Would you intervene in incident of Extraterrestrial Extermination

In this scenario you are the captain of the Terran Union Exploratory Fleet starship TES Darwin in the year 528 AT (2497 CE) on a long range deep space survey mission about 400 light years from Sol and 300 light years from the Union's frontier of colonization. Your mission is to explore the galaxy, take note of the specifics of stars and planets as you go. For the past three years things have gone quite normally for you as you've overlooked a few dozen systems and have found three semi-habitable worlds with basic microbial life akin to Precambrian Earth and one planet which is at a roughly Devonian level of development. All well and good if unremarkable. Then you found something which is a lot more notable and rare, a planet with home to a new sapient species which have been designated Platypoids.

Platypoids bear are a race of semi-humanoid creatures which are about 1.5 meters tall on average, have six limbs, four eyes, are covered in fur, lay eggs and have a short leathery bill full of teeth. They're named for their appearance and the fact that their form of speech is not pronounceable by human vocal cords. TV and Radio broadcasts as well as orbital surveys of architecture show multiple civilizations with rich and varied artistic traditions from architecture to music, complex philosophies and a diverse set of beliefs. They are currently the forth sapient alien species discovered and by far the most advanced. Two others have been found as stone age hunter-gatherers and one other race of Eusocial creatures is at an early iron age level of technological development. The Platypoids are at a level of technological development that's roughly on part with that of the mid 20th century, being ahead in some areas (computing and Radar) and behind in others (nuclear physics). Unfortunately there are other parallels to Terran History as the planet is in the grips of a World War between two power blocks: one which is called the Alliance and the other is led by a nation designated by your xenologists as The Reich.

From what can be gathered the Reich is a monarchical state with an established nobility which a few decades prior had ended a fifty year long period of political instability as one block rose to power due to a variety of powers, among which was fervor to a new ideology and populist support. The Reich took control of the broken nation and spent the next twenty years consolidating it's hold on society and engaging in major industrialization programs. Key among it's ideology's points was militarism, expansionism and obsession with racial supremacy and purity. The nobility was retained, but nobles could be stripped of their status for failure or disloyalty and commoners raised to the nobility for exceptional performance in service to the state (or being rich or posterboy steadfast supporters of the regime). Eight years ago, they launched a war with the goals of conquering the world and imposing their rather brutal society on it. The coalition has formed against them, but has been gradually loosing ground on all fronts. Satellite observation and a few probes have confirmed the presents of facilities which have confirmed the designation of this regime in the form of Killing Factories. They use a variety of methods ranging from destructive labor to gas chambers to electric shock, but the result of which is that millions are being subjected to systematic extermination.

Worst of all, the Reich is winning the war. Unlike it's Terran namesake the Platypoid Reich has a solid reserve of Manpower, Natural Resources and Fuel and it has gone into the war as the largest industrial power. The Alliance (an association of a number of other industrial powers that opposed the Reich's rise, most of which being democracies and constitutional monarchies) is hard pressed at the best of times and in retreat on other fronts. Several of it's members have been conquered, many others are loosing territory and almost all of those that those which are not loosing territory currently are mostly getting bombed. The best they can currently realistically hope for on their own is to hold out until the Reich has lost enough resources that they can accept bad terms while avoiding outright conquest for the time being while the Reich gears up for round two of conquest.

Spoiler: Technical information about The Darwin

Technical information about the systems of the Darwin

• It's mostly cylindrical, 500 meters long, 100 meters wide and is divided into three main sections: the top 150 meters are mostly full of the habitation section where people live and work, the middle section is the next 150 meters and is home to cargo bays, shuttle bays, EVA systems, sensor towers and so forth, the bottom 200 meters are the primary fusion drivers, hyperdrive and fuel tanks.
• Six Gatling Lasers: point defense laser weapons with an effective range of about 5,000 km able to get off about 50 megawatts of laser shots in about a hundred pulses per second.
• A hyper-drive able to travel at 500 c for two days in a straight line before needing to fall back into realspace for a day to cool off and recharge for another jump. You need to be outside the orbit of Neptune of a Yellow Dwarf star like this one
• Top acceleration of 3 gs, but usually pulls off a modest 1 g acceleration.
• Two 125mm gauss cannons able to accelerate a 10 kilo steel slug up to 30 km/s every eight seconds. Primary anti-ship weapons given to the Darwin.
• If pressed, the Darwin can accommodate up to 10,000 humans. This would apply to Platypoids as well as they are about the same size. Food will be an issue, especially since while there is general biochemcial crossover what's etable to a human would not necessarily be so to a Platypoid.
• 32 multi stage torpedoes, each one containing a one megaton laser pumped nuclear warhead able to make a 30 G burn for up to twenty minutes.
• Two shield generators able to produce a bubble which can resist a few megaton strikes.
  
