This story has some neat ideas, but it seems odd to me that two people in an organization dedicated to finding and contacting alien life, who clearly believe in their organization's mission, would be so xenophobic
Like if we discovered alien life that took a form we'd never believed was possible, I imagine there'd be people who would be hostile or repulsed, but I'd expect SETI to be like "holy shit break out the champagne, we made the discovery of a lifetime"
I think it's playing with the "Too Alien" or "Zoo" hypotheses of the Fermi Paradox. Ideally an interstellar org would be open to altruism, but a story playing off of human norms and anxieties would be able to put the argument under a spotlight. We're used to encountering and studying indigenous cultures and endangered species, often isolating or more often integrating them into our world on our whims and not theirs. Perhaps solar plasma beings are more "civilized", maybe they have something more interesting to say or give back to the universe. The interstellar community deciding that for them is not a prescription of the right thing to do but a description of our own prejudices.
Oh, I wasn't taking the story as prescriptivist or anything. Their reaction just felt at odds with what I would expect one to infer about them based on their backgrounds and jobs.
Like if I cared enough about discovering and contacting alien civilizations to dedicate my life to it and I found a species that broke what was previously considered an immutable rule of biology, my reaction would probably not be "how horrible, I'm going to pretend I never saw that" but rather "holy shit this is the most exciting thing I've ever seen, I'm gonna tell everybody"
If for example one of the characters were the scientist responsible for studying humans and wanted to share their findings, and the other were a xenophobic bureaucrat saying "dude you're weird, we don't want anything to do with those gross meat creatures, pursue something else or we'll kick you out of the club" the story would make more sense to me.
That would be a pretty neat way to write it, tbh. Though libs tend to use the rational libertarian science guy as the main character in their stuff (or supporting the main character). I'm not sure what kind of nuance you'd want to have for a lefty take...
One possible approach might be to draw an analogy to, for example, popular mainstream liberal animal welfare movements and how they treat "ugly" species. Biologists who study wetlands will waste no time telling you that we shouldn't be draining them and that frogs and snakes are as worth preserving as any other wildlife, but they struggle to get funding and support because a lot of mainstream animal rights groups are filled to the brim with libs who don't consider the issue beyond "save cute cats and dogs, swamp animals icky and bad"
Nothing inherently wrong with a scientist character being right just because :so-true: epic bacon types tend to be insufferable about science. Einstein was an outspoken socialist. Salk refused to patent his vaccine because he cared more about saving lives than profits.
Ahh, so it probably needs a third character: the lib NGO rep to be on the same side as the "this meaty gravity well is altogether unprofitable" neocon.
