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"Your Honour, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits. Waiting." - Picard
(lemmy.world)
TNG s2e9 "The Measue of a Man"
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
148 points (98.1% liked)
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Man, okay, I'm being pedantic, but it's a pet peeve of mine, so bear with me. It's "court-martial", not "court marshall". "Martial" means "pertaining to war" or, by extension, the military.
Apparently the process of setting up a hearing and appointing advocates that way is borrowed from US navy processes, which is a fun factoid I read somewhere, but it does raise questions about why Starfleet seems to model its legal system and a bunch of other stuff on an archaic national military tradition despite being neither American nor the military. But then again, it actually isn't the first time Trek sets up that bit of lore, since it's also the framing of the flashbacks for The Menagerie in TOS. Where, by the way, they outright say Starfleet has the death penalty, which just seems insane and barbaric.
The legal argument makes less sense, and I sympathise with the impulse to want a specific standard for sentience. But again, Trek shows a bunch of times they don't have one. TNG alone has like what? Three, four examples of episodes where the plot hinges on whether a nanomachine or a non-humanoid entity or some other random hostile thing is sentient or not.
The sentience argument also crops up again in DISCO after the ship absorbs the sphere data and becomes known as Zora.
also in the episode with data's daughter, Lal, and with the exocomps, and with Vger (er, that was the voyager probe,) and with the M-5 unit and then if we go into non-AI/synthetic... we got the Horta and the microbes in Home Soil and such.
fixed the typo, I should have known better.
In any case, like, the Prime Directive absolutely would require a robust, well crafted definition. Like. without one... are Serpent Worms sentient? I mean, they probably have some form of sensory apparatus, right? they feel. yet how often do we see starfleet officers slurping down gagh? or beaming down to some random world and fucking up the environment for science? at least some of those plants and all the animals "feel".
In order for the Prime Directive to be enforced... it would have to be something that's not totally left to arbitrary standards. Even if the courts were ran by some of the galaxy's most notorious stoners... it'd still have to have some level of precedent.
And it's not like this isn't the first time they came up with artificial intelligence that's possibly sentient. You got Vger, the M-5 multitronic thingamadoo. Then y you got things that weren't immediately recognized as sentient- Horta, the microbe thingies discovered earlier in Home Soil. the Crystalline Entity in Datalore.
this question would come up every single time a ships captain makes first contact with a new species. it's part of why they have the prime directive.
Like, IRL, JAG-lady would have just interviewed Picard, maybe Riker or some of the other senior crew, Maybe consulted Troi. Sat down with Data and worked through whatever test would almost certainly exist for guidelines and then render a decision. (this technically would have been a deposition.) And that decision would have been "Maddox you're an ass for wasting our time with this shit." (maybe worded a bit more politely.)
The underlying purpose of the article is to show that while some in starfleet are... not as enlightened, most of starfleet is and it makes the right decisions. But like. nope nope. That this went that far shows they're not nearly as enlightened as they think they are.
Which could have been a very sinsister and subversive backplot that could have been amazing, I guess. but then they stuffed it down like it wasn't. (I mean, a lot of people in the US think our legal system is amazing and fair and enlightened. it's not.)
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.