If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?
Most of us would ask about their spacecraft. Some would ask about the meaning of life. I think both miss the point. Our oldest problem is not that we do not know what is good, but that we know and do not do it.
Imagine waking tomorrow to news that a spacecraft has landed, its passengers are not human, and I have been granted one question. Only one.
The obvious questions queue up at once: where they came from, how they crossed the distance, how their ship works.
I would set them all aside. But I have come to think that the next question many thoughtful people would reach for, “What matters most?”, is the wrong one too.
1. The first question is a confession
Whatever we ask first reveals what we believe we lack. Ask about their engines, and we confess that we think our problems are problems of power. Ask about the meaning of life, and we confess that we think our problem is ignorance.
I am not convinced either is true.
2. We already know what matters most
Suppose they answered: kindness, honesty, restraint, care for the weak, gratitude, love beyond self-interest. Would any of us be surprised?
Every human civilisation has arrived at much the same list. We would have crossed the gulf between stars only to hear what our grandparents taught us at the kitchen table.
3. Our real problem is older than our science
The gap that troubles us is not between ignorance and knowledge, but between knowing and doing.
The Roman poet Ovid gives Medea a line that has never gone out of date:
“I see the better way and approve it; I follow the worse.”1
Writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul makes the same admission:
“For the good that I would I do not.”2
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna what drives a person to do wrong even against his own will, as if pushed by force.3
Three traditions, far apart in language and belief, make the same confession. Notice, too, that Arjuna puts his question to one his tradition regards as the divine in human form. He had his own encounter with a visitor from beyond, and this is what he chose to ask.
4. So this is my one question
“You must have known what was good long before you lived by it. How did you close the gap?”
I would not want their beliefs but their methods. What habits, customs, upbringing or forms of government turned knowledge into character? How did they keep power from outrunning compassion, and their machines from using them?
5. The objection: is that not a wasted question?
A fair reader will object. A cure for cancer, clean energy, an end to hunger: these would save millions of lives. A hungry child would be right to ask for bread, not philosophy.
I grant this. If they offered such gifts, I would not refuse them.
But consider hunger. The world already grows enough food for everyone, yet people still go to bed hungry. The shortfall is not technical. Every great gift of power, from fire to the printing press to the atom, has been absorbed into our old habits. Hand us their technology, and we would carry it home in the same hands.
6. The answer may not come from the sky
A Tamil poem nearly two thousand years old, from the Purananuru, opens with two lines that suit a first-contact morning:
“Every town is our town; everyone is our kin. Good and evil do not come from others.”4
The first line welcomes the stranger, even one from another world. The second warns us not to expect too much from him: if good and evil do not come from others, they will not come from other planets either.
7. While we wait for the spacecraft
So I can begin now, closer to home. I can ask someone who survived a war, an elderly neighbour, a parent who has raised children, a person who lost almost everything and still found reason to smile.
But I would ask the sharper question. Not “What matters most?”, which would only tell me what I already know, but “How did you manage to live by it?”
And I would ask myself.
If the visitors do land tomorrow, I half hope they hesitate. I half hope they admit that they never fully closed the gap either, and that each generation among them has had to begin again. That answer would disappoint the engineers among us. To me, it would be the most reassuring news from the stars: that becoming good is not something any civilisation finishes, only something it keeps choosing to take up.
If you had only one question for them, what would you ask, and could you ask it of someone you already know?
Notes for readers
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 7, lines 20–21: video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. Medea speaks these words as she wrestles with a love that will lead her to betray her own father.
2. Romans 7:19, King James Version.
3. Bhagavad Gita 3.36, paraphrased. In the verse that follows, Krishna names desire and anger as the forces at work.
4. Purananuru 192, by the poet Kaniyan Pungundranar. The Tamil opening reads: யாதும் ஊரே யாவரும் கேளிர்; தீதும் நன்றும் பிறர்தர வாரா (Yaadhum oore, yaavarum kelir; theedhum nandrum pirar thara vaara). The Purananuru is one of the eight anthologies of classical Tamil Sangam poetry, a collection of some four hundred poems on public life, kingship, war and ethics. This poem’s opening line is among the most widely quoted expressions of universal kinship in Indian literature.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 07 October 2026
© 2026 Rise & Inspire. All Rights Reserved.