So Bajor made one of it's moons uninhabitable for some energy

Except, as per the episode writers' intent, there weren't.
As such, it is your argument that is flawed - unless you do think that you and your family committing suicide in order to save a few trees is worth it.

 

Committing suicide is different from a government decision that leads to civilian death/suffering.

 

Yeah, the decision that would lead to the mass death/suffering is not harvesting that energy as not to inconvenience a few people.

 

Don't need to be mean to the trees, rocks, and scrub brush. What's 200,000 cold Bajorans to dirt.

 

Well for one there is supposed to be some kind of legal proceeding the government has to go through first unless they already made an agreement with the owner of the property in question. Whereas in this case the guy living on the moon didn't seem to have known about the Bajoran government's plans for the moon until the episode in question (unless I'm remembering it wrong).

Which kind of makes it look like they're being douchy about it.

 

Let's remember that the Bajorans never had any use for that habitable moon during their millennia of civilization - the first-ever settlers apparently only arrived during the Cardassian occupation, Mullibok being the very first at episode-minus-forty-years. The moon's biosphere was worthless to them for most of their history, and apparently still worthless to all of them but Mullibok at the time of the episode.

We know Bajorans colonize; at least the post-occupation Bajorans do, both within their own system ("Past Prologue") and outside (from refugee settlements in "Ensign Ro" to staking claims in Gamma later on). Yet Jerrado for some reason held no interest to them. Moreover, there were parts of Bajor itself that remained uninhabited despite being habitable ("Sanctuary"). We can count out various reasons to hold on to Jerrado's jungles, then: Bajorans don't have any shortage of jungles, Bajorans don't want to conquer every tessipate of land out there, and Bajorans have their choice of habitable territory even without Jerrado.

On the other side of coin, freezing to death in winter is not a realistic prospect with the numbers and facts given. We have no reason to think these beneficiaries of Jerrado energy would be in dire straits; Toran says the plan is to heat some houses, but somehow those houses were heated in the preceding year, decade and century already.

Nor is it realistic to assume anybody would die (except out of suicidal tendencies - c.f. Mullibok!) even if their lives depended on receiving power. If the winter is so severe as to threaten their survival lest the houses be heated by a specific type of power, then the winter isn't providing them with any sustenance; they might just as well move out to a more hospitable part of the planet. A thousand-mile exodus is a relative triviality various elements of humanity have survived easily enough, often multiple times in a row, without the benefit of a militia apparently well supplied in spacecraft and capable of moving 200,000 people in a matter of weeks if need be. Hell, these people could be moved to Jerrado without much trouble!

Heating those homes is just a convenience and a politically driven project, not a matter of life and death, unless something is kept hidden from us here. It's just that the other side of the equation doesn't amount to much, either: Bajorans do not have a particular need or love for Jerrado. Possibly they even want the damned thing rendered uninhabitable as soon as possible, so as to eradicate the evidence of Cardassian presence there (we never learned whether their mining projects, mentioned by Mullibok, actually came to anything).

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm pretty sure that the problem was with the episode: the writer is going too far to make an environmental conflict meaningful in a one-shot episode of a sci-fi series. As much as cities and states make stupid planning decisions, trading immediate benefit for short term benefit, the structure of the crisis in the episode is implausible. The numbers don't add up: they are going too far and too much to an extreme for something that could be resolved with some temporary migration. It might be cheaper to replicate firewood. Indeed, these sorts of decisions go forward in the real world because the environmental consequences won't be immediately visible.

 

Forget the moon or fusion reactors: They never heard of solar panels? Quicker, cheaper, and could be deployed to a lot more homes, and isolated so that if someone attacks one it doesn't knock it all out. Just grab an industrial replicator or two, load it up in a cargo shuttle, fly from location to location replicating a generator in a box: beam down, turn on.

For all it's "Wow, they're so advanced!". Star Trek races and powers, seem to lack common sense.

Edit: Hell, I even over thought. Screw the shuttle, just set up production areas n the affected areas, replicate or on an orbital station, transporter over the location.

 

There is most probably a major difference in logistics and costs between providing 200,000 homes with a piece of technology, and providing them with energy for their existing pieces of technology. Even sending a new stove to each of the homes might be more demanding than hooking them up to the Jerrado power.

