Your girlfriend of 10 months tells you she has some news. She looks scared: “I’m pregnant,” you fear she says, yet the truth is much worse. She tells you that she was born on a colony on Mars—and thereby has alien DNA. You freak out, tell her to leave, block her number, and ghost her. You can’t believe you were dating an alien. In this short post, I hope to make the point that this is the wrong approach, and that very little of what makes us who we are has to do with just our DNA.

Let’s start with the hypothetical freak-out of the boyfriend of ten months. I’ll try to go through this hypothetical process in order to shed light on why this is the gut reaction of many people. I think it comes down to two things. First of all, if they are your girlfriend, no less one of 10 months, you probably trust them a significant amount. Revealing something so significant, like that they have part alien DNA, can signify a lack of trust in any relationship (even a friendship). So there is probably some mistrust and psychological shock that they are reeling from. However, things like that can be healed and are altogether less interesting than the ethical dilemma of how we treat humans vs. non-humans. From what I can assume, the hypothetical boyfriend would feel a massive amount of “othering” toward the girlfriend. In the same way that it is not socially acceptable to date an orangutan or a dog, we look down upon dating across species—this is something most of us take for granted. As the girlfriend reveals her true alien identity, a supposed impenetrable line is crossed.

However, the statement itself that we should not date across species doesn’t exactly apply to this scenario. Our societal restrictions have less to do with pure species classification and more with a perceived lack of intelligence, personality, emotional/psychological complexity, and appearance. We are against the idea of dating across species because doing so would be unnatural to our relationship norms. In a healthy relationship, we expect a partner who has the same mental capacities as us. No animals can really provide those qualities. Additionally, appearance-wise, we are evolutionarily calibrated to be attracted to things like us, ruling out the possibility (for most people…) of a non-human spouse. However, none of that applies to our scenario. The fact is that if you are dating this alien girlfriend, she is mostly indistinguishable from a normal human being. This means that any possible prejudices one had regarding cross-species dating should be thrown away. Since we do not have a current conception of aliens, in this example, an “alien” girlfriend should not be treated as something like a cat or dog, but rather just as another person, despite the exact DNA. The point is, if something has the mind and appearance of a human, they should be treated as one—if nothing was wrong in the past, it shouldn’t be changed in the future.

The obvious next logical chain of thought after this regards humans and robots. If, somewhere in the near future, a girlfriend suddenly tells you that she is a robot, should your reaction in pushing her away be as justified? The jury is still out on that one. Unlike the alien, a robot raises questions about consciousness and authenticity—do they really feel, or only simulate?