Points of Superiority

For every race or culture in the world, using the point in which they integrated the innovations of Hellenistic science/philosophy and/or British Industrialism, they were a higher people after that point.

It is not that Greeks or British are great, it is that they discovered things that make any people better, and any people can integrate.

The planet would have been an evolutionary failure without something like the innovations the Greeks and British introduced.

Beyond humans, the planet has also become a higher form of evolution by mining and moving of massive amounts of minerals all over the globe. This mass alteration shows the Gaia evolved to a more complex object in the universe.

Humans would be lower without math, sciences and industry, and the planet itself would be a lower rank of planet if no species had developed to alter it at such extreme pace.

Re: criteria

Whether planet with life or culture, neither have the luxury of existing in a pleasant stasis. There is always an outside invader, predator or competitor.

It is not romantic or aesthetic goals that we can hold up as positive examples, rather it is whatever contends with assaults from the outside and survives or mutates is the higher and more positive example/specimen.

Re: slavery invalidates superiority or claim of innovation

Innovations are never invalidated by slavery or atrocities committed in war. Moralists do not have a leverage from which to invalidate innovation. In our era of sentimental moralizing this may come as a surprise, since sentimentalists thought they had a rhetorical innovation in the form of "if it was accomplished by arbitrary force it is evil" . Ironically, it is the Technologist that has a leverage for invalidating innovation. It is not the mass enslaving or genocide of humans that invalidates, it is whether the innovation is open source. An innovation is a sin and blight on this earth if it's means of production or use are kept secret, and especially, if the secret is allowed to die when its group of users die.

Millions of the world's poor and most common people reuse innovations that originated in some horrible context of slavery or mass killing. There is no regret for this. The advice of moralist luddites, to abstain from these innovations, is the course that is regrettable and evil. In sex and technology: abstinence is the greatest perversion.

Seth Galbraith email response to me

Extend an olive branch by admitting that history's winners were not inherently more moral or clever than the losers - in fact the winners were often foolish and arrogant - they were just ahead of the curve adopting the best tools available.

You must justify your asserted hierarchy of higher/lower culture and higher/lower world. This is the uphill battle you can't lose if you want people to take your thesis seriously. Specifically you must show the reader that (A) s/he is materially and emotionally safer in your world and (B) this happy condition does not require great suffering in distant lands or future generations.