This early in the show, Bajor probably has little or no industrial capacity for anything, be it stoves or solar panels; it's possible that the Jerrado project is only possible because it was something the Cardassians initiated and never got the chance to finish, but never got the incentive to scuttle when withdrawing, either...

That's speculation. What's known about existing assets is that Bajor operates large troop-carrying starships, as seen in "Past Prologue" already and demonstrated more clearly in "The Circle"/"The Siege". Those things don't need industrial support in order to move 200,000 homes to more hospitable climes, or 200,000 homefuls of firewood to the putative disaster area (more like a housing project from the sounds of it).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well, I don't know about in-universe explanations and all of that, but it was one of my favorite early episodes. Great performances by Nana Visitor and Brian Keith. And the unresolved way the episode ends...I love it. You really feel for both Mullibok and Kira.

 

Oh it's a good episode, one of the better early ones. It's just when you start discussing the logic behind the in--universe decision to frag a moon for such a relatively low number of people that you go "the fuck?"

Thing is that nuking the moon would be a bigger undertaking (even if the Cardies started the job) than just replicating some solar panels or--as you suggested--relocating people. Even a combination of the two options, would be less work and cost than converting Jerrado.

Logically battery tech should be well advanced in ST's time. Why not replicate some XL Duracells to help out the people.

 

Another thing to keep in mind - Bajor had more than one moon.

 

Those things that don't work very well in the middle of winter above a certain latitude?

 

Also here's the thing. Then heated homes are just the tip of the iceberg, the most imminent need. This energy would also bring the same homes electricity, and also bring it to the machinery to build the infrastructure that could make the planet prosperous.

I can't imagine anybody objecting to harming a moon very few people actually wanted to live on in order to bring energy to impoverished homes totally lacking it who has ever been without their creature comforts.

 

By modern day tech. You're going to tell me that in 300 years the ST universe never advanced the tech behind the 20th/21st century levels?

There's quicker, more efficient means of getting that power though.

 

Perhaps not on Bajor, who's resources are spread pretty thin so soon after the occupation.

 

Battery tech, solar tech should all be fairly easy for a typical replicator. If they've got the tech to use a moon for energy, then replicating a few 24th C. Duracells and solar panels or Mr. Fusions would be a walk in the park. The govt. could do it all in bulk, then transport or shuttle over to the affected areas.

It has nothing with preserving the moon, it's that they over thought the problem.

Granted, that goes back to one my issues with TNG era Trek: With the replicator, the problems like what Bajor went through shouldn't really exist. Or where they did exist easily addressed.

 

...Although funnily enough, even the locals don't seem to know how many. Jerrado was the fifth, but in "The Nagus" a textbook said Bajor has just three moons!

Then again, Bajoran culture really is ancient. Perhaps the book was written before there was a fifth moon?

There's no solid proof that Bajor would have had even one food replicator at that time, though. We only saw replicators on the space station, where they were said to all have been sabotaged by the departing Cardassians and were only slowly returning to service thanks to O'Brien's brave efforts. Creating multiple examples of anything (the replicator forte), even things as simple as solar panels or stoves, might thus be massively more difficult than creating a single geothermal powerplant and its power transfer systems.

(Not that solar panels would do any good in keeping houses warm through a winter. Even if they were infinitely efficient, they'd only gather as much sunlight energy as falls on them during that winter - and that amount does not keep anything warm, or else there wouldn't be a winter in the first place. We're talking about devoting massive areas per each house to solar energy gathering, so massive that it would again be cheaper to just relocate these people. Plus making the houses winter-secure, which would solve most problems without the need for imported energy.)

That the Jerrado project would be a solution to a problem is obvious (the Bajorans cannot afford to do anything that wouldn't solve problems). That it would be a solution to the problem of providing power to 200,000 households is a possibility. That it would be a necessary solution for keeping those million people alive is completely speculative. Sure, keeping the houses powered up through he winter is a known consequence of the project - but it's probably just a side effect of keeping them, and fifty million others, powered up for the next thousand years.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Here's another little oddity that muddies up the waters:

Jeraddo is Bajor's fifth moon, hence Lunar V.

Less than a year later in "The Siege", not only do Kira and Dax retrieve an old fighter from a hidden Resistance base on Lunar V, but the surface is far from uninhabitable - the Palukoos are still living there.

 

Lunar VI exploded but somehow nobody noticed. They were planning to test some kind of new device on Lunar VI. I think it was called Exodus or Leviticus or something like that. Mr. Roarke was pissed.