re philosophy quest how boldly in article c assy ao fs ece cmu edu loss fs ece cmu edu doug loss writes analog sf magazine did an article on a similar subject quite a few years ago the question was if an alien spacecraft landed in washington d c what was the proper organization to deal with it the state department alien ambassadors the defense department alien invaders the immigration and naturalization service illegal aliens the department of the interior new non human species etc it was very much a question of our perception of the aliens not of anything intrinsic in their nature the bibliography for the article cited a philosophical paper the name and author of which i sadly forget i believe the author was italian on what constitutes a legal and or moral person i e a being entitled to the rights normally accorded to a person the paper was quite interesting as i recall this is a whole different situation if aliens were able to get here prior to us being able to get there one might conclude that they would be more advanced and therefore more intelegent that we are however if we get somewhere where there is life chances are we wont be able to communicate with them so we will have no clue as to weather they are intelegent or not i think you d have to be very careful here if the answer is yes the human track record on helping those poor underpriveleged cultures does underpriveleged mean not having enough priveleges is terrible the usual result is the destruction or radical reorganization of the culture this may not always be wrong but that s the way to bet that s a good point i hadn t thought of it that way my question however was more along the lines of every year the us spends millions of tax dollars and giving tax breaks to individuals and companies who feed the poor of foreign countries while thousands of our own people sleep on the streets at night would we give to the economicly dissadvantaged on another planet if we hadn t resolved these issues on our own but your comment brings up another good question over the years we have decided that certain cultures need improvements the native americans is a good example prior to our attempt to civilize them the native american culture had very little crime no homelessnes no poverty then the europeans came along and now they have those and more if we encounter life elsewhere do we tell them they have to live in houses farm the land and go to church on sunday have a day bobo