• Four shuttles as parasite craft. The standard shuttle is about 30 meters long, triangular and can carry up to 25 tonnes of cargo from the surface of a planet like the one below and back up. They have basic shields allowing them to take anything short of a 120mm shell and can have a couple of lasers on it. There are also eight utility sleds, manned low range craft with waldos for asteroid mining, moving stuff about the ship and similar.
• One Hundred and twenty eight survey satellites. Most of which are in orbit of the Platypoid Planet keeping track on things.
  
• The Fabrication Bay. Basically a section of the middle section about 40 meters in diameter and 30 meters tall home to a lot of mostly autonomous industrial equipment which can process asteroids down into raw materials and assembling said materials into spare parts, munitions (save Torpedoes), robots and so forth. It can produce up to sixteen attrition robots a day along with ammunition. Technically the Darwin has Seven Phase Von Neumann capacity, which means that it it has all the raw materials on hand it can fabricate equipment which can be used to fabricate equipment and after seven such cycles and about thirty five years it would have a shipyard able to produce a new Asimov class exploration ships identical to the Darwin, though doing would require more crew that you got and does not figure in the hunt for raw materials and accidents.
  
• One Hypercomm: a large expensive long range FTL transciever. It can relay messages at very high speeds to the nearest Terran relay post. Latency is a bit less than a tenth of a second, but the bit rate either way is pretty darn low at about one per second. Sending reports back to Sol takes time.

Spoiler: The Darwin's Crew and related assets

• 500 regular crew divided into two bodies, Shipboard Operations and Exploration. Shipboard Operations has 200 guys and gals which are are mostly the various engineers and technicians tasked with maintaining the ship from it's engines and hyperdrives to the hydroponic farms and meat culture stations as well as pilots for the dropships, medics and cooks. Science are a bunch of scientists and lab technicians, including a number of xenologists and historians. All of which have been given basic small arms training and if the need arises they have small arms and spacesuits which can accept body armor for the head, torso and upper legs and arms on hand to fight. The body armor can absorb full rifle fire, but not heavy machine gun fire. The standard infantry small arms for soldiers are semi-automatic laser pistols which fire pulses of up to 3 kilojoules or laser assault rifles capable of firing either 600 7.5Kj pulses every minute or 20 Kj pulses semi automatically. Pistols have 60 Kj power cells, assault rifles have 300 Kj power cells.
  
• The ship has a variety of laboratories for the science labs.
• 5,000 shipboard robots. These come in a variety of shapes and forms ranging from simple units 5cm across to six 4-meter long manipulator units for moving stuff about outside the ship. Among the more common human sized models is known are the Steves (short for Sheng Cybernetics Stevedore). Steves have a body composed of two conical sections about 40cm across and 40cm tall that can rotate each with three 75cm long limbs which can have various tools, hands or feet installed at the end arranged radially about half way up the cone and a small camera turret on the top or bottom of which there are 500 onboard helping people out. All robots are non sapient.
  
• Emma: The ship's AI who helps out with a lot of things, specifically in overseeing the robotic workforce. Emma is fully self aware, but is loyal to Humanity, the Terran Union and specifically the Darwin and her Crew to a fault. She has a holographic avatar of a prim and proper Victorian lady.
  
• 64 Marines responsible for security. Each Marine is a capable soldier in zero G or planet-side and has a 300 kg suit of power armor allowing them a greater degree of speed, strength and durability than regular soldiers as well as improving situatual awareness and full NBC protection. A powersuited marine can run at up to 40km/h. Their standard armament is a 5mm gauss assault rifle firing 4 gram projectiles at 2.5 km/s which explode shortly after impact with six 80 round horizontal magazines as well as 16 guided micro-missiles with a 5 km range, each carrying the equivalence of a kilogram of TNT as their warhead, usually eight are shaped charge and eight are fragmentation as well as having a laser pistol built into their left arm, a 20cm combat knife and the fact that a soldier in this armor can lift and throw a sedan car is another factor in this. Nothing short of auto-cannon fire is getting through their armored hides. They need to swap out their power cells every 24 hours under combat conditions.
  
• 512 Attrition series combat robots. An Attrition Robot is a quadrupedal machine about a meter tall, 1.5 meters across with a top mounted turret with a single manipulator arm along with it's main weapon. The standard load out of said robots is a gauss rifle and sixteen micro-missiles. They are more lightly armored than powersuited marines and they can be taken down by heavy machine gun fire. In a combat scenario each marine is assigned a squad of eight Attrition robots. They are capable of executing basic tasks on their own but require a human overseeing them for maximum effectiveness. Half the Attrition robots are in drop pods, which if the need arises will allow them to make planetfall.
• Various bits of camp equipment
  
