[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[Angrboda]

I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math. You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics. The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions. You've acknowledged that math is much the same. There's a good deal of human-centricity to any domain that focuses on thinking and reasoning. But it's possible physics would be the same. The human mind has limits, such as the number of items it can hold in conscious awareness, depth of indirection, and so on. While Kant was wrong about various things, his observation that our experience of the world is pre-structured by things like spatial dimension seems correct. Try as we might we can't think in four or five dimensions. An alien species that could, or that could simultaneously contemplate hundreds of thousands of items would be able to conceive of things that we can't. In that case, we would be the alien species who doesn't agree with the science of that other species. Does our not being able to think the same scientific truths as them indicate those truths aren't objective? I think not. It seems the alien test is more a test of how similar or different an alien is than us, than any test of objectivity.

ETA: An even stranger possibility is that the aliens don't understand certain concepts necessary to physics. Various animals like crows are able to solve problems, indicating animal intelligence, but do they have reasoning like we do? An alien species could have no concept of cause and effect, with any 'reasoning' about such happening subconsciously. Would they understand our physics? It seems we're in a parallel situation with math and ethics in that for an alien species to be able to embrace our physics, they have to have a lot in common with us or else they'll fail the test. It's looking like the alien test is less about objectivity and more about similarity to humans.