A science-fiction story

The teacher set an essay topic asking students to write an imaginary story about the future of the Earth. Most of them wrote about a glorious, brilliant, advanced Earth in the future; only one student wrote the very opposite, though not absurdly. The whole school buzzed about this tragic piece of imaginative writing.
"Two astronauts looked down at the Earth in despair through the window. What had happened down there that all communication had been cut? More than twenty mushroom-shaped columns of smoke rose very high into the stratosphere, as if nuclear bombs had gone off in a series. The Earth was covered everywhere in the colour of death.
The space station still circled the Earth in a stable orbit, but the fuel for adjusting its path was running out. Food and many other necessities were running out. A tragic end was coming slowly for the two astronauts. Even more painful was that they could not contact the ground station to learn what had happened. News of their wives, children, families and parents was cut off as well. It seemed they were the only two living beings left in the vast universe.
The calendar and the clock silently ticked over; three months had passed. The communication signals were still sent down to Earth regularly according to the programme set up, but no reply came. The automatic replies were gone too. They had gone hungry for four days now. Tears welled up. It seemed the civilisation that countless people had worked to build over hundreds of thousands of years was now wiped out.
As death approached, the space station sounded an alert of contact. A dazzling light appeared at the window. The two astronauts, floating, pulled themselves by rope close to the window to look. Outside, a huge UFO had approached. Before long the space station was drawn by gravity and stuck to the strange flying saucer. The station's door opened although the two astronauts had done nothing. Then three aliens entered the compartment and pulled the two astronauts across into their saucer. As soon as they entered the saucer, a light gravity appeared and they fell to the floor.
The two astronauts were treated and recovered their strength, and began learning to communicate in the language of the cosmos. The saucer kept its orbit around the Earth. The two astronauts gradually lost the concept of Earth time because the saucer people counted differently. After six months with the saucer people, the two astronauts could communicate and had learned many things. The saucer's captain expressed deep condolences to the two astronauts for the end of the Earth.
The two astronauts told him sadly:

• Our Earth was not one common nation like your planet Vulcan. Some countries were large and strong, some small and weak. The countries raced to build weapons of destruction. If one country built a nuclear bomb capable of destroying half the Earth, another country tried to build a bomb capable of destroying the Earth completely. The countries kept racing to build weapons to destroy their own planet in order to be called nuclear powers. And perhaps someone pressed a button, making others press theirs, resulting in twenty nuclear explosions that destroyed all life on Earth.
  The two astronauts wept bitterly.
  The saucer's captain said:
• When one country managed to build a nuclear bomb, the whole planet should have joined together to get that bomb destroyed and exerted pressure to eliminate the technology for building nuclear bombs. You did the opposite: you competed to build new, more powerful bombs. The cause of this terrible disaster is that your Earth did not give proper emphasis to teaching ethics to humankind. You only cared to teach other knowledge more, and as a result life was destroyed by yourselves. On our planet, teaching ethics is regarded as supreme, and other knowledge is only secondary. And yet as time went on we advanced extraordinarily and can travel in space.
  With things as they are, you cannot return to Earth any more because everything is very heavily contaminated with radiation. So I invite you to come with us.
  The two astronauts wept bitterly again."
  The whole school took turns reading and discussing it for a long time. In the end the essay was marked 10 out of 10. 👩‍🚀

If science advances fast and ethics advances slowly, the consequences are incalculable. But it seems ethics stands still and makes no progress at all. In the last few hundred years there have been no new works to build ethics for humankind, no new arguments to compel humankind to care about ethics.

Humankind still does not regard ethics as the most important factor, still does not regard ethics as the most necessary subject, still does not regard ethics as the most noble value. Very few people understand the importance of ethics in this way, but they are not supported by others in building ethics for society together.

The difficulty of ethical education is that it requires those responsible for teaching to live in an exemplary way, not to live loosely and for enjoyment. For that reason, even fewer people "sacrifice" themselves to live exemplary lives in order to teach this subject. Everyone wants to live for enjoyment. And even if someone is willing to make personal sacrifices to become an ethics teacher, society does nothing to provide preferential policies or compensation. The teacher's enthusiasm will gradually fade.

If we do not want the imaginary story above to become reality, then the whole world must turn to very deep research into the science of ethics, to create an effective curriculum for teaching ethics to everyone, beginning when they are very small.