Okay, something of a theme this morning...From the Sunday Herald:
Half a century on, the Catholic Church is finally getting round to asking what it would mean for their religion if humankind were to establish the existence of intelligent aliens. The question weighs heavily on the mind of Guy Consolmagno. Sitting among his telescopes in Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace, Consolmagno is puzzling over whether or not the Catholic Church could – or should – baptise an alien. Were such creatures discovered, ought the Pope to consider ordaining an ET? And if the human race ever masters interstellar travel, should missionaries be sent into outer space ... ?I can't top this. I got nothing...
Consolmagno, a 53-year-old Jesuit brother from Detroit, is the Pope’s astronomer, with the run of the Vatican’s observatory here at Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome. Despite the aristocratic-sounding name and the arcane, slightly eldritch subjects he immerses himself in, Guy Consolmagno appears surprisingly Earth-bound: a self-confessed “nerd” from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who’s into Star Trek.
It’s his job to reconcile the wildest reaches of science fiction with the flint-eyed dogma of the Holy See. Right now, he’s off on a mental meander about “the Jesus Seed” – a brain-warping theory which speculates that, perhaps, every planet that harbours intelligent, self-aware life may also have had a Christ walk across its methane seas, just as Jesus supposedly did here on Earth in Galilee. The salvation of the Betelguesians may have happened simultaneously with the salvation of the Earthlings.
“Is original sin something that affected all intelligent beings?” he asks. “Is there a sort of ‘cosmic’ Adam predating even life on Earth? Is Jesus Christ’s redemptive sacrifice sufficient for the whole universe? Would there be a parallel history of salvation on other planets?”
