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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Relations with Extraterrestrial Life | ||
| Instructions to earth citizens on how to behave when encountering alien civilizations. |
This is the earliest reference to the idea of a non-interference directive, or as it is called in the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive, that I know about.
The two sections of a chapter citing regulations on relationships with aliens arise in the following contexts: the first instance arose when semi-sentient trees and other vegetation was seeking to either kill or disable the Earth citizens.
In the second, several Earth citizens were trying to dig up and take back to Earth some semi-sentient trees.
| "Section 17 of the chapter on Relations with Extraterrestrial Life. No employee of this company may employ weapons against or otherwise injure or attempt to injure or threaten with injury any inhabitant of any other planet except in self-defense and then only if every means of escape or settlement has failed.
"Section 34 of the chapter on Relations with Extraterrestrial Life. No member of this company shall interfere in any phase of the internal affairs of another race. |
| Technovelgy from Ogre,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1944 Additional resources -
|
The basic idea of the Prime Directive is that no interference with other civilizations is allowed. It is primarily used in situations when Federation starships or personnel contact new alien civilizations.
However, this is pretty clearly what Simak has in mind. I don't know if this is the first reference to this idea in sf, but it obviously antedates the usage in Star Trek by a generation.
Devoted readers of Clifford Simak, a gentle humanist genius, are probably not surprised that he would think about this.
Here's an example of the opposite idea, from Nocturne by Wallace West, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1950:
“Yah !” Percy's face resembled a well-buttered beet by this time, and he was in no mood for compromise. “If we should find grasshoppers when we land on Jonah, I suppose you’ll insist they are intelligent and make us teach them how to jump farther..."
Readers of H. Beam Piper may also be thinking about Little Fuzzy; the plot revolves around the question of what sapience really is, and how should we treat the life we find on distant worlds.
Compare to the Noninterference With Other Worlds from In the Deep of Time (1879) by George Parsons Lathrop, the law of contact from Orphans of the Void (1952) by Orville Shaara, the Prime Directive from With Folded Hands (1947) by Jack Williamson, the treatment of extramundane aborigines from Symbiotica (1943) by Eric Frank Russell and alien self-government from Co-Operate or Else (1942) by A.E. van Vogt.
Shiela dropped her flippant tone, “We had to help the Centaurans. You know as well as I do that our charter requires us to give aid and comfort to any intelligent beings we may encounter.”
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
