I’ve always assumed the Prime Directive was Rodenberry’s attempt to explain why we aren’t being obviously contacted by more advanced aliens attempting to fix all our problems for us, and his awareness how we would likely react to such intervention at the height of the Cold War.
The prime directive came about due to his concerns about western interventionalism. i.e leave other countries alone became dont interfere in the development of non warp capable species’ development.
“You will be remembered for a week or so.”
Still more time than Tuvix got.
It’s an interesting space version of non-interventionism. In the real world, intervention is a very complex issue to navigate. Particularly since most forms of national intervention have monetary drivers that make the choice much more about how it benefits the intervening country rather than the intervened.
I think DS9 is the only series to really address Statfleet’s long term effects of intruding onto other cultures and forcing them to change.
I went to a panel on the problems with the Prime Directive at Chicon 8. There was a lawyer there who actually works with international aid organizations on how they intervene. His biggest problem with the Prime Directive is that it’s too simple. They have stacks of rules about how exactly they go about this. There are places where they’re not allowed to go because somebody fucked this up bad at some point in the past, and those people don’t owe them access just because they promise to be better now.
IIRC, there is a throwaway line somewhere (from Data, I think) that says the Prime Directive is followed up by a hundred little rules defining out the specifics, but it’s never treated that way.
Naomi Wildman says it has 47 sub-orders in “Infinite Regress”.
I’ve also seen interesting arguments on wether the prime directive is even moral at all, after all if space fairing civilisations are encountering you then they’re probably going to imminently scoop up all the good interstellar real estate in your viscinity, not enlightening a civilisation is dooming them to be stuck with whatever resources are left when every other civilisation nearby has taken what it wants. (Lets be realistic there’s no way every single group is going to abide by a treaty that grants primitive civilisations pre-emptive territory bubbles)
I’ve been thinking about the prime directive recently and it just doesn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things. You don’t involve yourself because “well what if this extinction level event was meant to happen?” Could just as easily be phrased as them being there with the capacity to fix the problem was also meant to happen.
Especially if they can magic the problem away without even exposing knowledge of their existence to the pre-warp civilization. Would people who don’t know about starships really notice if a tachyon field was routed through the deflector dish to [science fiction jargon], causing the tectonic activity to stabilize?
It’s one thing to not interfere with internal politics, but another entirely to not save a planet from a random space anomaly while you happen to be passing through the system.
If we’re having a serious conversation about the PD, it’s important to note that it’s a blanket “don’t interfere” rule that applies to all civilizations, warp-capable or otherwise.
Most of the time, it makes sense, but these edge cases are wild.
The prime directive is a great example of how even a good rule taken to the extreme can end up causing more harm than good.
But beyond that, it’s just an easy aid for the writers to add a point of conflict for their stories. The prime directive as a value within the federation seems secondary to me.
it’s important to note that it’s a blanket “don’t interfere” rule that applies to all civilizations, warp-capable or otherwise.
Where did you get that idea??? It only applies to pre warp civilizations. Not getting involved in the internal politics of warp civilizations isn’t Prime Directive- that’s just regular diplomacy.
It’s applied to other civilizations pretty regularly.
The most cut-and-dried one off the top of my head is Sisko citing the PD when declining to help Tosk in “Captive Pursuit”.
The Prime Directive and the rules governing first contact overlap, but they are distinct.
There have been plenty of indications that the Prime Directive applies to warp capable species. I think episodes like “Too Short a Season” and “30 Days” could be cited as evidence, though some would argue we’re never explicitly told that either of the civilizations being interacted with are explicitly warp capable. In “Redemption” Worf resigns his commission after Picard claims the Federation cannot support Gowron in the Klingon Civil War, citing the Federation’s, *“principle of non-interference.” Granted, he does not explicitly say it’s the prime directive. However, there is “The Outcast” the J’naii that Riker falls in love with, Soren, claims to be familiar with all the systems aboard a Starfleet shuttle, including the warp nacelles, and Picard later tells Riker he can’t interfere with the J’naii subjecting Soren to conversion therapy because of the Prime Directive.
And, if you want the most explicit example, in the PRO episode, “First Con-Tact”, a screen displays text – copy and pasted from the book “Star Trek: Federation - The First 150 Years” – outlining the general rules for how the Prime Directive applies to warp capable cultures.
“Section 2:
If said species has achieved the commensurate level of technological and/or societal development as described in Appendix 1, or has been exposed to the concepts listed in section 1, no Starfleet crew person will engage with said society or species without first gathering extensive information on the specific traditions, laws, and culture of that species civilization. Then Starfleet crew will obey the following.
a) If engaged with diplomatic relations with said culture, will stay within the confines of said culture’s restrictions.
b) No interference with the social development of said planet.”I wonder if “_social_ development” is a word that a lot of Federation case law (and the 47 sub-orders) hinge on.
