PD is a Federation core value, not merely a rule for starship captains.
Those early estimates explicitly warned us that they might be underestimates, too, as I recall...
The Ittick-ka may well reply (under Dark Forest doctrine) that this doesn't make them safe, it makes them "not found out." In particular, they are so far outside the reach of most of the major powers that until a few years ago, said major powers were largely unaware of their existence. Since they were not detected until they became strong enough to resist being annihilated casually, the fact that they were not annihilated proves little.
My understanding is that interfering in pre-warp societies tends to result in cultural annihlation.
A culture with Warp Travel is in a sense a peer to the Federation, as well as other warp-capable civilizations.
Nonsense. Societies don't cease to exist. They change, sure, but change isn't a bad thing. Nothing says this people can't reclaim their traditions later, or mix their stuff with ours. Unless we went out of our way to eliminate all records of it of course but why would we, there's no point in it.
I happen to remember somebody somewhere in this forums having a rant on the resilience of oral storytelling traditions... The point of it was basically that they are pretty damn resistant and can last thousands of years. So I'm not too concerned. So long as nobody kills this people there should be no reason for them to lose anything unless everybody who knows it decides they don't care to pass it on, which is pretty unlikely.
So long as they aren't fucking it up by trying to force their own cultural norms on the natives (which they have been implied to be doing) then yes, that's pretty much what I'm saying.
Well eradication isn't that hard to identify, since it means it's all gone. I've been maintaining that exposing one culture to another doesn't have to lead to destruction unless genocide or serious cultural oppression happens.
Funerals will still happen, our tech is not that good and you know it. Death is postponed, not stopped. Religions are stubbornly resistant things, and can change and reinterpret their texts if needed, their believers will keep them alive. Maybe they'll focus on the aspects of their religion that deal with moral behaviors instead?
Clearly some people want to talk about various broader points, otherwise this discussion wouldn't be happening in the first place. The PD situation already happened, the court-martial isn't going to involve us, and such will be the case for every PD situation in the future of the quest. And yet people are still talking about what just happened and whether who was in the right or the wrong and why they might have been in the right or the wrong. Demanding "relevancy" for everything is so far off-base that it isn't even tilting at windmills. Hell, if everything had to be relevant to something we wouldn't have this quest in the first place. What relevancy does it possibly have to real life? Why are you in this thread at all? It is enough that some people think that these discussions are interesting.
PD says dont. Double the lifespan is a massive change on nearly every level, and we have no right to force it on them. It is also very much not always a positive change.
I disagree.
The interesting thing is that your answer moves the debate out of the realms of morality and ethics. The argument is now one of engineering, asking whether this is an effective way to increase quality-of-life or satisfy values.
A single captain can ruin everything. Far more easily than they can fix anything, in fact; I'm fairly sure that at least one post in this thread argued that the captain of the Whale has in fact ruined everything. So there's probably an element of deterrence to this decision; the Federation refusing to throw its weight around walls off many of the most effective courses of action, biasing intervention toward worse outcomes and reducing the expected value of those actions. Of course, the question is whether this is the right way to do this. Replacing the double-yellow no-passing lines with road spikes would certainly discourage passing, but are there better alternatives?
