 There's this nice book by a philosopher called David Miller called Philosophy for Earthlings. His approach to thinking about moral and political philosophy in general is to say, look, we want something that is, we want an account of morality and account of political philosophy that works for us given the way the world is, and it needs to take into account the sort of the empirical facts of the world. So, you know, if it's conceivable that something could, it's logically possible that something could happen, but it's very likely that it won't, then the thing that really matters is that it's very likely that it won't. I think thinking about these sorts of encounters with other species, with other sentient beings around the universe, regardless of how probable it is to actually occur, enables us to sort of put pressure on that idea, because we think, well, you know, if we put ourselves in another position, if we imagine ourselves encountering other species, imagine ourselves on other planets, it doesn't seem as though our ability to sort of understand morality, for example, completely drops out of the picture. You wouldn't think, okay, so now we're on Mars, and everything goes, we start afresh. We may have a completely different set of norms. Now it's okay for people to kill and assault one another. It wasn't okay on Earth, but now we're on Mars, it's okay. A lot of us would think, no, that's not plausible, actually there are some fundamental natural rights that obtain regardless of what planet you're on and would obtain regardless of what species you're engaging with. So I guess what it does is it forces you to think through how much of your approach to philosophy, how much of your approach to thinking about the world in general, is really contingently based on the way things happen to be here, and how much is based on more fundamental truths that would hold even if we vary those sorts of conditions. Now for my part, I think that there are these fundamental natural rights and that there can be sort of aspects of conventions that might change depending on the circumstances that we find ourselves in, but that you would always be able to drill down to some basic moral principles that would be universal, but that in itself is a contentious thesis and it's something that you can really think through by thinking through these sorts of examples.