What opinion would an alien - a space-traveller from a distant starsystem - form of the peoples of Earth were this alien to land here, and travel from country to country? This alien is a shapeshifter, and so is capable of assuming any form, including human form. Thus can this alien watch and observe, without being seen.

Let us assume that this alien is highly intelligent, and that, like all the sentient beings on the alien home-world, this alien is rational and civilized: that is, polite, well-mannered, fair, honourable, self-disciplined, and possessed of a scientific-like curiosity.
 
 

During the travels of this alien, the following are among the many, many things observed:
 

• In  city, a gang of youths drag a young girl of a bus while other passengers, including men, look mutely on and do nothing, despite her pleas. The gang take her to an alley where she is gang raped.
• A fireman, risking his own life, enters a blazing building to rescue an unconscious man.
• In one family home, a large quantity of left-over food is thrown away, while on almost the opposite side of the world, a mother gives her starving children what little food she has, going hungry herself so that her children may eat.
• A man stuffs three newly born kittens into a plastic bag which he firmly ties closed, then throws into the nearby canal.
• Outside a noisey party in a house, a young man is attacked by four other men, who, having pushed him to the ground, repeatedly kick his head until he is dead. They then run off, laughing.
• A man driving a motor-car fast on a narrow unlit country road hits a pedestrian who is hurled several feet into the air and who lands on the road, critically injured. The car driver carries on as if nothing had happened.
• A woman, arguing with her husband in their home, suddenly grabs a large kitchen knife and stabs her husband to death.
• A young man, walking home from work over a river bridge, sees someone struggling in the water below, and without hesitation dives in to pull the person to safety.
• A truck load of cattle arrive at a slaughter-house, where each one is killed, strung up on large hooks, and butchered, with various bits of their bodies thrown into various bins.
• A truck load of chickens arrive at another slaughter house where each one is killed, strung up onto a conveyor belt which takes them to an assembly line where their heads are cut off, one after the other, by rotating blades.
• Outside a small mud hut, a family sit silently on the parched drought-striken land, having eaten nothing for days.
• In a city at night in winter, a very well-dressed and corpulent man in an expensive car drives past a railway viaduct which shelters several homeless people huddled up against the cold. Nearby, two other homeless people lie stupefied on the ground, one stupefied from drugs, the other from alcohol.
• An elderly infirm man, sitting in his damp apartment, surrounded by mementoes from his past including several war medals gained for gallantry, is repeatedly punched by an intruder who wants to know where the man has hidden his savings.
• A group of men dig with their bare hands for a whole day without rest in order to find and free someone trapped under rubble following an earthquake, while others generously give what little money they have to help others who have nothing. Nearby, a young man, thinking himself unseen, steals some goods from what once was a shop.
• A young woman, recently qualified as a Nurse, sits - restraining her tears - by the bedside of an elderly lady terminally ill with cancer, holding the old lady's hand while listening to stories of things that happened a long time ago.....

For a while, all these impressions perplex our alien. There is kindness; terror; brutality; compassion; indifference; hatred. And many other things. The alien briefly wonders if human beings, as a species, are divided in themselves, like the werewolves of human myth were divided, becoming savage, killing, beasts on certain nights, and yet at other times appearing quite normal, quite human.

But, slowly, the alien begins to understand the human condition. There is a covering, a very thin covering, of civilization, as there are some people who do use their will to control themselves and so live their lives by reason and some code of ethics. Thus it is that these humans strive to do, to enjoin others to do, good deeds, as they strive to restrain themselves and others from doing what is bad. But there are other human beings, many other human beings, who cannot or who will not control themselves, and who live according to their emotions, their instincts, just as the thin covering of civilization can be easily broken by some natural event, some great surge of emotion, some sudden occurrence.

The alien understands the struggle there has been on the planet the humans call Earth for civilization: the slow ascent up from their primitive, savage, animal ancestry, and how this ascent is of the proverbial two steps forward, one and three-quarters steps back, kind, and sometimes even of the one step forward, two steps backwards kind.

The alien understands how tenuous is the human hold on civilization, on reason, and how so few humans truely live rational, moral, lives where they strive to control themselves - and succeed in controlling themselves - by using their will. For the alien has found:

• people addicted to drugs, pleasure
• people immoral - no self-control and no ethics to guide them
• people live for the most part based on their feelings, their emotions, and not based on reason and self-control
• people squabbling like undisciplined, emotive, children, and injuring and killing each other for very little reason
• people keeping and slaughtering animals wholesale for food when there is no longer a need for many of them to do this
• massive, polluted, teeming cities which remind the alien of termite mounds
• the Earth itself ravaged, exploited, and polluted because of the irrational, destructive, desire people have for luxury, for convenience: putting their own temporary personal needs before the planet itself.

The conclusion the alien reaches is that human beings resemble an infection which has spread over the Earth, making the Earth ill, and decimating the other living beings which live on the Earth.

The conclusion is that the majority of the peoples of Earth are essentially barbarians - in effect, still primitive animals, driven by animal desires and feeling. Even though many of these barbarians live in what seem to be well-functioning, prosperous, cities and towns, surrounded by material goods, they are nonetheless still barbarians by nature, and often by intent.
 

The alien further concludes, that there is a good probability that in a few centuries time, the covering of human "civilization" will vanish, with a widespread return to a savage barbarism, and with humans themselves becoming extinct in a few tens of thousands of years.
 
 
 

So it is that the alien departs from our solar system, leaving space-markers advising other star-travellers to avoid the homeworld of the savages who roam the planet those humans call Earth.