Star Trek: What Is The Prime Directive?

gamerant.com:

The minds behind the now-gigantic Star Trek universe have created vast amounts of content for audiences to consume. Some of this includes the usual stuff like engaging storylines and a plethora of interesting, yet normally humanoid, alien races. However, they have also created in depth futuristic science and engineering theories based on then-current ideas of how technology developed. Often life imitated art (for example, with touch screens and virtual reality), but they also proposed a very factual set of rules and regulations for how politics would work on future earth, and consequently, the Federation. At the forefront of this is the Prime Directive, not only a very aptly name set of guidelines for all Starfleet and federation members, but also something that is brought up a lot throughout the franchise. But what exactly is it?

The Prime Directive is at the center of many episodes, and outlines a set of principles regarding first contact and noninterference with cultures who haven’t reached a certain level of technology — specifically, warp travel. This was the breakthrough that brought the logic obsessed Vulcans to earth in the first place. The exact wording of the directive is as follows: “No starship may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society.”

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The “development” part is the most crucial, and is the best way of explaining the reasons behind these regulations. The Federation believes that every species in the galaxy has to develop in its own time, a natural progression through the ages without any exposure to the vastly advanced technology available to those within the federation, or in fact any exposure to any other form of sentient life