I like that McFarlane just said “fuck that” in The Orville. He kept the gist — leave developing civilizations alone — but doesn’t even consider allowing them to go extinct for stupid reasons.
Really early on, too. It was one of the things that made me go “oh wait this isn’t just fart jokes in space”.
Though to be fair, the reality is that no matter how advanced we get there’s still gonna be fart jokes in space. That scene in the cafeteria where everyone’s getting Bortus to eat random things seems like a far more realistic vision of a space-faring post-scarcity future.
Yeah ‘if the stars should appear’ was the point all of us sat up and went “HELLO”
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They save them in tos as well.
Yeah, but in TOS we also see what happens if you forget a book about the chicago mob of the 1920s on a developing planet.
“You will be remembered for a week or so.”
And logged in ships virus infected logs.
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.
The Prime Directive is one of those weird artifacts of the context of the original series. When naked imperialism was starting to be challeneged in pop culture but was still very much considered the status quo in the West, the idea not to interfere in other cultures was a bold stance. However, the idea of a “natural cultural progression” is unfortunately a product of its time and wasn’t even something Kirk actually believed when it came down to it. Picard was more by the book but even he couldn’t watch innocent people die when his crew pushed back. It’s now pretty much universally regarded in canon as a stupid rule.
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.
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?
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.”
So the question the Prime Directive poses is: what aspects of the Great Filter do we leave in place?
Do we save a developing civilization from an asteroid they have zero way of stopping?
Do we defuse a political situation that will end in nuclear war and destruction of their civilization?
how about: protect innocent people and dont veer into fascist “nature decided they weren’t good enough to continue living” nonsense
Great filters are strictly hypothetical anyway.
Well, the second one is a direct result of their own and controllable actions. The first is entirely out of their control and just got dealt a bad hand lol
“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.
Laughs in Bobiverse
