What Should We Tell Aliens? — Quarter Mile

What Should We Tell Aliens?

We recently ran a writing contest, DEAR ALIENS, and wanted to write about how it went.

What contests should we run next? Read this and then email us.

A few months ago, we got word: aliens are coming to earth.

Not sure why, but we were the only ones the aliens contacted.

They asked us for one thing: a short written document from humanity.

So we did the natural thing. We asked thousands of people. Many hundreds (nearly a thousand!) wrote real letters on real paper and walked to real post offices to send them in. These people were complete strangers from all over the world: Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, France, Spain, India, Malaysia, the United States, and many more; hundreds of strangers from dozens of countries took time out of their day to represent humanity.

Meanwhile, we assembled a panel of judges: Robin Sloan, Gwern Branwen, Rémy Ngamije, Niko McCarty, an (anonymous) award-winning poet and Ivy League writing lecturer, and Taylor Troesh. Our hope was that these judges would pick the best writing to represent humanity.

The finalists were all really quite different. Some examples…

There was a charming welcome letter from Liechtenstein.

There was a sestina about Spanish bulls.

There was a rather playful and sentimental collage essay.

There was a concrete poem in the shape of a human.

You can read the top ten entries here, if you’re interested. We think you’ll have a good time.

The rest of this essay is a short reflection on running the contest itself: a little about what we learned, what we noticed about the general temperature of humanity via these essays, what we thought about the contest overall. We hope you find it interesting.

It’s difficult to prompt creativity

Most writing contest prompts tell you what to write. The NYC Midnight challenge gets really specific and sometimes even tells you specific genres, actions, characters, or words to include. Other contests, like the recent Un-Slop AI Fiction Contest or the American Short(er) Fiction Prize, limit you to a specific writing type and length, e.g., short story These contests are, in some ways, much more constrained than DEAR ALIENS. Our prompt did something unique, which is that it did not tell people what to write at all, only what the writing would be used for. (We just told people that whatever they wrote would be the one document humanity sent to aliens before they arrived). One goal was that this open-endedness would prompt more creativity rather than less, but this proved to be pretty difficult!

To be clear, some people did get creative. The top 10 is good evidence.

Plenty of other people did visual art. Three examples:

And there were some other fun formats:

Somebody wrote the script to an ASMR video

Some people wrote poems

Some people wrote legal forms, entry applications, etc.

Some people wrote tourism brochures

Some people wrote short notes (one: Sometimes I get lonely. Do you get lonely too?)

Some people wrote things completely unrelated to aliens

But in the end most of the entries took the same approach: they wrote a fairly straightforward letter to aliens with some basic observations about humanity and Earth. Sometimes these were pessimistic. Sometimes they were (somewhat) funny. Sometimes they were emotional. But the general format and vibe is the same: here is a letter with some relatively basic stuff about humans.

The only version of this that made it to the top 10 was the Liechtenstein essay, and even that one is quite different (and more unique and creative) than the format I am referring to.

Would the entries have been more creative, more distinct, if the prompt had been: write a short story that includes aliens? Maybe. But I’m not really convinced. I just think that being creative can be difficult and often involves cycling through your first 1, 5, 10, 20 ideas. Most people don’t do that, so they land on what is obvious.

Many people were pessimistic and focused on the now

There is not much pessimism in our top 10. This is not at all representative of the entries we received. I don’t have the specific number, but I would bet that at least 40% of the entries were pessimistic about humanity. This ranges all the way from “humans are bad” to “humans are so bad that you should wipe out our entire species.” There was also strange pessimism, like one entry suggesting that the aliens should specifically kill the writer’s lonely old neighbor.

It is hard to draw conclusions from this. Are people who participate in writing contests more pessimistic than average? Are writers more pessimistic than average? Are humans more pessimistic than they used to be? (There is evidence to say yes.)

If you are one of these pessimistic people, perhaps you’d benefit from this essay.

The other thing is how focused some of the entries were on what is happening right now. Half a dozen entries mentioned the current war between the United States and Iran....