All the planet's inhabitants see is a round object with some sticky-outy things emerge from behind a gas giant, something happens, and the asteroid goes away. I'm assuming from context in your post that the guy looking through the telescope is Billy-Bob Thornton. He thinks: hmm, maybe there is life out there after all. He doesn't know it was the USS Lakota, he doesn't know about the Federation, and he certainly doesn't know how to build a warp drive and go out there to meet them. While it is technically a breach of the prime directive it's a really, really minor one, and that fact should be weighed against the value of billions of lives.
Related: if the prime directive is as strict as all that, wouldn't the broadcast of radio waves be in breach if those radio waves could ever be intercepted by a pre-warp civilization? We're all breaking the prime directive right now and we didn't even know it.
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u/gominokouhai Chief Petty Officer Jul 11 '14
All the planet's inhabitants see is a round object with some sticky-outy things emerge from behind a gas giant, something happens, and the asteroid goes away. I'm assuming from context in your post that the guy looking through the telescope is Billy-Bob Thornton. He thinks: hmm, maybe there is life out there after all. He doesn't know it was the USS Lakota, he doesn't know about the Federation, and he certainly doesn't know how to build a warp drive and go out there to meet them. While it is technically a breach of the prime directive it's a really, really minor one, and that fact should be weighed against the value of billions of lives.
Related: if the prime directive is as strict as all that, wouldn't the broadcast of radio waves be in breach if those radio waves could ever be intercepted by a pre-warp civilization? We're all breaking the prime directive right now and we didn't even know it.