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But standing behind his target, unnoticed, the Ship's Confessor had produced from his sleeve the tiny stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, the Confessor's arm swept out...
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... and anaesthetised everyone in the room. He then went downstairs to the engine room, and caused the sun to go supernova, blocking access to earth.
Regardless of his own preferences, he takes the option for humanity to 'painlessly' defect in inter-stellar prisoners dilemma, knowing apriori that the superhappys chose to co-operate.
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@Anonymous Coward:Reasonable, except even by defecting you haven't gained the substantially greater payoff that is the whole point of Prisoner's Dilemma. In other words, like he asks: what about the Babyeater children? ---
I misread the story and thought the superhappys had flown off to deal with them first. But in fact, the superhappys are 'returning to their home planet' before going to deal with the babyeaters. "This will make it considerably easier to sweep through their starline network when we return.". Oops.
In any event, if the ship's crew is immediately anaesthetised and the sun exploded, then earth remains ignorant of the suffering of the babyeaters, and earth is not coerced to have its value system changed by an external superior power. The only human that feels bad about all this is the one remaining conscious human on the ship before it is fried. The babyeaters experience no net change in their position and the superhappys have made a net loss (by discovering unhappiness in the universe and being made unable to fix it). Humanity has met a more powerful force with a very different value system that wishes to impose values on other cultures, but has achieved a draw. Humanity remains ignorant of suffering - again a draw when the only other options are to lose in some way (either by imposing values when we feel we have no right; or by knowingly allowing suffering).
Of course the confessor might wish to first transmit a message back to earth that neglects to mention any babyeaters, and warns of the highly dangerous 'superhappys', and perhaps describing them falsely as super-powerful babyeaters (ala alderson scientists) to prevent anyone from being tempted to find them, thereby preventing any individual from sacrificing the human race's control of it's own values...
I guess it depends on whether he believes 'right to choose your own species values' ranks above 'right to experience endless orgasms'. If he truly has no preference for either, he might as well consider everyone dangerously highly strung and emotional and an unsuitable sample size to make decisions for humanity. In that case, perhaps he should stun everyone in the control room and cause the ship to return to earth, if he is able to do so, to tell humanity what has happened in full detail. This at least allows the decision to be made by a larger fraction of humanity.
A final practical point. So far, the people on the ship only know what they have received in communications or what they can measure with their sensors. In fact, we can't trust either of these things; a sufficiently advanced species can fool sensors and any species can lie. We can observe the superhappys are clearly more technologically advanced from the evidence of the one ship present, and the growth rate suggests they can rapidly overpower humanity. Humanity has no idea what the superhappys will really do when they return. In fact, if they wish, they might simply turn all humans into superhappys and throw away all human values, without honouring the deal. They could torture all humans till the end of time if they wish or turn us into babyeaters. Equally, we know there is a race that is pleased to advertise they eat babies and wishes to encourage other races to do the same; and we know that they have one quite advanced ship that is slightly technologically inferior to us; what else they have, we don't really know. Perhaps the babyeaters have better crews and ships back home. Perhaps the babyeaters have advanced technology that masks the real capabilities of their ship. All we have is a single unreliable sample point of two advanced civilisations with very different value systems. What we have here is a giant knowledge gap.
The only thing we know for certain is that the superhappys are almost certainly technologically superior to humanity and can basically do whatever they want to us; unless the sun is blown up. And we know that the babyeaters have culturally unacceptable values to us; and we don't know if they might really have the ability to impose those values on us or not. Given this knowledge of these two dangerous forces, one of which is vastly superior, and one of which is advanced and might later turn out to be superior, if humanity can achieve a 'zero loss outcome' for itself by blowing up the sun, it is doing rather well in such an incredibly dangerous situation. Humanity should take advantage of the fact the superhappys already placed a 'co-operate' card on the table and allowed us decide what to do next.