• 16 Wombat Universal Utility Trucks: Wombats are 6 tonne multipurpose electric vehicles used for planetary exploration. They have six independent electric wheels that can reconfigure themselves into treads if the need arises, are self driving with backup manual controls inside a pressurized cab and have a flat bed which can have mounted on it a variety of boxy modules from a mobile lab to a mobile hospital to a regular bed to passenger modules for either regular people or powersuited marines. They have a top speed of 250km/h on road, 120km/h off road, can operate under up to 30 meters of water and have a range of 2,000km. The blueprints for simple trailers are on file and they can carry up to 12 tonnes of cargo in their bed and 20 more tons on a trailer.
• 16 Ferret rovers: 2 tonne four wheel electric vehicles designed for carrying up to six people overland. Two power armored individuals can squeeze into a ferret along with an unpowersuited individual. Has a mount for a turreted belt fed rail rifle. Can keep pace with a Wombat with the same range and is far more maneuverable.
  
• 16 fields reactors: four tonne fusion reactors about 3 meters in diameter and a meter tall with a wheel base for those occasions they need to be moved. They can provide up to 500 megawatts of power each for base-camps.
• Huxley and Dawkins, an English Bulldog and a Rottweiler that has had a genetic clean up to allow him to live a healthy 30 years. Both are exceedingly friendly.

Spoiler: The Reich's Assets

• About 3,600,000 square kilometers of core territory in the primary continent, most of which in the planet's tropics and southern subtropics composed of a mixture of agriarianized grasslands, jungle and mountains up to 2 kilometers high. It has significant deposits of coal, iron, oil and most other metals. It has a well developed rail network and two dozen major cities and a hundred smaller cities serving as local industrial hubs. For the most part it is secured against attack.
  
• About 10,200,000 square kilometers of conquered territory, expanding every year. Footholds have been established on or near four of the planet's five secondary continents. This is similarly varied and ranges from tropical mountainous jungle to sub-artic steppes. This is expanding.
  
• A core population of 160,000,000 people in the core territory. The vast majority of which supports the Reich to some degree or another. They are well fed and educated by the standards of the day, even though the curriculum is skewed towards soldiering, official doctrine, engineering and medicine. The Reich's core population has the highest standards of living on the planet by expedience of ruthless exploitation of the conquered territories.
  
• 350,000,000 conquered people, these range from "racially pure" which are undergoing the process of integration into the the society of the conquerors through "slave races" which are being systematically brought into into industrial bondage, denied access to education and have had their populations culled by food rationing, forced labor and collective punishments and finally "undesirables", which are parts of minorities which are deemed to be fundamentally subversive and are automatically sent to either destructive labor facilities and killing factories. According to the estimates they have wiped out about 100,000,000 people over the past decade either by their army or systematic extermination. About 30,000,000 people are brought into the Reich's core territory to help man the factories there. Collectively about 25% of the global population is under the control of The Reich. Some 12 million Reich Citizens, mostly military vets, have been settled in largely depopulated regions, being given plots of newly annexed living space.
  
• An army of some 50,000,000 soldiers. 25,000,000 of which are from the Reich's core territory with another 25,000,000 being auxiliaries drawn from the conquered territories. The auxiliaries range from the armies of vassalized states allowed a fiction of autonomy to members of the slave races drafted into light infantry regiments with Reich NCOs and Officers in command. The standard Reich trooper is equipped with what we'd consider high end WW2 era gear, including an assault rifle, sidearm, grenades, a uniform, a steel helmet that most closely resembles as Morion and a steel and nylon vest that can stop shrapnel and pistol fire with semi-automatic sniper rifles, RPGs, medium machine guns, mortars, backpack radios and similar gear being common at the squad level as well as Falchion like swords for officers. Auxileries are not equipped as well, ranging from having a few less radios than the Reich's core troops to soldiers from the slave races, which have to make do with old bolt action rifles, cheap ass SMGs and third hand helmets.
  
• 100,000 tanks and 300,000 other armored fighting vehicles including APCs, Self propelled guns, scout cars, armored recovery vehicles and so forth. The most common tank (designated Thugs by your guys) is roughly in the T-34/Panzer IV/Sherman range of armor, armament and speed with radios, which is also the basis of a variety of vehicles. Thugs are being superseded by the newer 42 tonne Gangsters which are closer to the T-55/Centurion/Patton area, which make up about a quarter of the Reich's tank fleet and are supplemented by the 65 tonne Hatchetman, which is in the IS-7/Tiger II range. The primary APCs of the Reich is the 12 tonne tracked Footpad. The biggest difference from mid-20th century earth among these vehicles is that some 20,000 of their tanks are Gatling Tanks, which carry a 20mm gatling autocannon as their primary armament, which are used to provide AA support and make mincemeat out of enemy infantry and light vehicles. Reich AFVs tend to be commanded by Nobles.
  
• 1,000,000 artillery pieces ranging from 75mm field guns through katrushka style rocket launchers to monstrous 800mm ultraheavy cannons (designation: Mehmeds). This is leaving aside self propelled guns.
  
