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Comment by jmts | Hacker News Reader

The dynamics of this situation are weird. Leave them uncontacted for however long out of principle, monitor them from above, commit to preserving their culture, but then intervene and try to manufacture a truce between tribes (thereby interfering with their culture) because we want to keep them around.

"Hey guys, uh, you know, we were pretty happy to just let you do whatever, but we've been watching you for a while and you've started taking risks. We're not real fond of risks. Would you prefer not taking risks for us please? It would make us feel much better about letting you do whatever you like if you didn't take any risks."

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The prime directive lover in me tends to agree with such logic (I am also a brazilian born/raised in the Amazon) but try to extrapolate that scenario to some extraterrestrial "overlords" telling us the same thing in a pre-nuclear winter situation. I would rather stick to their plan than risk my own ass. Of course, I know, that's a reductio ad absurdum type of argument but still...

Ironically, I wouldn't mind if aliens came down and told us we were being stupid some time soon...

We would still have to listen, however.

Would we?

If we're foolish enough to get to the point of self-destruction in the first place...

I feel like they are late....

But the reason for intervention isn't just "risks" but the decimation of an uncontested population due to disease caused by a previous intervention. In other words, it seems as though the "prime directive" has already been violated and this is damage control.

I understand that we might now feel obliged to intervene. I think the weirdness for me comes from the fact that we are watching them, and the paradoxes it introduces.

If we weren't watching them, they would potentially go to war, some of them would likely die, and there is a chance that more would die of disease. But we would be none the wiser.

But since we are watching, we perceive a risk that they don't, and we now feel an obligation to mitigate that risk through intervention. We want them to be independent but they are our dependents. We want them to be free but we must restrict their movements. We want them to be untouched by disease but must expose them to it in order to minimise exposure. We take pride in the fact they are untouched yet we must touch them in order to maximise their untouchedness. It is weird.

There's a great sci-fi world based around this premise, called The Culture Series by Iain Banks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)

They haven’t been left uncontacted for some prime directive like reasoning. It is because the every time it has happened before the primitive tribesmen die from exposure to our germs which thy have no antibodies for.

Right. We're treating them like zoo animals. What kind of existence is that?

It's an existence with no meaning like any other.

I'm upset by the whole thing for the reason of how some people think isolation is appropriate in allowing this situation to even occur. It's maddening to think a more advanced civilization in space could be observing us in similar fashion as these people with their kids and who have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world. Ugh.. seems so cruel.

And groups like the Amish show that it's possible to uphold traditional ways of life even when exposed to modernity. The Amish let their teenagers live in the outside world for a few years and decide for themselves whether they want to return to the community or become generic Americans. The strategy seems to work: the Amish are growing tremendously.

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