Page Content (OCR)
299 ethics—built into human brains.”> Would aliens who emerged from entirely different evolutions share these responses, or would theirs be different? Would post-biological intelligences lack such responses weet The day that communication is established, predicted dolphin researcher John Lilly, the other species becomes a legal, ethical, moral, and social problem. Do we have any moral obligations to extraterrestrials? Do they have any moral obligations to us? It depends, cautioned Ruse. Are they enough like us that any kind of moral discourse is possible? If the possibil- ity of some sort of reciprocal altruism is there, morality might emerge; otherwise it may not.” Several people have warned that we should not assume that the ethics of extraterrestrials will be like our own; Regis went so far as to argue that aliens may not have any such thing as ethics.”’ Are we prepared to accept all forms of social organization and all forms of behavior as equally worthy of respect? How would we react if we learned that some aspects of an alien society were deeply repugnant? We know nothing about good and evil in the context of extraterrestrial civilizations. As McKay pointed out, the Copernican Principle is not estab- lished with respect to biology, culture, or ethics.’ No instinct can be shown to have been produced for the good of other animals. wae on + 00 The competition for limited resources is what leads to improved species. —Frank Drake, 1974!°° Many contact optimists assume that scientific and technological advance go hand in hand with beneficence. Extraterrestrials are expected to show sympathetic concern for our well-being, even a parental sense of responsibility. United States Congressman George Brown, a scientifically trained man who was Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology, predicted that more advanced aliens would be altruistic teachers. They would look on us as children who need to be encouraged to develop further.'” The authors of Project Cyclops were more cautious. We might argue, albeit anthropocentrically, that compassion, empathy, and respect for life correlate positively with intelligence. However, counterexamples are not hard to find.” They Will Be Altruistic They Will Be Altruistic —Charles Darwin”