Dude, we jack off about first contact math abd how we would talk to aliens. Seti was(is?) A thing.

If we cant talk to fuckers whose antique bones my grandmother decorated her room with, whose grandmother read by the light of the burning flesh of? We have no god damn right to be calling ourselves intelligent or civilized as a species.

I said upgrade.

Let's make their bodies more enjoyable for us to see. If we never meet aliens, let's make them.

My so-called government just canceled nearly every space probe and scientific endeavor planned for the next decade, de-orbited two climate monitoring satellites for no reason other than performative politics, put a stop to windmill energy farms, effectively pardoned one of the worst sex traffickers in the world to avoid being found complicit, armed a genocide, and the supreme court is deciding on how legal it is to arrest someone for not being white.

I'mma say naw dog. The only way I could possibly condone uplifting any non-human creatures at this point is if they're designed to surpass us in every way and utterly overpower our species almost immediately so that we don't make it out into the stars. We are a scourge, a pox upon our world. I didn't even get into factory farming and what we're doing every day to animals for profit.

I say this as someone who grew up watching Star Trek and reading Sagan. The stars are not for us. We are the same horrible primates who smashed each others heads in with rocks for a million years before we discovered agriculture and money. Same creature, more complicated excuses to smash heads.