I appreciate your comment might be a funny one. But I've been asking myself the same question recently (inspired by reading the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor) and thought I'd share my current view on it:
The Prime Directive is immoral!
It might have been a neat plot device, but in practice it would be tragic to meet a race capable of knowledge creation — people — and not share our knowledge to bring them to our level.
Imagine if a race of aliens with the knowledge to cure our diseases, give us fusion energy, and free us from the boundaries of a single planet was currently watching us in secret, just to see how long it will take us to figure that out for ourselves... They would be responsible for all the deaths and suffering that incurred in the meantime.
At a minimum, they should seek contact and exchange knowledge. There might be necessary learning curves, or resource constraints that bind them to a market mentality. But to simply ignore us? That would be bad for us and bad for them, too.
More people with the most up-to-date knowledge means more people able to solve the current problems.
But what about the Prime Directive!!
I appreciate your comment might be a funny one. But I've been asking myself the same question recently (inspired by reading the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor) and thought I'd share my current view on it:
The Prime Directive is immoral!
It might have been a neat plot device, but in practice it would be tragic to meet a race capable of knowledge creation — people — and not share our knowledge to bring them to our level.
Imagine if a race of aliens with the knowledge to cure our diseases, give us fusion energy, and free us from the boundaries of a single planet was currently watching us in secret, just to see how long it will take us to figure that out for ourselves... They would be responsible for all the deaths and suffering that incurred in the meantime.
At a minimum, they should seek contact and exchange knowledge. There might be necessary learning curves, or resource constraints that bind them to a market mentality. But to simply ignore us? That would be bad for us and bad for them, too.
More people with the most up-to-date knowledge means more people able to solve the current problems.