Did anything good come from Project Vanguard?

[Sci]

We don't know the details of why President Bacco didn't share any Shedai info with the Andorians between 2382 and 2385,

I think her reasons are fairly clear - they seceded from the Federation.

Well, this goes to the question of whether or not the data should be shared, period. All I'm saying is, we don't know why Bacco didn't share the data. For all we know, it may have simply been that she felt the Andorians already had the data they needed from the Tholians.

 

[Claudia]

We don't know the details of why President Bacco didn't share any Shedai info with the Andorians between 2382 and 2385,

I think her reasons are fairly clear - they seceded from the Federation. I wouldn't have shared such highly classified information with them either.

So, if they are not with us, they are against us and we let them go extinct? A pretty small-minded (but unfortunately very wide-spread) PoV. I admit that it's unrealistic to share everything with everyone (even if I wish it were possible), but shouldn't medical breakthroughs be exempt from that? Shouldn't the mere survival of a people be more important than petty quarrels/economic interests/etc?

But then again, ST often holds up a mirror to modern society... and the reflection isn't always favorable.

 

[Sci]

We don't know the details of why President Bacco didn't share any Shedai info with the Andorians between 2382 and 2385,

I think her reasons are fairly clear - they seceded from the Federation. I wouldn't have shared such highly classified information with them either.

So, if they are not with us, they are against us and we let them go extinct? A pretty small-minded (but unfortunately very wide-spread) PoV.

Does that really seem like the kind of thing Nan Bacco would do? I don't think so. She's the sort who would indeed say damn the torpedoes and let's save the Andorians. She's a patriot, not a nationalist.

Bear in mind that it is only in the course of President Pro Tempore Ishan's first meeting in A Ceremony of Losses with members of the cabinet and of the Council that the key Federation policy makers figure out that the Andorians don't have all the Shedai data they need to find the cure. It is entirely plausible that the entire latter three years of Bacco's term saw her and her advisers convinced the Tholians had already provided all the data the Science Institute would need, and that releasing anything else might be an additional, needless security risk.

In other words -- maybe Bacco didn't release the data because she honestly thought they didn't need it.

 

[rfmcdpei]

But that's exactly it - it wasn't the *Federation*,

It was the Federation.

I'm pretty sure that there are not other Federation agencies charged with deep-space exploration, although some of the member-states might well have national forces of their own. There might be more agencies logistically capable of supporting ambitious research projects like Operation Vanguard than Starfleet, but given the security implications I'm uncertain that they'd be given access to the data. Possibly one of the more capable member-states like Earth or Vulcan might be able to run an Operation Vanguard on their own, but constitutional issues might force it to be a Federation issue.

Starfleet was the only candidate.

There's more to the Federation than its military and intelligence branch, which by its very nature with a strict chain of command and need to know basis doesn't really invite open discussion and ethical debates.

It's exactly this branch that would be the only one charged with researching the Shedai and their technological potential, for resource and security reasons. That this branch, staffed by people who were raised in open societies and presumably were inculcated with norms regarding civilian control of the military and issues of appropriate force and research ethics, segued so quickly to exploring the ability of Shedai technology to destroy planets says worrying things about the society it comes from. The Federation is a work in progress, clearly.

It might well be that the power offered by the Shedai would be too tempting for any civilization. I would make the case that the Federation probably behaved more responsibly than any other of its peer civilizations at the time, save perhaps the Tholians in their legitimate terror of what the neighbours might dredge up and their knowledge that some things just had to be killed with fire. That greater responsibility does not say much that is good for the Federation, mind: I see it as a matter of the Federation being less bad.

I don't think any of the civilizations around in the 23rd century were ready for the Shedai, or capable of applying a consistently ethical response to the quandaries of Shedai potential. The near-catastrophic failure of Operation Vanguard, which nearly unleashed a horde of sadistic god-like entities on the known galaxy, was followed a couple of decades later by the Genesis Planet crisis, which nearly triggered a Federation-Klingon conflict.

