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IT’S A FOOL WHO PLAYS IT COOL

January 7, 2008

ARTICLE 14.1 Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

December 14, 2007

The New York Times

A Third Option

To answer legal questions regarding the rights of extraterrestrial intelligences, we must think outside the box.

BY JANO MIRANDA

This week, protests in the capital spilled into violence as demonstrators in front of the White House, demanding accountability, clashed with police. The Cheney administration has seen a steady stream of resignations ever since President Cheney took office, and despite record-low approval ratings for the new president himself, he still refuses to address the topic at the center of these demonstrations: The people want to know the truth about First Contact.

I don’t condone what violence there has been, but we have to admit that the upset comes from a legitimate place. We still know almost nothing about the alien presence on Earth. Two months after President Bush resigned in disgrace, no new information has been released from those in power. What scant crumbs we do have at this moment come from the leaked memo that precipitated Bush’s resignation in the first place, the so-called Fremda Memo, which was published by my friend and colleague Nils Ortega via The Broken Seal. This memo effectively told us only that there are so-called ETIs (intelligent extraterrestrials) in federal custody, and they either cannot or will not communicate with us. But the purported reason for the delay in the release of what has up until now been confidential information isn’t the assumption that the public at large can’t handle the truth but instead the lack of legal status for any living ETIs inside the United States.

The de facto presumption right now, communicative or no, is that any intelligent extraterrestrial beings have existed and continue to exist in a sort of legal gray area, enjoying no real legal protections and beholden to no human law. Those on the left cry out against the former, those on the right cry out against the latter. And the rest of the world is similarly hamstrung, waiting and holding its breath to see what the United States will do, as the United States is, for the moment, the only country that actually knows what it is dealing with.

Regardless of what gets revealed about any ETIs, our first priority should be our own protection. A system of natural personhood was designed for humans, and we do not know what the consequences might be for allowing aliens, which, for all we know, possess vastly different intelligence and abilities from our own, into that system.

However, we likewise cannot assign extraterrestrial beings the legal status of animals, or of property. Protecting ourselves from abuses does not mean we should open the door for the abuse of others, now that we appear to be members of a galactic community. But that doesn’t mean we need to extend to any hypothetical extraterrestrial being, knowing absolutely nothing about their culture, their intelligence or even their civilization, the full scope of natural human rights. What then would follow? The right to citizenship? The right to vote? The right to marry? To own property, to play the stock market, to run for office? It may seem laughable, but in the United States, any natural person, provided they are of proper age and not in some violation of the law, can access some or all of these rights.