this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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My sort of writer's room motivation head canon is that the Prime Directive was a symbolic politically motivated response to the irresponsible "uplifting of primitive civilizations" by major world powers that resulted in cargo cults and widespread death from disease and nuclear weapons testing throughout the cold war, the manifest destiny to expand ever westward and drive native populations from their lands, the concerted effort to deprive native populations of their food by hunting the buffalo of the Great plains to extinction. It's also unfair to leave Hyper advanced technology in the hands of civilizations incapable of maintaining and repairing that technology.
Think if you brought a modern cell phone back in time even just 50 years, would someone from that time period would have the tools, supporting technology or the skills to make any repairs to that phone? I'm highly doubtful they could and that's ignoring that there are so many other interlinking technologies that that cell phone is reliant on to function.
This leans into a critic, Picard Season 1 and Lower Decks tries to address: TOS and TNG have this Alien of the Week, First Contact attitude: I came, messed around, and left. Sure, given that "I don't care about consequences" attitude, not messing too much is a good idea. But maybe the given is the problem and eye level relationship just works differently.
As far as TNG goes, a lot of the first contact stuff from S1 was a lot of already sufficiently advanced civilizations that are capable of at least local space travel and the Enterprise would openly announce like "Hey this is the Enterprise, we're with the Federation, lets do diplomacy." But whenever they interacted with less technologically advanced species they would usually do so much more covertly, wearing replicated disguises.