 

[Christopher]

^As I said, it is completely, dangerously wrong to think that destroying a technology with great potential for both good and harm is responsible. It is completely irresponsible, a cowardly evasion of responsibility. The Tholians acted out of fear alone. Responsibility is about balancing awareness of the risks with awareness of the benefits.

Let's look at the word itself. A response is an answer. Taking responsibility literally means that you are choosing to be answerable for the effects that something has. That means that you take it upon yourself to use a power with care and judgment, to make sure it is used constructively and its harmful potentials are contained. If you destroy it, then you're depriving people of the good it can do, maybe condemning people to death who could otherwise have been saved, and that's just as irresponsible and shameful as intentionally using it to kill would be.

 

[rfmcdpei]

^As I said, it is completely, dangerously wrong to think that destroying a technology with great potential for both good and harm is responsible. It is completely irresponsible, a cowardly evasion of responsibility. The Tholians acted out of fear alone. Responsibility is about balancing awareness of the risks with awareness of the benefits.

In the 24th century, Shedai technology did end up saving the Andorian species from extinction. Shedai technology also resulted in the Genesis Wave, which devastated a vast swathe of space. Can more good things result from it yet? Sure, but tight control will be necessary.

In the 23rd century, though, Shedai technology threatened to unleash an apocalypse. Even if, somehow, the enraged Shedai who were just looking for a chance to escape and transform the known galaxy into a nightmarish could be contained indefinitely, Starfleet would have been left with the ability to remotely destroy planets. This is the sort of artifact that ancient tyrannies have left for future generations. Which will be the first to go? Qo'Nos, Romulus, Tholia? Perhaps someone will try to preempt the Cardassians, the Breen, and the Tzenkethi? Hopefully there will be no need for demonstrations closer to home ...

There's plenty of good that has come from the Shedai technological kit. There's also plenty of evil. Even in the 24th century, I'd say that the Genesis Wave outweighs the survival of the Andorian species. How many people died as a result of one obscure independent planet's discovery of a proscribed technology? The Federation and its peers were even less able to handle the technology's potential in the 23rd century, the Federation going straight to planet-wrecking after just a few years and arguably showing more restraint in this regard than the Klingons or Romulans would.

Would anyone in the Federation have known of their civilization's moral incapacity at the time? No. The final Vanguard book in particular documents how normally sensible people and institutions ended up becoming drafted into a fearsome technological project that, again, was stopped only by a combination of the Tholians coming and killing everything with fire and Xiong's blind luck. This is what makes the Vanguard series a literal tragedy for me, the gap between hoped-for desires and actual outcomes, an effective one at that.

 

[Christopher]

^Again, I repeat David Brin's argument: The problem is not that the technology was researched, but that it was researched secretly without checks and balances. Those institutions got corrupted by the power because they isolated themselves from oversight and didn't have anyone telling them, "Hey, hold it, you're going too far." Secrecy doesn't work. It almost always does more harm than good.

I mean, heck, look at the Section 31 storyline. The only reason Section 31 is still able to function at all is because all the heroic Starfleet characters who know about it choose, for some reason, to keep that knowledge secret and thereby allow them to remain in the shadows. If they'd just out the organization, bring down public scrutiny, there's no way it would be able to keep operating with impunity. The only reason they haven't is that it allows the storyline to continue. You see the same thing in tons of other fiction. Look at The Tomorrow People, the recent CW series (and the original British show it was based on, though I don't know how similar that was). The bad-guy agency in that show was free to abduct and torture and murder Tomorrow People with impunity because nobody knew the TP existed. If the TP had just gotten themselves a good lawyer and publicist and taken their case to the people, there might've been some initial fear of them, but the blatant genocidal evil of the agency acting against them would've made them clear underdogs and earned sympathy, and the threat would've been neutralized. The same goes for any similar series where secretly alien or mutant or magical characters are on the run from shadowy government conspiracies. The only reason they remain in danger is because they're complicit in maintaining the secrecy that gives the villains freedom to act.

