Kyle,
“but I’d rather we dumped the funds from our space exploration and focused instead on the oceans of Earth. We’ve got enough aliens and unexplored frontier right here on two-thirds of our pale blue dot”

Sigh. Why space exploration? Why is it always NASA&co that people target when they want their pet project funded.

Not once have I ever heard a space advocate bemoan the funding of Earth/Ocean Science. Not once have I heard them criticise research into animal language/behaviour. So why is our respect for other research rewarded by making us the target of contempt?

“The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

The link here is that is it that much easier to show that they can suffer if they can talk.

I won’t hesitate to point out that if intelligence or language is the currency by which we weigh moral value, than you inevitably leave out many members of the human community, such as newborn infants and the severely mentally disabled (excluding extremes like embryos and the irreversibly brain-dead). It also poses interesting thought-experiment problems for transhumanists, if unenhanced humans ever had to plead the case for their continued existence and autonomy before skeptical “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic”.

To comment on something else, I have also noticed and been annoyed by scenes, such as Han Solo’s dialogue with Jabba the Hutt, in which the human can understand alien and the alien can understand human, and they both can pronounce each others’ words, and yet Han still speaks Basic and Jabba still speaks Huttese.

I wonder if they’ll ask us to let them out of their cages and
back into the ocean?