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The Prime Directive is explicitly defined in the March 1968 episode "Bread and Circuses":
No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.
In the November 1998 Star Trek: Voyager episode "Infinite Regress," set nearly a century later, it is revealed that the Directive has 47 sub-orders.
However, it has been stated that once a violation of the Prime Directive has occurred, Starfleet personnel are allowed to directly intervene on the planet to attempt to minimize as much harm as possible, with an openness proportional to how significant the exposure has been. For example, in "Bread and Circuses" itself, James Kirk and crew investigated the fate of a ship's personnel on a planet while attempting to keep their origins secret, even while the planet's rulers were aware. By contrast, in "Patterns of Force," where the crew discovered that a Federation cultural observer had contaminated the culture he was supposed to have been observing by having blatantly reformed a planet's government to emulate Nazi Germany, they helped the local resistance overthrow the government.
In the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive has special implications for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight ("pre-warp"), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. Although this was the only application Kirk actually stated in "The Return of the Archons," by the 23rd century, it had been indicated to include purposeful efforts to improve or change in any way the natural course of such a society, even if that change is well-intentioned and kept completely secret. "Pre-warp" is defined as any culture which has not yet attained warp drive technology and is thus, implicitly, unaware of the existence of alien races. Starfleet allows scientific missions to investigate and secretly move amongst pre-warp civilizations as long as no advanced technology is left behind, and there is no interference with events or no revelation of their identity. This can usually be accomplished with hidden observation posts, but Federation personnel may disguise themselves as local sentient life and interact with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive
"The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
I would say that Picard is correct when saying that "History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
At least if we're thinking about the effects on the less developed civilization. Such contacts have generally been quite beneficial to the more developed civilizations. They've generally gained land, resources, trade routes, and before recently, slaves. The less developed societies, however, have generally gotten screwed into the ground eventually.
Some people dispute that by claiming things like "If Africans were never made slaves, their descendants would still be in Africa, and without access to all our modern technology." I would counter that doesn't matter. Those people would have had no more reason to care about the fate of their ancestors centuries in the future than they'd have to care about the fate of anyone else in the future. Compared to all our ancestors who lived centuries ago, almost all of us would probably all be just about equally disturbingly, insane, alien freaks. They'd all see us as wizards or possibly evil spirits. Maybe some of them would perceive us as gods or messengers of the gods/God if we gave them food or valuable gadgets, or were sufficiently pleasant to be around in some way. They gain nothing from their descendants living better lives. Their descendants don't gain anything from that either because if history were changed and slavery never happened, the modern African Americans wouldn't somehow magically be transported to Africa. They'd just never exist. The Africans they'd be replaced by would just be completely different people.
Now, when two societies have similar levels of technology and they meet, oftentimes there's trade and cultural exchanges and plenty of positives for both sides, because they can defend themselves enough to keep from being taken advantage of.
Presumably, that's why the Prime Directive exists: simpler civilizations are too vulnerable to influences by outsider, more advanced societies, and oftentimes these more advanced societies don't understand these newfound societies well enough to assist them in ideal ways.
So, I would say that, at least from the perspective of the less-advanced societies the Prime Directive would have been a very good thing if it had been practiced throughout most of history.
Star Trek takes place centuries in the future from modern times though, and times can change.
Pros of the Prime Directive:
1. Discovered societies advance slowly, discovering things on their own, and the culture is evolved by the people who know it most well: them, rather than by strangers who know nothing about them.
2. The universe is kept more predictable. In the Star Trek Universe, where developing civilizations are common, frequent interference with developing societies could mean friends, and enemies, constantly popping up and making long term plans by the Federation obsolete.
3. The more advanced societies exist, the fewer resources exist for each society. In the Star Trek universe where intelligent life is extremely common, unless the life is about to spread through the stars anyway, by interfering with a developing society n a helpful way, you've created a competitor. A stance of non-interference could be seen as a morally decent middleground between actively hindering the developing of primitive societies (which would preserve more of your own resources) and assisting them.
4. Even if the majority of citizens of the advanced society have benevolent intentions towards the newfound technologically inferior society, some citizens of the advanced society, no matter how small their number, will inevitably wish to enter into a more predatory relationship with the society. Given how much of a militaristic advantage technology can provide, they might only need one ship to wipe out the entire planet of the newfound technologically inferior people and take their resources by force, and if that happens it won't matter that the other 99% of the technologically advanced society had benevolent intentions. If you just punish everyone who interferes, that might help keep out the undesirables.