And there's plenty of precedent in real life, too. Before WWII, anti-Semitism and bigotry against immigrants were rampant in the United States, and a lot of Americans were sympathetic to the Nazis. But once the world learned of the atrocities of the Holocaust -- once they were brought out into the open -- it changed things, discrediting such hate groups and beginning the modern push toward increased acceptance and equality. Openness is a powerful weapon against evil and corruption. The main reason so many works of fiction rely on secrecy is because fiction needs bad stuff happening, and there are so many bad things that just couldn't happen in the open light of day, so many abuses that would be prevented or quickly contained if there were public scrutiny, so many scientific dangers that could be managed if they received the same ethical oversight that real-life scientific research is subject to.

 

[Idran]

And there's plenty of precedent in real life, too. Before WWII, anti-Semitism and bigotry against immigrants were rampant in the United States, and a lot of Americans were sympathetic to the Nazis. But once the world learned of the atrocities of the Holocaust -- once they were brought out into the open -- it changed things, discrediting such hate groups and beginning the modern push toward increased acceptance and equality.

I agree with the overarching thrust of your argument, Christopher, but this example is extremely flawed. If you're claiming that bigotry against immigrants is any less today, just look to Arizona and Sheriff Arpaio, or to the tremendous pushback against any attempts at granting amnesty. (Arpaio, by the way, is a great counterexample to the idea that openness can reduce bigotry; he isn't working in secret by any means whatsoever. He's in fact proud of what he's doing, and never ceases to broadcast it. Openness can prevent the misuse of technology, but it can't prevent all negative events just by virtue of itself.)

It's not that anti-immigrant feelings were reduced, they were just redirected from Jewish immigrants to the next immigration wave. Exactly what happened with the Italian immigration wave, the Irish immigration wave, the German and Polish immigration wave, and the Chinese immigration wave. It's not acknowledgement of atrocities that caused bigotry to lessen, but the assimilation of the culture over time; each culture assimilated and was no longer seen as an other, and then the next immigration wave brought a whole new other for people to fear. The same thing will probably happen to the current Hispanic immigration wave given enough time, but this entire topic is a complete non sequitor when it comes to the effects of openness on public policy.

(Note that I'm not saying that acknowledgement of the Holocaust wasn't a major factor in reducing explicit anti-Semitic feelings, but rather that it wasn't a major factor specifically in the changing opinion of the Jewish immigration wave over time; that that opinion simply evolved over time the same way it had evolved for every immigration wave before or since.)

 

[Christopher]

^Oh, it's quite clear that such xenophobia is still rampant in the US, but it's not as mainstream as it was before WWII. And while many groups today have, sadly, forgotten the lessons of history and embraced that kind of anti-foreigner rhetoric as a path to political power, I'm speaking more of the immediate aftermath of WWII, the changes that were made in the acceptability of such attitudes when the horrors of the Holocaust were fresh in people's minds.

 

[rfmcdpei]

^Again, I repeat David Brin's argument: The problem is not that the technology was researched, but that it was researched secretly without checks and balances.

My point is that it was probably inevitable that the Shedai legacy would be researched in such a fashion by the Federation at that time.

 

[Masiral]

We don't know the details of why President Bacco didn't share any Shedai info with the Andorians between 2382 and 2385,

I think her reasons are fairly clear - they seceded from the Federation. I wouldn't have shared such highly classified information with them either.

So, if they are not with us, they are against us and we let them go extinct? A pretty small-minded (but unfortunately very wide-spread) PoV. I admit that it's unrealistic to share everything with everyone (even if I wish it were possible), but shouldn't medical breakthroughs be exempt from that? Shouldn't the mere survival of a people be more important than petty quarrels/economic interests/etc?

But they didn't know what part of the data would lead to medical breakthroughs. There is no way they would give away all the Shedai data, including the powers to destroy entire worlds, to a foreign power, especially not to one that might consider joining the Typhon Pact. It's not petty quarrels or economic interests, it's allowing world-destroying powers to fall into the hands of the enemy.

 

[Corran Horn]

I'm going to have to read through the Typhon Pact book for this - I don't quite remember how Bashir knew the data from Project Vanguard would help the Andorian problem.

