Is Humanity Being Observed?
Have you ever felt someone is staring at you from a distance. It could be intimidating or it could be a compassionate gaze, depending on your actions in life. NASA among other nations have poured billions into the search for life beyond our planet. But what are we truly looking for? Is it curiosity alone that drives us, or a deep, unspoken desire to be acknowledged by voices from other worlds? And if intelligent beings were out there, watching us, how would they judge the way we live on this fragile blue planet?
Think of it: Earth is overflowing with resources, enough to nourish every man, woman, and child. Yet images of starving children, hollow-eyed with hunger, still reach our screens. Diseases that could be cured with a few pills continue to take lives, while others spend fortunes on luxuries. In our cities, men and women sleep in doorways, while vast stretches of land lie unused. Drugs erode communities, and leaders—charged with steering nations—argue endlessly, unable to find unity even on the simplest matters. It is chaos dressed as progress, like trying to net fish in a storm.
And still, we imagine ourselves prepared to welcome strangers from the stars.
What would they see in us? They might acknowledge our ingenuity—rockets leaving Earth’s pull, symphonies that stir the heart, and sciences that peel back the fabric of reality. But would their hearts not ache at our inhumanity and contradictions? At our greed, our divisions, our blindness to injustice? Would they wonder why a species so richly blessed refuses to live by the principles that could heal its wounds?
And perhaps the greater question is not what they would make of us, but what we would make of them. Suppose these visitors did not arrive with weapons or dazzling technologies, but with a message—simple, ancient, and moral. Imagine them urging us to love our neighbour indeed, not just in speech. To be faithful in our commitments, to tell the truth, to show kindness to the vulnerable—the poor, the elderly, the orphan, the widow. To treat animals with dignity, to resist envy, greed, and gossip, to pay fair wages without exploitation. To live humbly, compassionately, humanly.
Would we welcome such wisdom, or scoff at it, as we so often dismiss the moral compass already laid before us and look where we are?
It is sobering to realize that the virtues we might hope for from enlightened extra-terrestrials are the very values humanity has long been taught—but so often neglects. Could it be that the wisdom we seek in distant galaxies has already been given to us, whispered through centuries?
Perhaps they are already watching, not with curiosity but with judgment. Not descending in spaceships, but observing from afar, weighing how we care for the gifts entrusted to us. In this sense, they might resemble the God described in 2 Chronicles 16:9: “For the eyes of the LORD roam throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.”
The apostle Paul spoke similarly to the Athenians: “That they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might feel after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). Could it be that in our restless search among the stars, we overlook the presence of the eternal that is already nearby?
Before we stretch our gaze outward, perhaps we must first look inward. For if we cannot learn to live in peace with each other on Earth, what chance do we have of understanding life beyond it? The real discovery may not be out there, among the constellations, but here—within our own humanity, waiting to be lived.