Reflection: Manifest Destiny

We as Americans spend an awful lot of time talking about basic human rights. The phrase "inalienable rights" shows up in our Declaration of Independence, and the United Nations has an entire council devoted to ensuring that foreign countries provide their citizens with freedom and access to basic civil liberties and human rights. The problem with this is a fundamentally ethnocentric one that we have not yet encountered, as Earthlings, because the dominant species on this planet (from our perspective) communicates entirely within itself. We don't ask the dolphins about basic human rights, or the bonobos about their civil liberties. Mind you, it's recently been proven that dolphins actually kill baby porpoises--which are not in any kind of competition for food--for apparently no reason: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3323070/Killer-dolphins-baffle-marine-experts.html

and certain chimpanzees have also been found to develop forms of weaponry: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201007.html

What I'm trying to say is, what happens when we encounter a race that, for whatever reason, has fundamental differences in what it determines to be the basic rights of its citizens, people, etc? What do we do then?

It's something that Star Trek brought up, and something I vaguely remembered from some Star Wars novel where that obnoxious Bothan politician mentions that the New Republic is pretty racist because of the basic dichotomy they present: humans v. aliens. Whereas to any other species we are technically the aliens. But it works for now because humans, in a very bizarre way, like the feeling of being alone in the universe. We feel superior on our own planet (although, if you believe Douglas Adams, we should be pretty suspicious of the mice [and clearly the dolphins]) and believing ourselves to be the one, technologically advanced, intelligent species in existence makes it a lot easier to cope with how ethnocentric and conceited we really are. It reminds me, actually, of this scene in one of the Hitchhiker books, where Zaphod Beeblebrox enters the Total Perspective Vortex, which is supposed to reduce him to bits by the sheer vastness of infinity. Instead, he emerges feeling quite swell, as the Vortex confirmed what he knew all along: that he was the center of the universe.

When we talk about space colonization, too, most accounts of it have a perfectly natural extension of this idea, and it's kind of what Manifest Destiny (and Manifest Destiny) is all about. We are the center of the universe, and as such, when we decide to spread our gifts of civilization and humanity to other worlds, we are doing everybody else a colossal favor.