 

[David Mack]

^ He didn't, until he was told by his old crewmate Thirishar ch'Thane.

 

[Corran Horn]

^ He didn't, until he was told by his old crewmate Thirishar ch'Thane.

ah, I forgot the role the Tholians played in getting the Andorians clued in, I think.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

That this branch, staffed by people who were raised in open societies and presumably were inculcated with norms regarding civilian control of the military and issues of appropriate force and research ethics, segued so quickly to exploring the ability of Shedai technology to destroy planets says worrying things about the society it comes from.

Actually after reading the Vulcan's Soul trilogy and finding out the Intellivore (aka a warp capable lifeform in the form of a planet that eats minds) managed to make the jump to the current novel continuity, Starfleet having the firepower to blow up planets disturbingly enough seems very prudent.

I mean this isn't the space is tamed and pretty safe TNG era here, this is TOS where any minute our heroes could walk into a cosmic horror story.

Really its kind of one of the reasons I put TOS above the rest becuase space actually felt dangerous more often than in the later series.

 

[rfmcdpei]

That this branch, staffed by people who were raised in open societies and presumably were inculcated with norms regarding civilian control of the military and issues of appropriate force and research ethics, segued so quickly to exploring the ability of Shedai technology to destroy planets says worrying things about the society it comes from.

Actually after reading the Vulcan's Soul trilogy and finding out the Intellivore (aka a warp capable lifeform in the form of a planet that eats minds) managed to make the jump to the current novel continuity, Starfleet having the firepower to blow up planets disturbingly enough seems very prudent.

I mean this isn't the space is tamed and pretty safe TNG era here, this is TOS where any minute our heroes could walk into a cosmic horror story.

Really its kind of one of the reasons I put TOS above the rest becuase space actually felt dangerous more often than in the later series.

Space isn't tamed in the 24th century, either. It's in the TNG/DS9/VOY epoch that the Federation experiences existential challenges it simply did not in the TOS era.

Developing metaweapons is one thing. Maybe it might be possible to defend their development given the scale of some potential threats.

But doing so without clear oversight and control of civilian governments, using technologies that are barely understood and could easily bring about the end of civilization as we know it? This is a profound problem for any number of reasons.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Space isn't tamed in the 24th century, either. It's in the TNG/DS9/VOY epoch that the Federation experiences existential challenges it simply did not in the TOS era.

A bunch of rival empires on the scale of the federation, whoopee do.

I'm talking about mad godlike aliens that could swat starships like flies, ancient weapons of mass destruction roving around the cosmos, and freaking space monsters. Not to mention all the ancient civilizations leaving dangerous crap lying around.

You know things that are actually terrifying.

And Voyager doesn't count if they have to go to the other side of the galaxy to encounter strange and scary things again.

 

[Thrawn]

A goddamn full scale Borg invasion doesn't count as terrifying?

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

^Or war with the Dominion for that matter? The Federation of the 23rd century would have gotten its butt kicked by a fleet of Jem'Hadar ships--and they had no Klingon or Romulan allies to help them.

--Sran

 

[Hartzilla2007]

A goddamn full scale Borg invasion doesn't count as terrifying?

After they stoped being so pathetic a science vessel kicked their asses in their own backyard maybe.

^Or war with the Dominion for that matter? The Federation of the 23rd century would have gotten its butt kicked by a fleet of Jem'Hadar ships--and they had no Klingon or Romulan allies to help them.

Assuming 1) the Dominion had that level of tech in the 23rd century, 2) The federation would have been anywhere near the wormhole, and 3) that Starfleet was as nerfed as the the TNG era.

Seriously I'm expected to believe that the people who developed the freaking Genesis Device and, phaser canons that can wreak parts of mountains, have the firepower to glass planets with one ship, and could probably make Voyager's trip home in a month at the most are going to outmatched by enemies introduced to challenge a sadly nerfed federation whose ships suffer a warpcore breach if you look at the core funny and forgets the freaking super weapons they've run into.

And again you're bringing up galactic geo-political stuff that has fuck all to do with COSMIC HORROR.