Remove ads

To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

Linked contents
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
Reader mode
I really hope the Shanpurr's attempt at uplifting their protectorates did not also include *biological* uplift. I mean, it would be so tempting to throw in something to fix that socially inconvenient sexual dimorphism, or bump up their abnormally low social cognition, or someothersuch technobabble, along with normal antibiotics and gene therapy.

I mean, it would be one way for their uplift to not give them their first experience in violence (if they're editting that out of the target species genome)...
 
Last edited:
Yech, I'm getting to really dislike the term "uplift". It's a bad word that rolls way too many things together into a package of assumptions that probably shouldn't be made.

Don't say "uplift", people!
 
Kolar said:
Give some alternatives then.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Coach? I like 'coach.'

Jrin said:
I prefer to do diplomatic push for info since intel reports are for our opponents.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I get the informal feeling that we get a different kind of information from diplomatic pushes. Also, diplomatic pushes cost 20pp while intelligence reports are for free, so there are cases where, given a choice, the intelligence report seems like a better choice.

fasquardon said:
And this quest had been doing so well at portraying Vulcans as reasonable people.

An entire city is disrupted, the power grid knocked offline (if this didn't kill anyone, the Vulcans are genius safety engineers - losing all power in a modern human city would kill thousands of the city's inhabitants as critical machinery was without power at the wrong moment and for just long enough to kill by lack of ventilation in constrained spaces, by exhaustion as the old or the ill are trapped in the wrong places for too long, by heatstroke, etc, ect).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
To be fair, I bet the Vulcans are genius safety engineers, in addition to having a more cautious outlook on life as a function of their greater longevity. But I do take your meaning about the militarization point.

And this shows us that the Shanpurr are not the fuzzy corporeal beings they appear to be, but are instead higher dimensional life forms going incognito.

I am joking of course. But I do think you are somewhat misrepresenting what "Dunbar's Number" actually is (I think unintentionally). It is a limit on the processing power of a meat-computer that needs to fit inside a human skull. While the impact of "Dunbar's Number" may be different in the Shanpurr, their brains will also have physical limits and this will have impacts on how Shanpurr deal with very large social groups, just as "Dunbar's Number" has an impact on human behaviour in very large groups.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If their ingroup/outgroup distinction is weak enough, the impact is significantly reduced.

Also, maybe their neural circuitry is such that they can process much higher numbers of people in shallow memory storage, and store extremely large numbers of people in 'deep memory,' so that the effective value of their Dunbar's Number is in fact vastly larger?

This is a common trope in space opera, but I would like to point out that this is basically impossible. It's like rolling a billion dice and most of them coming up 1 when the laws of entropy dictate that there should be roughly equal numbers of each die face.

Most all herbivores eat other animals (mostly insects) as small but important parts of their diet. (Similarly most all carnivores eat small but important numbers of plants in their diets.) The only animals that do not eat other animals on Earth are highly specialized feeders like butterflies (though even that may be a bad example, since the larvae are much less choosy eaters). As a consequence, it takes an extremely brief amount of evolutionary time (as little as hundreds of thousands of years) for herbivores to evolve into predators and vice versa. The ecological niche is easy to fill, but this background on the Shanpurr is implying that somehow on the Shanpurr homeworld the laws of physics that underpin biology are working differently.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Describing the Shanpurr as herbivores in a summary document does not mean they don't occasionally swallow a bug or something. "Remember to take your vitamin grub" can be a thing.

Not to mention, on Earth detritivores at least equal and often exceed herbivores in number. What is eating the dead things on the Shanpurr homeworld?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Presumably the Shanpurr equivalent of termites, worms, flies, and so on. A report largely focused on summary-level information about the broad outlines of Shanpurr biology is likely

As for aggression, even among animals that are not aggressive for the purpose of eating, aggression is used for other things. Horny male herbivores fighting for mates or territory being prime examples.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
With a bit of tweaking of the duration of the various phases, the Shanpurr sequentially hermaphroditic life cycle may significantly reduce the proportion of males, to fertile females. It may also make the idea of the males securing territory farcical.

Which leads me back to my theory that the Shanpurr are higher dimensional life forms on holiday. Their home planet isn't a natural ecosystem - it is a park!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I can go with the "ascended Iconian petting zoo animals" hypothesis, though.

