steelmanning the whole “space colonization ideology is just a new colonialism/imperialism, and just as bad”: let's take domestic robots which display signals of pain when damaged (even though we know that they don't feel pain, because consciousness research was miraculously successful). if there was no moral norm against damaging/destroying them, we would still regard it as bad, because it's harmful to the human psyche to perceive oneself to be causing pain, and that being okay.
“but niplav, isn't that way too meta/coupling?”
“yes.”