Cons of the Prime Directive
1. Every single consequence that happens due to your advanced society not interfering was caused by your people. If there's a pandemic and your people didn't provide a cure and could have without extensive difficulty, your people caused that pandemic...more or less. Also, if your society doesn't give the people you find the technology to adequately defend themselves, and some predatory variants of your technologically advanced society choose to attack them and take their resources...that's your people's fault, more or less.
2. If your advanced society discovered the primitive society, others likely will soon too. Unless the society exists inside a black hole, or is a rogue planet floating in deep space between solar systems, or is very difficult to find, at least in the Star Trek universe where life is so common, someone else will probably find the species soon. In the real universe, you might be genuinely able to avoid interfering, assuming alien space-faring life is uncommon. In the Star Trek Universe, all non-interference means is you've let some other species decide what to do about the primitive society...unless they're within your people's borders and you can relliably protect them from outside influences.
3. If they become an advanced society on their own, once that happens, they're probably going to be extremely annoyed at anyone who could have assisted them in dealing with their food shortages, and diseases, and genetic problems, and all the inevitable problems involved with being a primitive society, who didn't.
4. It will be quite possible that the technologically advanced society will know more about what's better for the primitive society than the primitive society does, through having a better understanding of the universe. The real people of Earth have gotten better at dealing with primitive societies through learning more about the world around us than our ancestors, so it stands to reason that future societies would be even better at it than us. For example, take how the world treats the last stone age tribe: the isolated Sentinelese.
Off the coast of India is an island the size of Manhattan on which the Sentinelese live. India has banned anyone from coming within four kilometers of the island. That's because the Sentinelese don't like outsiders. In 2006 two fishermen were attacked and killed by the tribe after venturing too close to the island. When an Indian helicopter tried to recover the bodies, the Sentinelese threw spears at it.
The Sentinelese still practice hunting and gathering and may have never developed agriculture.
In 1880 an British expedition entered the Island. The standard practice for dealing with unfriendly tribes at the time was to take a prisoner, treat them well, and return them to their people with gifts, so that's what the British expedition did.
Most Sentinelese ran away into the jungle at their approach, but they did find an elderly couple and four children who they took prisoner. The elderly couple became sick and died, possibly from European illnesses they had no resistance to. The British expedition returned the four children to their people with gifts.
So...what might have happened was that the children returned to their parents talking about how they were kidnapped by demons who killed their grandparents with their strange demon powers. They probably assumed those gifts were poisoned, and have been passing down stories of horrible outsiders they need to execute on sight for the last 140 years.
But now we know more about diseases and resistance. Our culture has modified too. As a result, the whole world, for the most part, has been granting the Sentinelese the avoidance they seem to want.
So, I think the Prime Directive is, mostly, a lazy and horrible idea invented by bureaucrats. They need to get rid of it as soon as possible. Even Picard knows this deep down. He claims to respect the idea of it...but he's constantly breaking it, because he's a sensible person, and that's what it makes sense to do. The only advantage of it is for societies who are far more interested in preserving themselves than assisting the surrounding universe, but who don't have the guts to practice some kind of painless form of genocide on all primitive societies...which I don't think would really be that cruel, at least not compared to a strong policy of non-interference. You could just sprinkle a planet's atmosphere with nano-machines. They could multiply and spread. They could enter the brains of the populace of the world unnoticed. They could be triggered to, all at once, unleash some kind of electronic pulse to simultaneously destroy everyone's brain cells on the planet, painlessly and suddenly. To me, that might even be a more humane method of preserving resources in the galaxy than letting the society experience plagues and food shortages and other problems.
But there is some truth to the Prime Directive. Generally, it's probably for the best to not interfere in developing societies. The Prime Directive just needs to be modified to: Don't interfere unless you truly understand the people you're interfering with. Don't interfere unless you've lived among them for a time...maybe as much as one of their lifetimes. Perceive interference the same way you would perceive brain surgery: as something it's morally wrong not to do, but also as morally wrong to not attempt without extreme care. What the Federation needs is for it to be prohibited for he average citizen to interfere with primitive societies, as well as the first discoverers of them, unless there is some kind of extreme, short term threat to the whole primitive society, such as their star being about to explode, or a pandemic. After the initial discovery though, they need to send down teams to secretly spend decades learning everything they can about the discovered societies, and then learn how to influence them.
This is actually a very important philosophical topic and one for which we will need to establish rules and principles within the coming century. Already you have Yuri Milners plans to send probes to Proxima Centauri this century. This is more than just a fun exercise, its something we need to start talking and thinking about on a high level with the aim of establishing official UN policies.