Interfering with an election is clearly “social”, but preventing a natural space disaster (without any contact) shouldn’t be.
Or perhaps the latter is in a “if we start here, we’ll never stop” category. So it’s against the rules, but if you’re nearby, you can. But it’s against the rules so Starfleet doesn’t feel the obligation to go out looking for these situations.
Yeah, I’m sure the full PD is riddled with case studies and examples of what sorts of decisions Starfleet captains can unilaterally make without specific approval from the Federation Council.
And of course, the Council seems to be able to order Starfleet to override the PD if they want to.
Yeah it’s pretty stupid. If it’s a random act of nature that’s about to wipe out an entire species, why is warp capability the cut off for helping? Perhaps it was meant to happen even if they have warp technology.
I could see leaving them to destroy themselves if they invented nuclear bombs and hated each other so much they would kill themselves to harm the others, but a supervolcano or meteor or something? Lend a hand dude.
Also I found it very human-centric.
That’s an entire planet about to get destroyed. You going to condemn the other hundreds of thousands of species to death because the one intelligent species isn’t smart enough?
I sometimes think about this. Imagine you were an “immortal” being or mind in a powerful starship that could interfere with Earth. Like you could prevent the plague killing millions, but if you do we humans might not learn sanitation - or they need to learn later. Or do you prevent climate change because you know it will kill us all - but then humanity won’t learn and “evolve”. So when humanity does finally become interstellar and spreads over the galaxy, terraforming every planet and harvesting every resources, bulldozing everything and endlessly and exponentially grow - is it your fault?
As soon as you interfere you take on responsibility and guilt for every genocide or ecocide this civilization is going to commit in the future.
Outside completely cosmological threats it becomes quite iffy. Even something like a planet killer meteor could be argued that if the species knew it could happen but didn’t put effort into preventing it, then that means they don’t value survival of intelligent civilizations enough. They don’t value theirs, why would they value other civilizations they encounter?
In reality Star Trek colonizing all these planets would eliminate future intelligent civilizations too. Imagine some star trek people would have stepped on Earth a hundred million years ago and found no signs of intelligent live, terraformed it. Or even just introducing countless microorganisms on your shoe. You wouldn’t be able to read this silly comment :D It would be a kind of temporally displaced genocide. Of course NASA is already thinking about this and no colonization would make for rather boring drama, but a modern “hard sci-fi” would have to have artificial space habitats (orbitals / halos) as the main living spaces and leave any potentially live giving planets alone.
Then another argument would be about diversity. For an immortal being, planets could be seen as bio computers creating incredibly complexity and irreplaceable wealth of information. A new way to exist or how not to exist. As soon as you interfere you taint that and have removed some of distinctiveness of their culture with your own culture.
The main problem I have with the prime directive is that it has been broken over 30 times so far but also upheld to the point that entire species are allowed to be snuffed out. Sometimes they intervene in natural disasters without the species on that planet knowing and sometimes picard lets an entire planet get snuffed out while he makes a big sad speech about how it is more important to uphold the prime directive. It is applied inconsistently and callously. I would have had more respect for it if they picked a lane. Either never intervene or stop hiding behind it.
Meanwhile:
GCU The Gravitas Meme is so Last Year: I’m gonna sort out that extension event, then we should probably send a couple of Special Circumstances operatives to guide them in the right direction. In the past picosecond I’ve absorbed and analysed their global information net so know exactly what actions we need to take to give them the correct nudge.
The “correct nudge” has been determined to be “give a specific citizen a cheese danish.”
“More of a set of guidelines” Kirk and Picard in unison with a chorus of “Exactly” from every other Federation Officer or Official except any featured in anything involving a speech about the prime directive by that episode’s primary cast.
Any good captain knows that’s a rule worth breaking. If your options are: a) save a whole planet of people or b) keep your fancy status job in a post-scarcity economy, then you know it’s morally worth it to get court marshalled.
And those examples would involve a speech about the Prime would they not?
Besides, federation prison is just a sunny beach on New Zealand anyway. The worst part is getting stuck in the delta quadrant but that happened like one time.
I didn’t remember what their prison is, but that makes the choice so much easier. Was that in Voyager?
Yeah, it’s been awhile, but iirc in the first episode Janeway springs Paris from a prison in new zealand because she needs a pilot.
Laughs in Bobiverse
