Are the Maquis doing the right thing?
Thanks for the lively discussion all! My take is that the sci fi elements mean you can’t cut and paste their experiences onto our morality exactly, but it makes the feeling of conflict relatable, at least emotionally.
I actually think habitable planets in the Star Trek universe are pretty rare. That is the easiest explanation as to why they go so far out of their way to not destroy habitable planets, despite clearly having the technology needed to just blow up planets willy-nilly like the Empire can in SW.
IDK, the universe is pretty vast, and they seem to be tripping over M class planets. Also, there are several other classes of planet available and they do some terraforming, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say they took a “not quite M-Class” planet and did a little terraforming and had that up for grabs.
Did any terraforming happen after Project Genesis and Kahn? I haven’t watched since Voyager, but I don’t remember them explicitly mentioning it in either TNG or DS9
They do plenty of terraforming adjacent tasks in TNG, mainly for planets that have recently joined the federation, or are undergoing some kind of collapse prevention. I think the issue with Project Genesis and similar is that they were “bombs” that would instantly overwrite the ecological system on a planet with a predetermined one, wiping out the existing ecological system in the process, to put plainly, killing everything.
The terraforming I’m talking about is stuff like earthquake mitigation, adjusting “atmospheric conditions” to stop greenhouse effects or similar, etc. And it’s all signed off in triplicate from the federation etc, not just lobbing a terraforming bomb at a planet on a whim.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Terraforming
New head canon: Project Genesis is the actual origin of Exterminaus in WH40K, and during the Dark Age of Technology they forgot how to do the terraforming bit, so it’s just a bomb that completely wipes out a planet.