My personal opinion is that aside from the obvious potential destructive influence of alien introduction in a primitive society, there is the idea that a planetary culture ought to develop and evolve without interference (at least until they themselves begin to seek out interplanetary interaction).
My thought is all living beings 1st act is survival along with comfort and happiness.
The people in the 1400's would probably have been fine with beings from the future showing them things like 'how to heat your home, a microwave, etc.
Todays people would most likely be OK with an advanced species showing how to make all the energy necessary right at home for free, or what food can make you live 2-3 times longer with no illness's.
The prime directive is like your father never teaching you anything and having to figure out everything on your own from square one.
The bible that is not a book of religion (it is not complete 11 books are missing) says that man was created by alien species, there are many creations, in the Indian texts, not obscured by the "so called holy inquisition" they speak about 400,000 humanoid species in this galaxy and many planets with water and plants.
Evolution is necessarily guided
In terms of what I have observed, technology can not be bestowed, it has to be earned. And most often earned at the expense of the blood of your own people. At that point you are fully aware of the high's and lows of that technology and have eared the right to use it.
Just look at Nuclear Energy as an example, we had initial use, then it had to be used badly for bombs, and finally had to be used improperly in it's handling to get to the point where it can be used for power generation with all of the safety precautions that have to be taken.
Freedom is another that can not be bestowed, it has to be earned. you can not fight a fight for someone, they have to be willing and able to step and fight for themselves.
Which both of these lead back into the Prime Directive, people have to advance at their own pace, if they are ever to get to a space fearing civilization, they will have to get their own their own.
In terms of what I have observed, technology can not be bestowed, it has to be earned. And most often earned at the expense of the blood of your own people. At that point you are fully aware of the high's and lows of that technology and have eared the right to use it.
Just look at Nuclear Energy as an example, we had initial use, then it had to be used badly for bombs, and finally had to be used improperly in it's handling to get to the point where it can be used for power generation with all of the safety precautions that have to be taken.
Freedom is another that can not be bestowed, it has to be earned. you can not fight a fight for someone, they have to be willing and able to step and fight for themselves.
Which both of these lead back into the Prime Directive, people have to advance at their own pace, if they are ever to get to a space fearing civilization, they will have to get their own their own.
I would say that, a species is more likely to "earn" technologically if they're given it by cautious, advanced society than if they develop it themselves. If they develop it themselves, your nuclear energy example could come into play. I'll add onto that our current issues with global warming stemming from C02 production from burning fossil fuels.
An advanced society, on the other hand, could only give us those technologies we do seem ready for. The thing about the natural progression of technology is that it can easily be guided by things like capitalism or sheer curiosity. An organized alien intelligence could simply say "Okay, we're going to give you clean fuel sources that make oil and nuclear power obsolete. That way, nobody'll have as much of a reason to research nuclear technology, which means it'll take longer for your species to develop atomic bombs."
It's easy for us to totally ignore our technology's effect on the world because we don't see it. We don't see global warming on an individual basis. We don't see the effect of chemicals on the ocean, on an individual basis. That stuff's too big for us anyway. If the aliens just told us about those sorts of risks and said "Here's the technology that lets you avoid all those risks, that makes oil and nuclear energy obsolete, and here's why," I don't think it would be too much different from our scientists telling us the same things.
But that all depends on a careful society giving the technology, that studies the culture extensively.
lol, that show told us that no rule is to be taken too literally. Even they broke it. But, I think the point was that there are some rules that have to override the day to day choices that we may make when in a group of people.
like a bathroom pass in high school. It seems silly when taken out of contexted. In context, its important for everybody to follow that rule. At the same time, a student may get up and run out of the classroom without asking for the pass, and the teacher holds the door for them.
lol, that show told us that no rule is to be taken too literally. Even they broke it. But, I think the point was that there are some rules that have to override the day to day choices that we may make when in a group of people.
like a bathroom pass in high school. It seems silly when taken out of contexted. In context, its important for everybody to follow that rule. At the same time, a student may get up and run out of the classroom without asking for the pass, and the teacher holds the door for them.
Goes to show how stupid things get when thinking science fiction knows best.
Nuclear force was put to good use in ww2. It saved more lives than it took.
No algorythm or fixed set of rules can outperform intelligence.
Turn the tv off.
The Prime Directive is explicitly defined in the March 1968 episode "Bread and Circuses":
No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.
In the November 1998 Star Trek: Voyager episode "Infinite Regress," set nearly a century later, it is revealed that the Directive has 47 sub-orders.
