Your comment resonates with me a lot because I’ve thought about the same thing. As a communist when you think about the existence of actual alien intelligent life tomorrow the prospects are really bad. Humans aren’t capable of accepting another species that may be intellectually/morally/economically superior. As humans most people can’t even accept other humans in those situations.

And then when you think about the evolution of the next intelligent life form on earth, even disregarding the destruction of the environment, it is also pretty clear we are the dominant species in such a way that no intelligent life form could exist that resembles anything more than a human child level of intelligence because again we are simply not capable of understanding or handling the responsibility of co-existence.

People always wonder why we feel empathy for some animal suffering but allow other humans to suffer. I wont go into all the other reasons(and there are plenty) but one of them is undoubtedly that we know these animals are less intelligent, therefore “innocent”.

This is because we rely on agency to determine morality. Animals are perceived to not have agency because they are dumb. As soon as they are understood to be intelligent, some people will start to attribute agency to their actions and then you’ll see the shift in morality, now our actions will be(more) “justifiable”.