Of Aliens and Religions

With NASA’s Phoenix mission to Mars and the discovery of planet OGLE-2005- BLG-390Lb, our search for evidence of extra-terrestrial life continues. Accordingly, the Vatican’s astronomer has declared that “extra-terrestrial life may exist, and if they exist, it would have been created by God”. Of course, this is fully in line with the Catholic Church’s always being at the forefront of scientific discoveries and inventions.

All the same, if and when extra-terrestrial life is found, it would raise difficult issues for the world’s religions forcing their followers to find logical answers to tricky questions. Hindus and Buddhists, for instance, will have to take a stance on whether souls can travel between planets during reincarnations. So can a pangolin for earth take birth as a ZX456 in another planet in its next life? Christians and Jews will have to modify the Genesis to also indicate the year in which extra-terrestrial life was created just as they estimated that earth life was created on October 23, 4004 BC. But then, given the number of religious scholars on earth, such questions would be rather quickly and comprehensively solved.

Bigger challenges would be faced by those who would not want to miss out on this opportunity to proselytize an entire planet. Who would be the new Cortez the killer? He is most likely to be a Korean. Many Koreans, who comprise the most zealous Christian evangelicals, are probably already making arrangements to beam television signals towards the direction of this second earth in order to be the first to proselytize the aliens. As for Muslim proselytizers, they would first have to develop the most accurate compass in the world so that their alien followers can accurately orient towards Mecca and not Pluto while praying (since even a minute error in orientation can lead to huge deviations in the world of inter-stellar distances). Israel will need to develop super fast spaceships so that they can be the first to ship settlers to establish “facts on the ground” in second earth.

But what if the aliens find us first and are proselytizers themselves with their own Cortez? Will we be able to cope with extra-terrestrial inquisitions? Does someone in the Pentagon have any plans for that?