However, it has been stated that once a violation of the Prime Directive has occurred, Starfleet personnel are allowed to directly intervene on the planet to attempt to minimize as much harm as possible, with an openness proportional to how significant the exposure has been. For example, in "Bread and Circuses" itself, James Kirk and crew investigated the fate of a ship's personnel on a planet while attempting to keep their origins secret, even while the planet's rulers were aware. By contrast, in "Patterns of Force," where the crew discovered that a Federation cultural observer had contaminated the culture he was supposed to have been observing by having blatantly reformed a planet's government to emulate Nazi Germany, they helped the local resistance overthrow the government.
In the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive has special implications for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight ("pre-warp"), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. Although this was the only application Kirk actually stated in "The Return of the Archons," by the 23rd century, it had been indicated to include purposeful efforts to improve or change in any way the natural course of such a society, even if that change is well-intentioned and kept completely secret. "Pre-warp" is defined as any culture which has not yet attained warp drive technology and is thus, implicitly, unaware of the existence of alien races. Starfleet allows scientific missions to investigate and secretly move amongst pre-warp civilizations as long as no advanced technology is left behind, and there is no interference with events or no revelation of their identity. This can usually be accomplished with hidden observation posts, but Federation personnel may disguise themselves as local sentient life and interact with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive
"The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
I would say that Picard is correct when saying that "History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
At least if we're thinking about the effects on the less developed civilization. Such contacts have generally been quite beneficial to the more developed civilizations. They've generally gained land, resources, trade routes, and before recently, slaves. The less developed societies, however, have generally gotten screwed into the ground eventually.
Some people dispute that by claiming things like "If Africans were never made slaves, their descendants would still be in Africa, and without access to all our modern technology." I would counter that doesn't matter. Those people would have had no more reason to care about the fate of their ancestors centuries in the future than they'd have to care about the fate of anyone else in the future. Compared to all our ancestors who lived centuries ago, almost all of us would probably all be just about equally disturbingly, insane, alien freaks. They'd all see us as wizards or possibly evil spirits. Maybe some of them would perceive us as gods or messengers of the gods/God if we gave them food or valuable gadgets, or were sufficiently pleasant to be around in some way. They gain nothing from their descendants living better lives. Their descendants don't gain anything from that either because if history were changed and slavery never happened, the modern African Americans wouldn't somehow magically be transported to Africa. They'd just never exist. The Africans they'd be replaced by would just be completely different people.
Now, when two societies have similar levels of technology and they meet, oftentimes there's trade and cultural exchanges and plenty of positives for both sides, because they can defend themselves enough to keep from being taken advantage of.
Presumably, that's why the Prime Directive exists: simpler civilizations are too vulnerable to influences by outsider, more advanced societies, and oftentimes these more advanced societies don't understand these newfound societies well enough to assist them in ideal ways.
So, I would say that, at least from the perspective of the less-advanced societies the Prime Directive would have been a very good thing if it had been practiced throughout most of history.
Star Trek takes place centuries in the future from modern times though, and times can change.
Pros of the Prime Directive:
1. Discovered societies advance slowly, discovering things on their own, and the culture is evolved by the people who know it most well: them, rather than by strangers who know nothing about them.
2. The universe is kept more predictable. In the Star Trek Universe, where developing civilizations are common, frequent interference with developing societies could mean friends, and enemies, constantly popping up and making long term plans by the Federation obsolete.
3. The more advanced societies exist, the fewer resources exist for each society. In the Star Trek universe where intelligent life is extremely common, unless the life is about to spread through the stars anyway, by interfering with a developing society n a helpful way, you've created a competitor. A stance of non-interference could be seen as a morally decent middleground between actively hindering the developing of primitive societies (which would preserve more of your own resources) and assisting them.
4. Even if the majority of citizens of the advanced society have benevolent intentions towards the newfound technologically inferior society, some citizens of the advanced society, no matter how small their number, will inevitably wish to enter into a more predatory relationship with the society. Given how much of a militaristic advantage technology can provide, they might only need one ship to wipe out the entire planet of the newfound technologically inferior people and take their resources by force, and if that happens it won't matter that the other 99% of the technologically advanced society had benevolent intentions. If you just punish everyone who interferes, that might help keep out the undesirables.
Cons of the Prime Directive
1. Every single consequence that happens due to your advanced society not interfering was caused by your people. If there's a pandemic and your people didn't provide a cure and could have without extensive difficulty, your people caused that pandemic...more or less. Also, if your society doesn't give the people you find the technology to adequately defend themselves, and some predatory variants of your technologically advanced society choose to attack them and take their resources...that's your people's fault, more or less.