• 3 million logistical vehicles, the most common of which are 5 tonne trucks. A decent number of the older or commandeered ones are steam powered.
• 300,000 combat aircraft. These range from prop driven recon plans through fighters, bombers, fighter/bombers, ground attack aircraft, torpedo planes, transport planes and attack helicopters. Most of their bombers are big four engine prop driven aircraft akin to the Lancaster and the Superfortress with a new jet bomber akin to a Stratofortress coming into service. Their fighters are mostly akin to late WW2 piston fighters with jet fighters ranging in quality from Me-262 to MiG-9 quality, but armed with gatling cannons. In most theaters the that it's engaged in the Reich has the edge in the air. Most of the Reich's pilots are from the Noble Class.
• 150,000 non combat aircraft ranging from trainers to logistical planes to 300 meter long airships. Airships are more viable on the platypoid's homeworld due to an atmosphere about 1.6 times as dense as earth's.
  
• 1,500 warships ranging from 270 meter long aircraft carriers to 60 meter long corvettes and submarines. There are a few battleships still around, but experimentation with guided missiles is being preformed. The Reich's Navy currently has a two to one advantage over all other navies on the planet put together.
  
• Several allied nations which have not been conquered, but are fighting alongside the Reich. Most of which are on the other four continents. They have about 90,000,000 people between then and are mobilizing about 12 million troops with gear broadly similar which is often ether copies of or made by The Reich. While they are not engaged in the same degree of systematic genocide they're not nice regimes.

The Terran Union has adopted a generalized policy against conquest of primitive species and believes that Genocide Is Bad, though has determined that in some cases intervention might be necessary. Indeed, if there was a multi kilometer long asteroid sent to impact the Platypoid homeworld in the next few years you'd be required to deal with it. That said you have been given a wide rage of latitude in how you deal with this scenario by the exploration fleet given the logistical complexities of sending a response fleet out. You can pack up and leave this system to it's fate or you can to various degrees attempt to aide the Coalition in their war against The Reich so long as you don't engage in acts of genocide such as dropping rocks on the Reich's homeland until it's a barren moonscape.

What do you do and how do you go about it?

Zor

 

Three beer conversation.

 

Need more information. In the generalized philosophical case I would say sure, prevent the genocide. But you would need to go through a phase of looking at the Platypoid culture and history, seeing if they would do the same thing given the upper hand or not, asking them if they WANT help and what form they would want that help in. Then analyzing whether the requested intervention would make a meaningful difference and what long term effects it would have on any other surrounding places. And of course selfishly, are the Reich capable and inclined to target my planet next?

I would be more inclined to offer asylum and safe escape than military intervention. If I am confident that my intervention COULD make a difference, and that the platypoids WANT my help, and WOULD stop the war as soon as their military were crippled, then I would consider offering military help.

 

This isn't a philosophical case - it's pretty simplistic narrative fiction, derived from Star Trek, and as with all popular fiction the writer has loaded the dice. I assume that this is why the writer put it here in the SF&F forum rather than Miscellaneous or the Science forum. It doesn't really resemble any situation that might occur in reality.

 

If the aliens are mammal-like enough to identify with them, we'd probably try to save them from themselves. If they were significantly different in form, say insectoid or slug-like, we probably wouldn't bother. I doubt we'd be as "noble" as we think we'd be. The bottom line might well be to reduce the risk to ourselves in the future when the aliens' technological development might have caught up. Probably best to limit physical interaction to prevent accidentally killing them off with our bacteria - or vice versa. Contact would, of course, have a profound effect on their society - especially if they believe it has been revealed that they are the chosen race of a deity or deities. At least, one might hope we would not enslave them, turn them into food animals or deliberately wipe them out to make way for our colonists.

 

I made it this far...

 

Is the question what *we* would do or is it what the humans actually in charge would do? Very different questions.

@Severaux

It’s a specific situation designed to get you thinking about universal principles, like almost any scifi. It sounds like you may have stopped reading my post when you got to the ‘General principle’ part at the start, but I’m curious to hear your view.

 

Wow, @Imperator-Zor, did you write that yourself or is this from something? I'd like to watch it if it's on somewhere.

One thing I'd like to know, do these people know about alien races such as the Terrans? Would it be one of those things where the knowledge of advanced space faring aliens visiting their world cause a change in philosophy for the whole race and possibly not concentrate on their own petty issues, kind of like some people think we Humans would if aliens stopped of at the UN to say hi?

I'd be up for that but I doubt I'd want to kill them to save them.

 

Depends... do the Platypoids go good with a side of mash potatoes and green beans?

 

Nuke em from orbit, its the only wat to be sure.

 

Leave them to it and then send in a shedload of colonists to take over once they've bombed themselves into extinction?