Yeah, sorry for being pedantic about it, it really isn’t a big deal.
You WOULD think the Prime Directive would include better definitions for both upper and lower bounds, right? And yet it remains one of the most inconsistent, arbitrarily applied fake regulations throughout the entire show. They can’t decide if it applies to direct contact, interference, interference but only if it’s widely known or whatever the hell.
Most of the fanbase seems to interpret it as “no direct contact unless they have warp”, but that is definitely not what is consistently implied at all.
And don’t get me started on the lower bound problem. Somehow it’s not cool to rescue a child from certain death, but it’s cool to quietly divert a comet, but also it’s cool to take a freshly born AI or nanomachine cluster you just created yourself and tell them everything about Starfleet.
My read on the intent is certainly that while Starfleet is all high and mighty they’re a bad week away from enacting dehumanizing regulations, and that this is something they’ve done multiple times in their history (as far as humans are concerned, anyway).
Which is a super enlightened argument to make in TNG. It gets a bit murkier now that the canon is that they did indeed end up creating a race of slaves out of Data’s template. But hey, I can pretend that Picard didn’t happen and so can you.
Yeah, sorry for being pedantic about it, it really isn’t a big deal.
You WOULD think the Prime Directive would include better definitions for both upper and lower bounds, right? And yet it remains one of the most inconsistent, arbitrarily applied fake regulations throughout the entire show. They can’t decide if it applies to direct contact, interference, interference but only if it’s widely known or whatever the hell.
Most of the fanbase seems to interpret it as “no direct contact unless they have warp”, but that is definitely not what is consistently implied at all.
And don’t get me started on the lower bound problem. Somehow it’s not cool to rescue a child from certain death, but it’s cool to quietly divert a comet, but also it’s cool to take a freshly born AI or nanomachine cluster you just created yourself and tell them everything about Starfleet.
My read on the intent is certainly that while Starfleet is all high and mighty they’re a bad week away from enacting dehumanizing regulations, and that this is something they’ve done multiple times in their history (as far as humans are concerned, anyway).
Which is a super enlightened argument to make in TNG. It gets a bit murkier now that the canon is that they did indeed end up creating a race of slaves out of Data’s template. But hey, I can pretend that Picard didn’t happen and so can you.