2. If your advanced society discovered the primitive society, others likely will soon too. Unless the society exists inside a black hole, or is a rogue planet floating in deep space between solar systems, or is very difficult to find, at least in the Star Trek universe where life is so common, someone else will probably find the species soon. In the real universe, you might be genuinely able to avoid interfering, assuming alien space-faring life is uncommon. In the Star Trek Universe, all non-interference means is you've let some other species decide what to do about the primitive society...unless they're within your people's borders and you can relliably protect them from outside influences.
3. If they become an advanced society on their own, once that happens, they're probably going to be extremely annoyed at anyone who could have assisted them in dealing with their food shortages, and diseases, and genetic problems, and all the inevitable problems involved with being a primitive society, who didn't.
4. It will be quite possible that the technologically advanced society will know more about what's better for the primitive society than the primitive society does, through having a better understanding of the universe. The real people of Earth have gotten better at dealing with primitive societies through learning more about the world around us than our ancestors, so it stands to reason that future societies would be even better at it than us. For example, take how the world treats the last stone age tribe: the isolated Sentinelese.
Off the coast of India is an island the size of Manhattan on which the Sentinelese live. India has banned anyone from coming within four kilometers of the island. That's because the Sentinelese don't like outsiders. In 2006 two fishermen were attacked and killed by the tribe after venturing too close to the island. When an Indian helicopter tried to recover the bodies, the Sentinelese threw spears at it.
The Sentinelese still practice hunting and gathering and may have never developed agriculture.
In 1880 an British expedition entered the Island. The standard practice for dealing with unfriendly tribes at the time was to take a prisoner, treat them well, and return them to their people with gifts, so that's what the British expedition did.
Most Sentinelese ran away into the jungle at their approach, but they did find an elderly couple and four children who they took prisoner. The elderly couple became sick and died, possibly from European illnesses they had no resistance to. The British expedition returned the four children to their people with gifts.
So...what might have happened was that the children returned to their parents talking about how they were kidnapped by demons who killed their grandparents with their strange demon powers. They probably assumed those gifts were poisoned, and have been passing down stories of horrible outsiders they need to execute on sight for the last 140 years.
But now we know more about diseases and resistance. Our culture has modified too. As a result, the whole world, for the most part, has been granting the Sentinelese the avoidance they seem to want.
So, I think the Prime Directive is, mostly, a lazy and horrible idea invented by bureaucrats. They need to get rid of it as soon as possible. Even Picard knows this deep down. He claims to respect the idea of it...but he's constantly breaking it, because he's a sensible person, and that's what it makes sense to do. The only advantage of it is for societies who are far more interested in preserving themselves than assisting the surrounding universe, but who don't have the guts to practice some kind of painless form of genocide on all primitive societies...which I don't think would really be that cruel, at least not compared to a strong policy of non-interference. You could just sprinkle a planet's atmosphere with nano-machines. They could multiply and spread. They could enter the brains of the populace of the world unnoticed. They could be triggered to, all at once, unleash some kind of electronic pulse to simultaneously destroy everyone's brain cells on the planet, painlessly and suddenly. To me, that might even be a more humane method of preserving resources in the galaxy than letting the society experience plagues and food shortages and other problems.
But there is some truth to the Prime Directive. Generally, it's probably for the best to not interfere in developing societies. The Prime Directive just needs to be modified to: Don't interfere unless you truly understand the people you're interfering with. Don't interfere unless you've lived among them for a time...maybe as much as one of their lifetimes. Perceive interference the same way you would perceive brain surgery: as something it's morally wrong not to do, but also as morally wrong to not attempt without extreme care. What the Federation needs is for it to be prohibited for he average citizen to interfere with primitive societies, as well as the first discoverers of them, unless there is some kind of extreme, short term threat to the whole primitive society, such as their star being about to explode, or a pandemic. After the initial discovery though, they need to send down teams to secretly spend decades learning everything they can about the discovered societies, and then learn how to influence them.
"DOCTOR: It was what happened on Minyos that led to our policy of non-intervention.
LEELA: Huh?
DOCTOR: Yeah. Well, the Minyans thought of us as gods, you see, which was all very flattering and we were new at space-time explorations, so we thought we could help. We gave them medical and scientific aid, better communications, better weapons.
LEELA: What happened?
DOCTOR: Kicked up out at gunpoint. Then they went to war with each other, learnt how to split the atom, discovered the toothbrush and finally split the planet."
(Classic Doctor Who, "Underworld")
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