Perhaps, like Ellie Arrow (Jodie Foster) in the WB movie Contact you would ask, "How did you do it? How did you manage to survive your technological adolescence without killing yourselves?"
In the absence of contact with a group of friendly, helpful aliens, the better question might be, "How will we know the answer when we see it?" And that is the question to ask because, as you can see from reading "Halloween", a meeting with friendly, helpful aliens is an extremely unlikely prospect.
To help us deal with such a grown-up question, we can do what all children and, one supposes, childlike species do. Play. Among the most constructive activities occurring today are games, specifically those dealing with ways to get off this rock or with traversing and living in the airless void between worlds.
The Mars Society sponsors the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island in the Canadian arctic. The reason for the Society's interest is that the cold and dry arctic climate exhibits similarities to the Martian environment. This is a game called "pretending to live on Mars".
A brand new game, which might be called "pretending to drive a rover on Mars", is afoot with a Mars Society project to develop a pressurized Mars analog rover. Chapters or individuals who wish to present concepts are being encouraged to do so at a special session of the Third International Mars Society Convention at Toronto, Canada, in August.
NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) started playing the game years ago in Antarctica, which is thought to resemble the surface of Mars the way it was several billion years ago. Combining remoteness, isolation and harsh weather, the Antarctic Space Analog Program makes use of technologies intended for space outposts to reduce waste management problems and apply solar energy instead of diesel engines to power camp sites. A multi-legged all-terrain robot called Dante, designed to explore active volcanos, is similar to devices that might be used to explore the surface of the moon and Mars.
Biosphere 2, the brain child of a private firm called Space Biospheres Ventures, started its game of pretending to live on a space colony back in the early '90s. The project, much maligned by the popular press, failed in its publically-announced goal of supporting eight human "biospherians" for two years when mechanical carbon dioxide "scrubbers" had to be installed. The project did provide some useful insights into closed-loop systems, not least of which was the information that aging concrete emits large amounts of carbon dioxide.
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