Prime Directive

In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Prime Directive is the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets. The Prime Directive, used in five of the six Star Trek-based series, prohibits Starfleet personnel from interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations. This conceptual law applies particularly to civilizations which are below a certain threshold of technological, scientific and cultural development; preventing starship crews from using their superior technology to impose their own values or ideals on them. Since its introduction in the first season of the original Star Trek series, it has served as the focus of numerous episodes of the various series. As time travel became a recurring feature in the franchise, the concept was expanded as a Temporal Prime Directive, prohibiting those under its orders from interfering in historical events.

The creation of the Prime Directive is generally credited to original-series producer Gene L. Coon, although there is some contention as to whether science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote of the Prime Directive in an unused script for the original series, actually came up with it first. The Prime Directive closely mirrors the zoo hypothesis explanation for the Fermi paradox.

One writer has argued that the directive reflected a contemporary political view of critics of the United States' foreign policy. In particular, the US' involvement in the Vietnam War was commonly criticized as an example of a global superpower interfering in the natural development of southeast Asian society, and the assertion of the Prime Directive was perceived as a repudiation of that involvement.

The first reference to the Prime Directive occurs in the February 1967 episode "The Return of the Archons." In this episode, Captain James T. Kirk and his crew encountered a planet which was enslaved 6,000 years earlier by a computer intelligence, its society stagnating into mechanical obedience. Asserting that the society it had been programmed to preserve was already effectively "dead" under its control (violating its own "prime directive" to protect it), Kirk argued the computer into self-destruction, then left behind a team of sociologists to help restore the society to a "human" form.

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