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298 technologically advanced states, such as Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. There is no reason to suppose, warned Lamb, that a superintelligence would develop superlevels of compassion and empathy. Shostak acknowl- edged that technological supremacy is no guarantee of cultural refinement or moral virtuousness.”” Burke-Ward proposed a more subtle argument. Extraterrestrial intelli- gences may be civilized from their own perspective, yet may be dangerous to Humankind. It may not even be a question of intentional malice. Accord- ing to Pickover, Tsiolkovskii suggested that a superior species would pain- lessly eliminate animals on other worlds rather than seem them endure the sufferings of evolution.”! Ethics and Fishing The way humans treat dolphins is not reassuring. We enjoy their company, watching them perform like circus acrobats. A few of us try to communicate with them as if they were friends. Yet, we continue to kill them by the thousands when they get in the way of commercial fishing. Noting that dolphins do not use their great strength against humans despite the outrageous treatment they have received from us, Bruce Fleury speculated that this may indicate an advanced ethical system that might be shared on a planetwide basis. Another intelligent species may not be as quick to forgive.” Others have suggested more restrained claims about morality. To be intelligent beings also means to be moral beings, Musso argued, as that necessarily implies an ability to imagine different possible futures and an ability to choose among them rationally. However, he recognized that to be more advanced does not imply being more moral.”* Would aliens have values that we would recognize? Puccetti proposed that no community of intelligent organisms could achieve a technological civilization without certain values: the search for knowledge, the desire for truth, the willingness to subordinate individual interest to social aims for the common benefit. This implies some level of morality. There might be values shared by a potentially universal community of persons from which we are detached by the accidental dispersion of matter in the cosmos, suggested Puccetti. However, distance would be a major limiting factor; moral relations may not be possible in the case of perma- nent physical separation.” Mind-Stretcher: Ethicist Michael Gazzaniga proposed that there could be a universal set of biological responses to moral dilemmas—a sort of Assumptions: After Contact