For the very first time in my life, I have a sense that there is no voice on this planet that anyone listens to anymore. The world is spinning out of control, with highly destructive wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and internal conflicts in Sudan, Haiti, and multiple countries across different continents. In the past, there were authoritative voices, such as those of an American president, leaders of other major countries, and the United Nations Secretary General, that could be summoned to help dampen such flames. But no longer. Appeals by global leaders nowadays rather seem to raise the intensity of whatever conflagration is at issue.

As I look at the state of our world today, I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel, Childhood’s End. In it, Clarke describes a planet that was perilously close to implosion. It was threatened by nuclear weapons, wars, and myriad thorny problems. To save it from destruction, aliens, called Overlords, descended from deep space. The massive silver ships that carried them did not land on Earth. Instead, they hovered above all the major cities.

The Overlords were invisible to the world’s population in the initial years. During that period, they communicated with only one person on Earth: Rikki Stormgren, the Secretary General of the United Nations. He took instructions from the Overlords and transmitted them to his fellow humans. Within fifty years, the Overlords had eliminated not only wars from Earth, but also poverty, disease, and ignorance.

Other than climate change, many of the problems we face nowadays are exactly the same ones that the Overlords came to eradicate. In their attempts to put out the many fires burning across the world today, our current leaders seem to have run out of ideas. Tireless diplomatic efforts go nowhere. The two other main instruments in their toolkit, hard military power and sanctions, have also proven woefully ineffective lately. For those reasons, I get the feeling that it might be time for another alien intervention to save humanity from ruin.

In the novel, I was especially struck by one exchange between Stormgren and Karellen, the Supervisor of the Overlords. Karellen told Stormgren that “All political problems can be solved by the correct application of power.” Sensing that Stormgren was skeptical of his statement, Karellen clarified that “The operative word is correct.” He explained that there are “efficient” and “inefficient” approaches to solving problems. For example, he said that he could use “billions of horsepower in the shape of atomic bombs” to respond to a threat by a rebellious national leader who tried to revolt against him. Such a solution, he said, would be complete and final, but highly inefficient. He stressed the importance of proper calibration of power to achieve results in the most efficient manner possible.

Karellen’s point about efficient application of power is particularly pertinent now. The instruments at the disposal of our current leaders for conflict resolution are, for the most part, overly blunt. Too many innocent people across the world are getting badly hurt or killed. Wishing and waiting for a descent of another group of aliens to rescue us is clearly not a wise strategy. We need today’s crop of political leaders and foreign policy experts to think creatively and come up with ways to apply the tools they have correctly.