Good, good. My net is bearing fishes. To avoid a massive text-wall, we'll have to blitz through this.
Heaviest first. Greatest chance for survival of more people.
That said I may see what the world renowned scientist was into (and make sure none of the others were either). If it was jane, the office admin, bob the bricklayer and jim the world renowned scientist in psychology then heaviest first!
Right, so i had a little think about it today. I would initially have said heaviest 1st, it makes sense i suppose... but i think i will go for lightest first, that would be Dingo (sorry buddy), then the old man, he's had a great innings - i'm sure he would sacrifice himself if he was old (he's a selfish idiot otherwise). It's hard to determine between everyone else, probably Paris, scientist, boy, pregnant mother. Hopefully only Dingo has to do die before the balloon stabilises to an acceptable speed though
Amp34: Pretty much landed in the central limit of all of this -- a modern-rationalist, objective metric (though he then performs a leap into Trusty's position): Dingo, notably, and other light individuals are worth two lives though (depedening on the stage of pregnancy and your definition of life in the womb); if you shuffle the people on the trip, can give very weird orderings; removes one a step away from responsibility and hard to apply in a crisis (how do you weigh people in the balloon that's about to plummet hard?); analysis paralysis and slow decisions likely, can overgeneralize (see below); provided you survive the crisis, was weight the best primary metric to have used? If you can't apply your chosen metric accurately, would you still start chucking people out, even if it risked arbitrary results? What if people refuse, or demand a democratic means of selection? How do you justify an animal as equal to a legal individual, given that objective metrics can make it just that?
Trusty: A repentant rationalist or a proto-utilitarian: even though Amp's chosen metric remains, it's applied differently and you're on track to considering more quality of life arguments and the least harm for the greatest shared good more concretely. Difficult consequences still follow: Do animals have different value? Is encouraging suicide murder? What is the harm value of murder to the utility of the whole group? What is supreme: an individual's right to life, and to refuse suicide for the greater good, or their utility? Do you prejudge utility based on past experience or attempt to establish it at each decision point? Is it a good use of time in a crisis? What if some individual's utility varied significantly relative to context, and other's did not (Scientist vs Hilton; majoritarian systems are fun like that)?
This thought experiment is also primed to test for determinism: you don't know what your chances of survival are, even after killing everyone; indeed, there's a difference between safely gliding down in a middle of a beer festival in an open field and crashing atop Mount Everest. Would you still act and justify your actions if the outcome was preset by your initial conditions regardless? How does your moral framework face the unknown? Do you still act in the same way if your personal survival cannot be assured?
Now that we've got a measure of you with the balloon, we can look at 'Why can't we eat babies?' dilemma.
Amp34 (overgenelazying 
): They're, excepting any weight abnormalities due to genetic conditions, severe injuries and diseases, the lightest members of the population. Objectively it's a stupid thing to do given heavier specimens. But in extreme cases, eat the ones you don't approve of/like first.
Trusty: They are the lightest so we can, but since we're also congnizant of the quality of life of the individual and our greater good, we pause: what is their quality of life, utility and thus value? Well, they haven't had a life and their utility is objectively impossible to measure (a eugenicist would go with genetic potential here instead); further, provided they're healthy and you disregard animals like Dingo, their quality of life shall remain much better than that of older members of the population of limited utility or great harm: pensioners and criminals, respectively. Moreover, we need to sustain a population which can continue to produce goods and services and have more young individuals than old individuals to pursue the greater good through time. The latter conditions outweigh our chosen metric, and we proscribe the eating of babies... for now.
Hence we can't eat them.
A lawyer would not be so loose with their definitions, test cases and application. But you get the picture of how throwing about ideas at such thought experiments can have merit of bringing one's values and intuition out of the dark.
More appropriately to the thread: Given the above (two out of a rather large number of permutations in what is a simple case), would you assume other intelligent life had converged on a similar set of ethical reference points before meeting you? How'd you explain good and bad to it? Is moral behaviour universal or specific? Does 'goodness' correlate with intelligence, likewise universally or specifically? Provided you can define intelligence and recognise it when you see it!
Also, the discussion is, even in its practical guise, rather 'pointless' -- there's no right answer nor end to it. deGrasse Tyson would give up on such speculation, whilst arguably still having a philosophy, engaging in such speculation as befits his field and a morality he's socially absorbed from the scientific community and wider society; which would emerge in a crisis whether he had thought it was a pointless pursuit to consider undecidable problems or not. (It remains an open problem: how do you know that a problem is intractable in advance? How do you tell a problem that's merely very hard apart from an impossible one?) Feynman was guilty of this little sin as well. (Social sciences and humanities are 'pointless' until you pronounce on their effectiveness and attempt to apply hard scientific methods to elucidate their effectiveness or improve them... which makes you a social scientist if not a philosopher off the bat.)
Okay, it's a text-wall. Shoot me.
