In February, former President Barack Obama made a comment on a podcast saying that aliens are real. Despite later clarifications, President Donald Trump announced that he would direct government agencies to release files on extraterrestrials and UFOs. In addition to all these, the recent launch of NASA’s Artemis II moon mission has increased interest in the idea of aliens from distant planets coming to visit Earth.

There is a common line of thinking that aliens, if they saw us humans and how we manage our affairs, would laugh at us or think we are crazy. We indeed have many problems: wars, materialism, poverty, environmental disasters, and more. 

But would aliens really be better off? If there even is intelligent life out there, who is to say that they would not have similar problems? And even if they were not as divided as us, we shouldn’t assume their lives are so great. Perhaps they live as slaves under an autocratic hive-mind, or perhaps they go around consuming entire planets. Why should we think that aliens would be organizationally or morally superior to us?

But, this derision of humanity does seem to express human weariness to our constant sins against each other and the world we live in. The constant cycles of human violence and incompetence leads us to look outwards for some solution. An indifferent universe based on survival is unlikely to produce a peace-loving, perfect species that has it all figured out. Perhaps we must look beyond.