The rules said, do not contact those not ready for space flight. This culture was quite primitive, and religious. So the humans had to make a choice. Possibly risk interrupting the culture, and the religion, and rush in with their advanced tech to save the civilians before that huge quake they detected caused a tsunami that would wipe out almost the only large city on the entire planet, or sit back, do nothing as the rules dictated, and watch tens of thousands die? Damnit! -- Fighting Fit
There's a reason why more technologically advanced cultures try not to meddle with those still working out that -for example- fire is hot. It's embarrassing for both parties to discover that the benevolent god that saved them from, or showed them how to do something... was actually just some guy who decided to fix something that may or may not be broken.
Somewhere, there is an entire planet whose intelligent life owes their existence to a vending machine janitor named Dave[1].
And it's things like that that make moral quandries like this such an enormous problem. Submitted for introspection: the planet known to its natives as Shoal. They're working towards an industrial era and, thanks to an accident of geography, a large portion of the population is in one city.
It's on the largest island the planet has, backed up against a cliff and neighbouring -geographically speaking- a Krakatoa-class volcano.
The centre, as many Humans were wont to say, could not hold.
The UFTP, studying the planet for science, were having a debate about it. Sooner or later, the volcano would go up and cause a dangerous genetic bottleneck in the population. Not merely from the explosion, but also from the resultant tsunami that would devastate the primary city.
Was it more ethical to warn them somehow and potentially pollute their culture? Or to leave them to their own devices and let them struggle and suffer from the inevitable.
However you looked at it, it wasn't a great set of options.
Leave it to Humans to come up with a secret, third thing.
Thanks to intense studies with discreet drones and duck blinds, they came up with a plan. They used extant beliefs and superstition to concoct a series of events that would move most, if not all, residents out of the largest city before Volcano Day.
Unnatural lights in the sky. Sounds without source that played into extant superstitions. Warnings in their own language that death was coming to sweep the city off the surface of their world.
It worked. Ninety percent of the population distributed to other islands. The only hold-outs being the skeptics, the stubborn, and those with a severe profit motive, and even then, they had emergency kits.
When Volcano Day hit, the city was almost leveled to the ground. Those who were still there were lucky to survive, and largely dependent on their kits until sympathetic aid arrived from the outlying land masses.
It would be a bizarre and unexplainable event in their history. One that may yet be forgotten by the time the Shoalians made their way into meeting with the Alliance.
And even if it wasn't forgotten, the Humans would never own up to it.
[1] Let me know if you get this reference.
[Photo by Harry Shelton on Unsplash]
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