AKuz said:
It actually occurs to me that Office 0 /DTI, probably has a dude whose only job is to keep all the tenses straight in their documents.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Leslie:

"No."

[beat]

"They have eighty-three."
 
UberJJK said:
On the topic of uplifting; to me this comes down to a question of ethical priorities. How much is culture worth compared to the lives that make up it?

In 1800 it is believed that almost half (43%) of all children born died before reaching their fifth birthday. In the United States alone there were an estimated 300,000 children born in the year 1800. Extrapolating that out gets approximately 55,000,000 children born in 1800. So during that time period we're talking around 23,650,000 children born every year who would not live to see their fifth birthday.

Hell even today (technically 2015) we've still got a childhood mortality rate of 4.3% which means of the 131,400,000 babies born every year there are still around 5,650,200 who don't make it to their fifth birthday.

That's not even getting into the various other easily prevented causes of death with the Federation's level of technology.

So the question becomes; at what point does the suffering and death prevented balance out the loss of culture?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There is a counterargument I would like to point out, as something of a Q's advocate.

Everyone dies of something, sooner or later, even with Star Trek technology. Deaths are not prevented, only deferred. Lives are hopefully made greatly happier in the process- but it's easy to imagine a situation where the attempt to defer deaths in the present undermines long term happiness of both the current and future members of the species to a great degree.

Because if we take the "prevent all death" approach and treat it as an ultimate utilitarian good, always seeking to do people favors, things can get problematic if we take the idea to its fullest possible conclusion.

There's an important line that has to be drawn at the place you identify, between "we're just hurting the Yogbonians' development" and "we're saving the Yogbonians from disaster."

But we ALSO have to draw a line between "we're saving the Yogbonians from disaster" and "we're destroying everything that makes the Yogbonians Yogbonian, in the name of maximizing the number of living Yogbonians, while inviting the question "so, why is it even a good thing for there to be Yogbonians, as opposed to just having more humans or Apiata or Shanpurr or Klingons in the galaxy? What makes them so special?"

TyrialFrost said:
is it even possible to have a +60pp success? or just a -60pp failures?

was that a critical failure? or can we look forward to 120pp penalties?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The worst thing that ever happened to us as a pure blown event check, so far as I know, was our war with the Sydraxians. I'm pretty sure that if we tallied up all associated costs, -60pp is grossly underestimating the costs.

Remember that we pass the great majority of event checks, an the proportion is likely to get higher, not lower, in the future. If the penalties aren't significantly worse than the bonuses, we'll hardly even feel them.

Nervos Belli said:
First off thanks for linking that piece on High Modernism, that was actually very interesting. Although it's worth mentioning that even the author of that piece admits that for every example of an external power imposing their rules and regulations without regard for local circumstances that went horribly wrong, there was one where it went fine and everyone benefited.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think it's more accurate to say that interventions went better or worse depending on how much comprehension of local conditions the external overlords had.

Like, when the French revolutionaries arbitrarily imposed the meter and so on upon the people of France, they knew what they were doing, because their lived experience and that of generations of their ancestors included all this weirdness and fuckery involving nonstandard units of measure throughout France.

When 'scientific' foresters arbitrarily imposed neat rectangular grids of Norwegian spruce or whatever on the timber industry of Europe, they did not know what they were doing, and were enacting policies wildly at odds with the lived experience of people who actually spent their lives in forests.

And so on.

I think there's a line that can be drawn, somewhere between "All buildings must be rectangles of X dimensions", and "We've got a cure for a disease ravaging your people, but we don't want to interfere in your development". Making a guess as to motivations of the other two, the Padani are big on control and threat neutralization, and see a guided uplifting as a peaceful way to ensure that a species won't pose a threat to them. The Shanpurr it's less clear, but I get the impression they aren't used to lots of differing viewpoints and have a strong societal tendency towards unity and collectivism, which they've assumed is universal. Neither of those are fundamentally incompatible with the Federation, in my opinion.

Rather than drawing away from the Shanpurr and Padani because of this, I'd prefer if we tried to discuss our differing views like rational species and see if we can work out a better set of guidelines. The number of times Starfleet has to skirt, work around, or openly defy the Prime Directive makes it clear to me it's not a perfect rule, so why not take an opportunity to fine-tune it?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't disagree.

Glassware said:
We have one. It's called "cultural genocide."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Now that is a comment so harsh as to violate the principle of charity. Giving someone new tools does not automatically destroy their culture, and certainly doesn't maliciously destroy their culture.
 
