I always ponder at this scenario. Why are they asking?
Obviously it is implied that this alien race holds the future of humanity, but how?
Is it that the aliens are going to kill us if we can't convince them not to? What is the alternative? What motivation would they have? If they gain nothing from our doom, why take the time? If they gain something from our doom (resources, I assume), what is it, and why don't we offer it freely so our demise will be unnecessary? Clearly, if they have a reason to kill us, and have already elected to do so, what could we offer of redeeming value anyway? Not in that we have no value, but clearly they want something so bad as to wipe out a whole species anyway, regardless of the "value" of that species.
Is the situation, then, that there is an imminent outside threat; like the sun going super nova or an asteroid, or a third party of aliens out to destroy us? And this otherwise neutral alien race wants justification for going out of their way to save us? Obviously if they know enough of our plight to ask the question, they know about as much of us as they're ever going to care about. Furthermore, if we had anything of value to compensate them with at this point, we'd find ourselves in my first scenario.
How would we determine what was deserving of merit to this aliens? If they aren't like us in any discernible fashion, nothing in our context would make sense to them anyway. If they are like us, they probably already have the things that we think are "special".
In short: if they're going to kill you, they're going to kill you. If they aren't going to help you, they aren't going to help you. If you have something worth them helping you, they might find it easier to kill you for it (or corpse-loot). The odds are, however, that you have nothing of value to them.
So, I guess the answer is, we're hosed.
(yes including me)
