Where you going there, little fellow?

I heard a story the other day on the radio, and now I know we are screwed as a species.  It was a rescue story about a pod of whales.  Some Humans had discovered a pod of whales heading for shallow water and gathered many other Humans to prevent the whales from going to a place where we knew that they would surely die.  Maybe people helped and I believe almost all of the whales were returned to the ocean, where they would be safe.  The story was told with such a positive note that I had trouble believing that none of the news staff understood the dire implications.

First off, the "rescuers" believed that the whales didn't know what they were doing.  That the Humans could look at the whales and know that they didn't intend to go into the shallow waters.  Maybe the whales had their reasons!  Maybe they were great whale explorers, swimming into uncharted waters, ready to claim a new area for their whale country.  Maybe they were planning on offing themselves because they had some disease that would kill the rest of whales if they came into contact with them.  Maybe they were suicide-whales hoping to take out some enemy creature.  The Humans involved didn't know nor care, they thought they knew better and took action then patted themselves on the back for a "good deed done" while this belief was probably the furthest thing from the Truth.

Secondly, the belief that the whales were doing something deadly or dangerous and that we had the moral obligation to prevent them, even if it stymied the whales' plans, whatever they were.  This is the one that will hurt the Humans the most.  Picture Humans in space, flying around, exploring and sending data back to the Home World - very valuable information that all Humans want and a few put themselves in potential harms way to gather.  But, the Aliens they meet will see the Humans as the Humans saw the whales.  If it is really a moral obligation to help out a species if the "greater" species knows better, any Aliens the Humans meet will simply return these lost people to their Home World, then tell all their Alien friends about how good they feel about themselves for helping the lost Humans by preventing them from possibly going somewhere dangerous.

We should proudly help the whales achieve their objective as we hope to some day be helped by a more advanced race.

The Edward