Klaus said:
Also, I object to devaluing the word "genocide" by using it in any context that doesn't reference a massive body-count. "Cultural Imperialism" should convey the idea.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Except that is is a form of genocide.

That is to say, it's the destruction of a people as a people. Give it long enough and these people won't be whatever they were, but they're Shanpurr in all ways but body. Their cultural identity is dead, all that they identified themselves with lost in favour of something different and distinctly not them and strictly speaking not quite by their own choice simply because of the sheer pressure that can be exerted by someone who holds the medical and logistical advantage.

Now, are the Shanpurr doing that deliberately?

I'm not sure. But malice and incompetence can be nearly impossible to distinguish if the situation is bad enough.
 
Hazard said:
Except that is is a form of genocide.

That is to say, it's the destruction of a people as a people. Give it long enough and these people won't be whatever they were, but they're Shanpurr in all ways but body. Their cultural identity is dead, all that they identified themselves with lost in favour of something different and distinctly not them and strictly speaking not quite by their own choice simply because of the sheer pressure that can be exerted by someone who holds the medical and logistical advantage.

Now, are the Shanpurr doing that deliberately?

I'm not sure. But malice and incompetence can be nearly impossible to distinguish if the situation is bad enough.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Neolithic Cultures die out anyway, like the Native Americans encountered during the colonial era were likely nothing like the Pre-historic people that came over the Russia/Alaska land bridge. Untill you get to relatively modern eras, the death of cultures is something that WILL happen as nations die and colonial and Imperial powers make their presence known. Is the death of a culture a good thing that should be celebrated? No. But am I going to fault two potential allies(one a major power) for their point of view here? No.
 
Hazard said:
Except that is is a form of genocide.

That is to say, it's the destruction of a people as a people. Give it long enough and these people won't be whatever they were, but they're Shanpurr in all ways but body. Their cultural identity is dead, all that they identified themselves with lost in favour of something different and distinctly not them and strictly speaking not quite by their own choice simply because of the sheer pressure that can be exerted by someone who holds the medical and logistical advantage.

Now, are the Shanpurr doing that deliberately?

I'm not sure. But malice and incompetence can be nearly impossible to distinguish if the situation is bad enough.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Nooot really.

Because know what malicious action with the tech edge in play her looks like: That planet where the Orion Empire left an automated system that coerced everyone into slaving away producing weapons for them.
 
Well, to get away from whether we ought to call it genocide, what shall we do?

I would propose that we first get more information on what is going on and then apply our greater knowledge about first contact scenarios to nudge the Shanpurr into giving the natives more room to develop in their own ways. Basically, we go nosy grandmother on the Shanpurr. I think this would be an approach to which the Shanpurr should be recptive and that can resolve the problem without violence.

Applying military force seems rather hypocritical to me, as we have let the Cardassians get away with much worse things on Bajor.
 
Klaus said:
That doesn't really cover the technology aspect though.

Also, I object to devaluing the word "genocide" by using it in any context that doesn't reference a massive body-count. "Cultural Imperialism" should convey the idea.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cultural Genocide is a real term used in real spaces to discuss real, lasting, centuries-long damage from institutions such as residential schools. It's not devaluing the term genocide when discussing the specific and lasting damage of the institutions that perpetuate it.

When discussing things like residential schools and the banning of the potlatch, which were literally rooted in a policy of extermination of unique culture, I can't think of a more fitting term.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Because if we take the "prevent all death" approach and treat it as an ultimate utilitarian good, always seeking to do people favors, things can get problematic if we take the idea to its fullest possible conclusion.

There's an important line that has to be drawn at the place you identify, between "we're just hurting the Yogbonians' development" and "we're saving the Yogbonians from disaster."

But we ALSO have to draw a line between "we're saving the Yogbonians from disaster" and "we're destroying everything that makes the Yogbonians Yogbonian, in the name of maximizing the number of living Yogbonians, while inviting the question "so, why is it even a good thing for there to be Yogbonians, as opposed to just having more humans or Apiata or Shanpurr or Klingons in the galaxy? What makes them so special?"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yes. After all, "everybody dies" also applies to cultures. Everything that makes Yogbonians Yogbonian is also doomed to change sooner or later, external intervention or not. Things are always different, and every person who lives to grow old dies in a vastly changed world from when they were young.

