When the Aliens Arrive

The price of gas at the pump continues to drop.  The Islamic State (IS) commits multiple acts of terror in Paris against non-combatant humans.  The French retaliate with bombing sorties in Syria likely to kill non-combatant humans.  Global temperatures are rising, not over thousands of years as they have before as part of a natural cycle, but suddenly over just 100 years clearly due to human behavior.  The population on planet earth is growing exponentially creating huge shortfalls in food and water.  I go to church and see a man wearing a T-shirt that says, “I am a good guy with a gun.”  Religious fundamentalists are seeking control of the US government and the Syrian and Iraqi governments.  The current thinking on education is that in order to improve the performance of poor kids we must test more and take money away from the schools teaching these kids to fund private sector efforts that are no better than public schools. 

There is more, much more, but I feel depressed just listing the above.  So I imagine a different scenario, a day when we suddenly realize what is important, a day when we finally see the big picture:

Extraterrestrial life exists as we have long suspected but could not prove.  Eventually contact will be made.  Our orientation to the universe will dramatically shift.  We are not alone.  We are but one of many intelligent life forms.  And the aliens send an ambassador for a first meeting with our world leaders.  I would love to hear such a discussion and imagine how it would go. 

World leaders will be overly concerned with the motives of the aliens and why they waited so long to contact us.  We would want their technology.  We would want treaties.  On and on.  But the aliens – and these are truly undocumented aliens because they are not humans of planet earth – have questions of their own.  They remain baffled by our behavior and they ask the following:

“If you know that burning fossil fuels and deforestation is destroying your atmosphere and threatening human life on this planet, why do you continue to do so?

Is increasing the personal wealth of some worth more than saving your planet?

Is increasing the personal wealth of some worth the starvation and suffering of so many more?

Why do you see each other as so different?  Men and women, Christians and Muslims, light complected and dark complected, etc.?  From space all humans look the same.

Is warfare and terrorism your solution to overpopulation?  There are many more effective, humane ways.

Is warfare and terrorism your strategy to get what you want at the expense of so many others?  Such ignorance baffles us.

Why must you compete with each other when collaboration is the model that yields the best results?

Why do you allow entertainers and athletes to prosper while your teachers of the young live in near poverty?

Why do you dream of going to some heaven and then fight to avoid dying?  Why is death such a source of fear for you when you know everyone alive now will die?

Why do you believe you are alone, you are special and you have a deity to turn to?  No other species we know is so arrogant.

If you would like to join an intergalactic group of sentient beings, you must answer these questions and address your own shortcomings.  If you do not mature as a species we will simply isolate you and allow all your self-destructive behaviors whether they are economic, political or religious to destroy your once beautiful planet.  We will not intervene or assist you.  We will monitor your progress or your self-destruction.  We wish you the best.  Goodbye.”

And they leave us as they found us.