The best way to put people out of poverty is public investment in infrastructure and education though. The government literally needs to come in with money and

The best way to put people out of poverty is public investment in infrastructure and education though. The government literally needs to come in with money and improve the place, people are not poor because they're lazy or unmotivated to get out of povery; but in most cases people are poor because their parents are poor and because they live in a poor area. When I look at humanity I see so much diversity and potential for good, wouldn't any intelligent species also see this? It seems to me that most of today's problems stem from the oligarchic capture of power that simply benefits more from the status quo than anyone else and so they do as much as possible to change it. If aliens were to come, that would be such a paradigm shift that it could steer earth in any imaginable direction. But maybe they operate in time scales that are just meaningless for us. If they are so advanced, they might as well be immortal, so at that point you might just not care as much... I mean, we look at ants for example and they do their whole life cycles in such a short time. I don't know. I mean we've had contact stories in human history that haven't gone very well anyway. In Childhood's end, from Arthur C. Clarke, the aliens took quite a while to make contact but one day they did simply show up.