Long before cities, books, the atom bomb, or speaking machines, human beings were already asking: Who are we? Why are we here? Is there a purpose to human life? What lies beyond death? Are we alone in this immense universe?
More than 11,000 years ago, at Göbekli Tepe in what is now Trkiye, people raised enormous stone pillars carved with animals and strange symbols. We do not know exactly what they believed. But the site tells us something remarkable: very early human beings were doing more than surviving. They were gathering, creating symbols, performing rituals, and reaching toward something greater than themselves.
The same search appears in ancient flood stories. In Mesopotamia, the Atrahasis story was written in Akkadian cuneiform around 1635 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh preserves another flood story in Tablet XI. In India, Manu appears in the Satapatha Brahma?a, roughly 800-600 BCE. Greece remembered Deucalion. Plato, writing in the fourth century BCE, told of Atlantis, which he said Solon had learned about from Egyptian priests.
Did these stories come from one ancient catastrophe? We do not know. Atlantis has never been proved by accepted archaeology. The flood stories may preserve real disasters, or may have developed separately among peoples who knew the power of water. The sensible position is neither blind belief nor ridicule. We can remain curious while still asking for evidence.
Across Egypt, Babylon, India, Greece, Rome, Mesoamerica and Asia, human beings continued looking for meaning. They watched the stars, measured the seasons, built temples, prayed, meditated, and created philosophies about life and death. Their answers differed, but beneath them lay a common question: Is the world we see only part of a greater reality?
Centuries later, Meister Eckhart looked for that greater reality within the human person, beneath possessions, ambitions and the restless ego. Baruch Spinoza looked outward toward nature. He spoke of Deus sive Natura-God or Nature-the infinite reality within which all exists. Albert Einstein admired this idea and spoke of the astonishing order and harmony of the universe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asked another question. What if evolution is more than the development of the human body? As life became more complex, consciousness also seemed to deepen. Eventually there came a creature able not only to think, but to know that it was thinking. Teilhard wondered whether humanity itself might therefore be moving toward greater consciousness. He called the growing world of shared human thought the noosphere. Today, with billions of minds connected almost instantly, the idea seems easier to imagine.
Rizal belongs beautifully in this conversation. During his exile in Dapitan, he exchanged letters with the Jesuit Fr. Pablo Pastells about faith and reason. Rizal resisted superstition and blind acceptance of what reason could not embrace. Yet he did not reject God or mystery. In April 1893, he wrote:
‘I believe in Revelation but in that living revelation of Nature that surrounds us everywhere, in that mighty voice eternal, incessant, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal like the Being from which it emanates, in that revelation that speaks to us and penetrates into us from the moment we are born until we die.’
He then asked what books could better reveal the goodness, love, providence, eternity, glory and wisdom of God. Rizal tells us to use reason, but also to look around us. Nature itself may become a book.
Rudolf Steiner later added another thought. Knowledge, he said, should not simply become a private treasure. Learning should help us grow and serve something larger than ourselves. He wrote: ‘Every idea which becomes your ideal creates within you life-forces.’
Here Rizal and Steiner almost meet. Rizal asks us to read the world. Steiner asks what we will do with what we learn.
Ancient Indian traditions also speak of great cycles in human history. Sri Yukteswar proposed that humanity had passed through its darkest age, Kali Yuga, and that 1899 marked entry into a new ascending period associated with greater understanding of nature’s forces. This is a spiritual teaching, not an accepted scientific chronology. Yet consider what followed: electricity, radio, airplanes, relativity, quantum physics, nuclear energy, space travel, computers, the internet-and now artificial intelligence.
AI may therefore be more than another invention. It is also a mirror. We have created machines that calculate, recognize patterns, write, and answer questions. But this raises a harder question: Are human beings becoming wiser as our machines become more intelligent?
We possess more knowledge and power than any earlier civilization. Yet knowledge is not wisdom. Intelligence is not compassion. Technology can advance quickly while human character advances slowly.
The same mystery appears in today’s interest in UAPs-unidentified anomalous phenomena. Pilots and military personnel have reported things they could not readily explain. Diana Walsh Pasulka studies how such experiences can create beliefs resembling older religious traditions. But unexplained does not mean extraterrestrial, and no publicly verified evidence has established that visitors from another world are here.
Still, the ancient question returns: Are we alone?
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day gives dramatic form to that fascination. Yet perhaps the greatest disclosure will not come from the sky. Perhaps it will be about ourselves.
From Göbekli Tepe to ancient flood stories, from Eckhart and Spinoza to Teilhard, Rizal and Steiner, from the first temples to artificial intelligence, humanity has continued asking the same question in different languages: What does it mean to be human?
We need not believe every mystery. Neither must we close our minds to everything we cannot yet explain. Mystery does not require credulity. It requires humility.
Perhaps human progress will finally mean something only when intelligence grows together with wisdom, knowledge with compassion, and power with responsibility.
Then the oldest questions remain: Who are we? Why are we here? And what are we becoming?
Dr. Pablo S. Trillana III is the former chair of the National Historical Institute, which is now the National Historical Commission of the Philippines. He is a distinguished historian who has also served as the president of the Philippine Historical Association.