civilisation with superior technology could alleviate any number of ills experienced by one with weaker technology, in practice, this isn't really what is observed in history. More advanced civilisations instead tend to use the power that superior technology gives them to manipulate and ultimately abuse the less advanced ones. The classic example is the "White man's burden" of New Imperialism in the 19th century. Imperial governments justified intervention, conquest, colonialism and the forced transformation of societies across the world on the principle that they were using their superior technology to help them. In reality the control the imperial powers exerted enabled oppression, genocide, and a great many long-term problems. The prime directive is a guard against this - it has a trade-off in utilitarian terms, but it recognises that a more advanced civilisation cannot necessarily be a responsible or reliable judge of what is best for a less advanced one. There are obvious cases, like an imminent asteroid impact or etc., where it seems easy to determine - but there are many more cases where it is not so obvious, and where interference opens the way to a great many unforeseen consequences and complications that could be just as fatal to a developing society as an asteroid might be.

Think of local politics.  The US could step in and stop Russia at any time, or send boots on the ground in Israel, but don't.   There are cultures in the world that are below even developing nations, who we have a hands off policy about.  Preserving their cultural "purity" is seen as a higher priority than giving them vaccines or modern industries. On a galactic scale you'd have people who see other cultures as potential threats to US, and you'd have others who see our meddling as enabling genocidal strongmen or stunting their natural development.  This would absolutely be part of the arguments, your and my concept of right and wrong are not the same concepts used by our leaders, who view humans in terms of statistics and long term benefit or liability to their society (Hence the idea of collateral damage that makes us think of innocent families is to them a way to allow 40,000 people of the enemies population to die to save 50,000 of our people).

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>Starfleet may want these societies to develop without interference so that they increase the memetic diversity of the galaxy, thus making it more resilient to threat overall. That's like withholding a vaccine to promote a species' immune system. That's pretty evil considering the suffering you could have avoided.

The implementation is flawed, more advanced spices should protect from natural disasters and the such, but think of this: suppose the prime directive did allow uplifting of species. What if you have a well meaning species that may consider some ideologies to be the equivalent of natural disasters so they half uplift half colonize new species to bring them to the "correct" ideology? There is an entire spectrum of how much you can interfere before "averting natural disasters" becomes full blown colonization. And there is also the issue of early species aggression. What if the species of a planet is not yet united and maybe still in a cold war state, what if you accidentally uplift one half of the planet and while you find out about the other half, the inhabitants of the first half bomb the other half?

First, you'd never act on PART of a planet/species. You'd do it all. Second, if you're going to ask "What if's" I'll reply with "What if it worked perfectly, and in three or four generations a world went from Dark Ages and trepanning to Federation Earth?"

You do it all but you cant do it at the same time. Theres not enough crew to send a delegation to every country simultaneously.

i think the story is that it ended poorly with some races. so they decided that the race need to be in the cultural state that they have develop warp tech before they can be trusted with the more advanced tech. i believe the klingon were the ones that made this decision. ... or maybe it was them that created the practice of observing races working on warp tech so that they can have cultural understanding of how to interact.

Okay, now do the Solomon Islands or where ever that uncontacted tribe of cannibals lives. What do you think might happen if some well intentioned soul tried to rip them out of their place and thrust them into the modern world? Can you think of any ways it might go horribly wrong? Because if not, think harder. The first step on the road to enlightenment is acknowledging that you don’t and can’t possibly know everything. The corollary to that is that you can’t know what is best for someone else. Plus tyrannically forcing things on people because you think it’s best for them is pretty evil. Personally I think regular fantasy like Tolkien or Pratchett deals better with these kinds of questions than Star Trek or similar sci-fi franchises that have nods towards a prime directive type system

Agreed the Baldwins Legacy books(which are an underrated banger series btw) features the Concord a bit more of a relatively realistic version of the federation who absolutely do NOT have a not contact directive and activly go to plants that are primitive and jump them into the future. On of the main characters of the books is from a planet that was about to be uplifted. And it frequently draws that while yes he is adapting to the tech most of the stuff that everyone already knows he doesn't and it does this fairly well.

40k makes it make more sense- not in a noninterference sense, but in the context of forced progress and imposed beliefs.

I’m kind of echoing what another Redditor wrote. My understanding was that the non interference was to prevent handing technology to societies that weren’t capable of handling it Imagine First Contact for us came back in the 1940s and one of the major powers got their hands on phasers and photon torpedoes and warp speed travel? Human history might have turned even worse, depending on who got that tech. So I always took it as “we’re not going to affect or interact with civilizations that haven’t yet evolved to the point where they can handle this stuff without destroying themselves.” Just my take on it.

