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Space Exploration Needs Extraterrestrial Ethics
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Andy Miah notes there's already international government policies taking hold on outer space — and a need for new ethical guidelines. 'For instance, what obligations do we owe to the various life forms we send there, or those we might discover? Can we develop a more considerate approach to colonizing outer space than we were able to achieve for various sectors of Earth?' And what rights do astronauts have? 'Could our inevitable public surveillance of their behavior become too much of an infringement on their personal privacy?' But more importantly, professor Miah notes that 'the goods of space exploration far exceed the symbolic value,' pointing out that 'A vast amount of research and development derives from space exploration ... For example, the United Kingdom's 2007 Space Policy inquiry indicated that the creation of space products contributes two to three times their value in GDP.'"
You only need "ethics" to guide your behavior when you are dealing with entities weaker than you.
When dealing with aliens, "terror" and "weakness" will be sufficient. With the occasional "being dissolved by acid blood" for the truly tricky situations...
Who let the facehugger have the baby!?!?!
Oh, yeah, there was an article too. Yeah, yeah, we need ethics, blah, blah. OK? Am I on-topic yet?
But I mean OMG WTF? The baby! It has a facehugger! Rescue it already!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Didn't the Federation already agree on the Prime Directive?
An interesting point. In this day and age, if we landed on a planet that had pigs and cows, we might "study their culture", or "bring them democracy", but we damn sure wouldn't be allowed to kill and eat them.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Let the ethicists at the first university in the asteroid belt work on these questions.
It's irrelevant until we get out there, and we're not out there.
I think you overestimate the diversity of life on Earth when compared to a hypothetical alien life.
Welcome our benign alien overlords.
On the other hand if the first aliens we meet are like the Borg or G'ould rather than Vulcans, then its irrelevent what our ethics are, we will be assimilated/conquered and or eaten.
May I suggest this rather simple but effective ethics:
Value sentience.
To the degree that something is sentient (has feelings) it is valuable and worth treating well (helping to feel good, helping to avoid suffering).
There are weird corner cases that are hard to figure out and certain issues that aren't clear (if you should decide to bring them up please realize that they're not really arguments against the idea), but as a foundation this is a pretty good system. It rises above the intellectual muck of "animal v. human" and provides a way to begin thinking about aliens and even artificial intelligence.
Unresolved issues: What is the relative worth between entities A and B when they have equal sentience but when A will live twice as long as B? What is the value of an entity that is certain to come into being but hasn't yet? What is the value of the process that can certainly cause an entity to come into being, but hasn't yet been undertaken? What is the value of an entity whose sentience has been practically put on pause due to reversible coma or suspended animation? How do you accurately (as opposed to intuitively) measure sentience?
"Don't be evil."
"Unless it's _really_ profitable."
The More You Know: It's not illegal to be a Communist.
It all seems rather obvious:
If they're more advance then it's their ethics that will dictate what happens.
If they're essentially equal (e.g. better than us in physics, worse in chemistry) then economics will dominate.
If they're less advance then we'll observe and debate until we figure out the best course of action.
In any case, the threat of biological contamination would necessitate nearly absolute isolation. A single invasive species (e.g. a microorganism) from either world would have the potential to devastate the other. So we wouldn't be landing and shaking hands, or crossbreeding or anything. (BTW, crossbreeding? We can't do that between species within a genus, let alone between organisms more distantly related than prokaryotes and eukaryotes.) The economics and logistics of space travel would dictate how much interaction would be practical and I see little reason as to why we wouldn't maximize that.
but my opinion is that we should leave any life-bearing planet alone. If a planet has conditions suitable for life, then chances are there will be life forms there. Chances are also that the forms of life there will be totally alien, not only in the movie cliche kind of way, but also down to the biochemical and genetic level. Any direct interaction between us and alien life would most probably have disastrous consequences for all. By all means, send a sterilized robotic probe and study them but no colonisation. Instead, we should confine ourselves to lifeless planets or asteroids, or even become space-nomads, living on huge motherships. If our civilization could finally manage to travel the gap between the stars, then we should have the technology to terraform a lifeless planet or asteroid or survive indefinitely in space. I don't really know what we should do if we meet any other sentient species. There are no precedents for this. We couldn't even understand different cultures of our own species. I think it might be a good idea if we ever become truly space-borne, to go out of our way from ever contacting or be detected by any other technologically advanced species.