And the Directive overall doesn't make any real sense. Unless you are willing to destroy an entire society/species and every record, nothing you can do to stop them from trying again and again and again.
The Omega Directive is a fool's errand.
What does the Prime Directive demand in the following scenario?
- Thread starter Lexx Shrapnel
- Start date
And the Directive overall doesn't make any real sense. Unless you are willing to destroy an entire society/species and every record, nothing you can do to stop them from trying again and again and again.
The Omega Directive is a fool's errand.
Destroying a species would no doubt be perfectly viable. But with resources greater than those at Janeway's disposal, a lighter touch ought to suffice: outsource the putting down of inventions/inventors to the species itself. Make contact from a position of superiority, have some dialogue sub rosa, convince the local leadership that not only is it a great idea to give up Omega research but it will also save their own asses from, well, consequences, and you have delayed the inevitable a few useful decades or centuries more.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
If humans are any kind of indicator, none of the above would work. How many times has the US begged, pleaded and threatened North Korea?
Actually, wouldn't the guys in Angel One be the outliers? After all, those guys in TNG who wore the gray jumpsuits aren't Starfleet but rather belong to some civilian agency, and they're required to follow the Prime Directive, as per Who Watches the Watchers. Likewise, Nikolai Rozhenko was required to follow the Prime Directive to the point that his action to save the villagers he lived with was enough to "finish his career" according to Picard.
So you don't think Janeway should have given a damn about something that could and would affect other civilizations?
That's not her place. Her place is to get her crew home, not fudge around in an internal affair of a world that has no effect on the Federation. Seriously, what is to stop them from beginning again as soon as she leaves? Is she planning on staying around for the rest of her life with a gun to their collective heads making sure they never try again?
If Omega is truly that dangerous, then she should've stopped Voyager right there.
Just nuke'm. The Federation wouldn't be limited in any of the ways the US is - in our analogy, nobody would get angry about offing the entire Korean peninsula, or at least meaningfully angrier, there wouldn't be any physical fallout to worry about, and messages wouldn't travel much between Korea and, say, Myanmar anyway so the secret of atomic weapons wouldn't leak out.
Similarly, the option of brainwashing the Korean leadership or slaughtering enough of them would exist without repercussions - no Russia or Switzerland would ever even have heard about this "Korea" place anyway. Although the Feds would probably kill/mindwipe just the researchers, and then do their successors and their successors until there was no Omega program left.
Good point. A few buts, though...
Everybody wears jumpsuits - in TOS, the blue-green ones filled many roles, from government-sponsored research to penal management to counterculture colonization.
But in any case, it's a "Federation" team. And it's not the team that is in trouble with the PD, but Beverly Crusher.
The actions that involved the Prime Directive in that episode were ones Worf's brother expected Picard and his crew to take. His own actions were their own thing: Worf chastised him for failing to have followed Picard's orders, which resulted in a PD violation, but this is a chain of events that started with Nikolai ignoring Jean-Luc and culminated in Jean-Luc unwittingly violating the PD.
Timo Saloniemi
They will be strong.
That was a good way to start a war. I want to see them pull that shit on the Klingons, sometime.
If it isn't within Federation borders, you do nothing.
They wouldn't know their borders have changed. So they're still in the same boat.
Unless that boat rode the temporal wake with the other one....
That didn't stop them in VOY "Relativity". Changes in time can have a ripple effect to the entire galaxy too like in TNG "All Good Things".
I guess the point would be more like "If it isn't within range of practical action, you do nothing". Most time travel hijinks not just involve, but stem from the local availability of a time travel method. If no such method is easily available (i.e. a villain hasn't just made use of it to create havoc Starfleet might hope to reverse by also making use of it), Starfleet doesn't engage in time-policing, not in the 24th century yet. But it does think time-policing would be a good idea in general, and embraces any opportunities.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
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