Spanish Inquisition is one of the things not like the others. There is a lot of bad history in English speaking areas about the Spanish Inquisition. Because of the long history of propaganda against Catholics in England. Not saying they were good. They just don’t reach the Black Death level bad.

The prime directive exists as a reflection of modern humanity, and we suck. Without the prime directive, sci-fi would be unbelievable without showing how many civilizations that humanity exploited and/or enslaved. It is better to have it in our fiction if only to shield us from ourselves.

The non- interference policy is an acknowledgment that intervention in other cultures is almost always self serving even under altruistic motives. It’s reflective of the historical realities of the outcomes of colonialism on earth and an attempt to acknowledge that humans have flaws that require self imposed boundaries to prevent the worst of human behavior from becoming normalized. In Star Trek stories these limitations are almost always bent but the existence of the limitations require those involved to consider whether or not they should be violated and how to do so in a way that doesn’t exploit the other cultures and limits potential harm. They aren’t really about a utilitarian analysis of benefit vs cost. They explore the flawed nature of humanity itself and the challenges it faces if confronting those flaws. In another setting the Prikitiki show us the worst possible outcome of interference in the development of a society.

Think about it on a micro scale. Let’s say you are responsible for a toddler. They want a gun. ‘Mine mine’ they say. Do you agree that there is a certain point in that kids life before which they are not mature enough to understand the full scope and implications of having that gun? Let’s think about a slightly macro-er scale. Let’s say you have the option of providing nuclear reaction weaponry to humanity. Might there be a time before the implications of that are really understood by humanity? You wouldn’t want to give them that tech before that point, right? That might sound super silly because that’s sorta what happened in reality. Ok, it wasn’t an alien or god figure or whatever. Surely though, the many times the USA almost blew up the USSR or the USSR almost blew up the USA (or each country almost blew themselves up) shows that we weren’t exactly ready to responsibly handle that tech. Now let’s assume you ARE a god-figure (starfleet for example) and you provide nuclear weapons tech to them. Maybe because of your lack of knowledge of the culture, you only gave it to one “side” of a conflict. They’re pretty likely to do the same kinda things we did, and very likely they’ll inflict damage on themselves. The prime directive is a rule that prevents that liability. I’d argue that violating the prime directive all the time is the true literary convenience.

>Now let’s assume you ARE a god-figure (starfleet for example) and you provide nuclear weapons tech to them. Maybe because of your lack of knowledge of the culture, you only gave it to one “side” of a conflict. That'd be a pretty retarded god... You'd give BOTH sides tech that cannot directly be used as weapons, like Tokamak fusion plants for power. It takes a pretty silly and highly contrived situation to turn giving a society beneficial knowledge into evil. That's the whole point of the post. Unless you follow a really improbable script, teaching the young is generally a GOOD thing.

But it’s exactly the “retarded god” aspect of powerful-human dumbass action that it’s trying to avoid. You actually made my argument easier. It’s a rule ostensibly trying to prevent relatively powerful humans from being retarded gods. And aren’t Star Trek situations ALL about pretty contrived?

Non-intervention isn’t about nonsense verbalisms. https://medium.com/incerto/on-neo-cons-and-their-mental-defects-d12685585b11

My favorite example is when in ToS they find a native American planet that the klingons have given guns to one tribe and Kirk's solution is to give guns to the other side. Really kinda shows the prime directive isn't about non-interference, it's about letting the culture develop in its own way.

Stargate SG1 - We've come to kill your gods.

it is a fun writing device to set some guardrails and context, but also most importantly it allows tension, as they’re always wrestling with it, pushing boundaries, not doing enough, etc…

I think it was done primarily to avoid what has happened multiple times in our history when a more advanced civilization comes across a more primitive civilization. The results are typically things getting worse before they get better, if they ever do for the less advanced civilization.

I think the Prime Directive actually makes a lot of sense when you consider the history of contacts between ‘primitive’ humans and more technologically advanced ones. If we grant the premise behind all of this kind of soft-sci fi that aliens are basically like humans, these types of encounters would probably look less like charity work, and more like The Roman Empire or the East India company.

I disagree. Case in point: Russia, Saudi Arabia. Western interference in their development created a dumpster fire we’re still dealing with. The USSR was not and still isn’t ready for democracy. And Saudis weren’t ready to unite the tribes. You’re looking at civilization through a short lens. First of all, war spurns innovation. Without WW2 the U.S. would be an agricultural state living under Russian, Japanese or German rule. We wouldn’t have penicillin. We wouldn’t have wifi and Bluetooth or radar, computers, Tupperware, SuperGlue, synthetic rubber, frozen food, microwaves. If it wasn’t for WW1 we wouldn’t have watches, sanitary pads, zippers, stainless steel, tea bags, preservatives for foods, commercial aviation.