Let’s imagine that Earth is now a one-world government and we have also discovered aliens from other planets. However, the discoveries quickly became cursed as those aliens band together and launch an all-out assault on Earth. The people of Earth fight tirelessly to defend our world, but over the course of the war, we lose a tremendous amount of troops and eventually we are defeated. The aliens have destroyed our last remaining strongholds. There is no way out. There is no solution.

Our alien overlords are now basking in the light of their victory and they’ve gotten bored. So they devise a challenge in order to further humiliate us. Their challenge is a strange one: we can survive if we play them one song from any time period in human history, and that song has to be the best song they’ve ever heard or else they will exterminate mankind. There will inevitably be people who would refuse to even entertain the thought of begging for mercy and those who would support going gently into the great night.

But is a non-response the best course of action? Can we live with tossing our hands up and saying fuck it. Let’s die. There are instances where death is the best option and when principles must be defended. Choosing a song that might satisfy the demands of our captors is not an instance where our principles will be violated. Even if the aliens are acting in bad faith and have no intention of sparing us, if they are given a song that they genuinely enjoy, we must still fight. The way we handle this hypothetical reveals a great deal about how we feel existential crises ought to be handled.

There are over 7 billion people in the world and a project to find the best song ever would be difficult and exhausting, but would it be impossible? Would it be impossible to have every capable person on the planet nominate a song and the song that is chosen the most is the song we play to the aliens? In order to decide at what age someone can legally be considered capable, we would need to have a vigorous debate--where every person is given equal time – to make their case about how we define exactly what we mean by "capable" and then the citizens of the world would have to vote on one definition. One person, one vote.

There will inevitably be people who aren’t willing to be a part of the process and simply want to censor people who disagree with them. There will also be people who are willing to use violence or the law in order to silence ideas that they disagree with. I have no moral hang-ups with jailing those people and neither should you. The politically correct and censorship-obsessed crowd in their fanaticism are literally going against mankind’s best interests and in order to offer a more compelling counter message, moderates would need to dominate and show themselves. People who base their choices based on tangible facts, honesty, good faith and an openness to criticism and new ideas are the people we need in order to genuinely say that humanity did their best to appease the aliens.

We would need every capable person to be able to create music so arbitrary censorship laws based on religious texts would need to be eliminated. What if our alien overlords enjoy crass lyrics? Would we choose Young Thug to be the representative for humanity or Taylor Swift? Even though Meek Mill is still recovering from the "L's" Drake handed to him, we would want to include his terrible diss track as part of the voting process. Who knows?

There will always come a time when we must prove to ourselves that we truly believe that we are evolved creatures of a higher-order. We must become people who live our lives based on objective principles first and foremost. And the next order of consciousness is realizing that there is no such thing as absolute certainty, only degrees of uncertainty. We have to live our lives with the sincere belief that our actions and thoughts could be wrong, and strive to be the kinds of people that are open to all forms of expression and who are willing to revise our beliefs.

Now imagine you’re a Nazi soldier in front of a crowd of Jewish onlookers and your commander orders you to kill a Jew or else you will be killed in their place. The commander tells this Jew’s life story and you quickly discover the Jew is a saint. They have never so much as stolen a pencil. This seems like a puzzling and difficult choice if you believe that survival is more important than character. It is a less puzzling choice if you believe that all humans are equal and every action a person takes must be based on that principle.

And even if you knew nothing about whether or not this Jew was a good or bad person, if you were put on trial in front of the entire world for your decision to kill that Jew could you honestly and vigorously convince a majority of people that what you did was right? I believe you can’t and I am willing to bet that most people if they’re being honest will say the same thing. Humans have reached a point in our moral development where we give no credence to the phrase I was just following orders. The president is only commander-in-chief so long as his actions are in furtherance to the best ideals of the constitution. The moment he orders soldiers to take an action that violates those principles, soldiers have a moral obligation to defy him, consequences be damned,

The case of an alien invasion may seem exaggerated, far-fetched and improbable, but that, in a nutshell, is the story of mankind. We were born struggling to survive and our greed, anger, envy and selfishness were necessary components of survival. Those aspects of our human nature prevented us from realizing that working together with other humans will always lead to greater innovations then we could ever hope to achieve alone.

Knowing all this, if we want to move towards a utopia where wars are a thing of the past, bigotry has been eliminated, as well as poverty, famine and climate change, we must be willing to create a culture where everyone is dedicated to becoming the best version of themselves; A world in which everyone strives to help even strangers become the best version of themselves. There will be people who say that what I'm aspiring to is impossible, but those are the snakes in the grass who will do nothing but inflict harm when we need to be focused. The rules we place on ourselves and others should always be framed in terms of this inspirational vision.