Which is why it's an argument so difficult to have in generalities and that can really only be addressed in the specifics.
 
MS-21H 'Hawke' said:
Neolithic Cultures die out anyway, like the Native Americans encountered during the colonial era were likely nothing like the Pre-historic people that came over the Russia/Alaska land bridge. Untill you get to relatively modern eras, the death of cultures is something that WILL happen as nations die and colonial and Imperial powers make their presence known. Is the death of a culture a good thing that should be celebrated? No. But am I going to fault two potential allies(one a major power) for their point of view here? No.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

While it's true that the American cultures encountered during the colonial era were likely nothing like the neolithic cultures preceding them, they adapted on their own accord to their own circumstances without being forced to adapt by an outside power attempting to stamp out their culture either through deliberate effort or by sheer advantage.

The Shanpurr are of the opinion they know better than the native species what those species should be like. That's dangerous ground to be treading ethically speaking, very dangerous. As Old Iron noted, things like Residential Schools are part of such attitudes, as well as forced religious conversion, the forbidding of cultural practices and a host of other things. That the Shanpurr are being kinder in their ways than most does not necessarily mean they are not murdering a people's spirit as surely as they would be if they were putting any dissidents up against the wall.

I can and will fault them for it.

pheonix89 said:
Nooot really.

Because know what malicious action with the tech edge in play her looks like: That planet where the Orion Empire left an automated system that coerced everyone into slaving away producing weapons for them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Just because it's done with the best of intentions to the weaker side doesn't mean it's not malicious. Sufficiently careless kindness is indistinguishable from malice because of the sheer lack of care for the receiving party. There's a reason medical ethics exist, and why the Federation holds the Prime Directive so closely.
 
Hazard said:
Just because it's done with the best of intentions to the weaker side doesn't mean it's not malicious. Sufficiently careless kindness is indistinguishable from malice because of the sheer lack of care for the receiving party. There's a reason medical ethics exist, and why the Federation holds the Prime Directive so closely.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Wrong.

Malice: the intention or desire to do evil; ill will.

If something is done with the best of intentions it is BY DEFINITION not malicious. Words mean things. Malice and good intentions are mutually exclusive.
 
Iron Wolf said:
Cultural Genocide is a real term used in real spaces to discuss real, lasting, centuries-long damage from institutions such as residential schools. It's not devaluing the term genocide when discussing the specific and lasting damage of the institutions that perpetuate it.

When discussing things like residential schools and the banning of the potlatch, which were literally rooted in a policy of extermination of unique culture, I can't think of a more fitting term.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I am aware that people do that, but just because they chose to use a particular label to encourage people to think about the subject in a particular way doesn't mean I agree with that choice. I'm not saying that using that term is technically wrong, merely registering my objection to the practice.
EDIT:
Not technically wrong when applied to culture that is. My comment about it not covering the technology portion of the word "uplift" was separate.

Hazard said:
Just because it's done with the best of intentions to the weaker side doesn't mean it's not malicious.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It kind of does. That's how "malicious" is defined. It may of course still be harmful. The road to hell, and all that.

EDIT
Gingganz said:
Well, to get away from whether we ought to call it genocide, what shall we do?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think someone earlier in the thread of basically nailed it: our anthropologists and diplomats just show them our big book of "how intervention went wrong" and let them handle it from there.
 
Last edited:
Hazard said:
Just because it's done with the best of intentions to the weaker side doesn't mean it's not malicious.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Uh, I'm pretty sure that "has bad intentions" or "has bad intentions to the weaker side" is the DEFINITION of "malicious."

If words mean anything and conversation is even possible, then sometimes you have to resist the urge to apply a nasty-sounding word to a sitaution you don't like. Even when the word sounds nasty and the situation seems nasty.

"Malicious" refers specifically to acts taken with the intent to cause harm, or the desire to prey upon one group to the benefit of another group. It does not refer to actions genuinely taken with the intent to do good, or to benefit the party being 'helped' at the expense of another group.

This is why we even have a word for "malicious," as opposed to merely using words like "bad" to mean the exact same thing.

Sufficiently careless kindness is indistinguishable from malice because of the sheer lack of care for the receiving party.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
No, pretty sure I can tell them apart. The results may be similar in some ways, but when you're watching them happen they're visibly different even if they lead to similar results in a hypothetical scenario.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top