Should Space Aliens Be Baptized?

I mentioned a short while ago that the smartest man I've ever met (as opposed to one I've read or heard but haven't met) is a priest in residence at our parish. In a homily he gave in a livestream mass, he mentioned the topic of a web discussion he conducted with seminarians on the subject, "Should space aliens be baptized?" He posited that, given the number of exoplanets identified by recent satellite technology, it could be possible that in fact intelligent aliens could land on earth and say, "Take us to your leader." The question for Fr Sam was whether we should offer them baptism.

I raise this because one of the YouTubers and bloggers I follow is Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. a German physicist whom I would characterize as a moderate skeptic of standard-model physics. Her current blog post, which is duplicated in a YouTube video, is How to search for alien life. As I say, she's only a moderate skeptic of standard-model physics, and her views on alien life are actually pretty conventional:

So, we now know that other earth-like planets are out there. The next thing that scientists would like to know is whether the conditions on any of these planets are similar to the conditions on Earth. This is a very human-centered way of thinking about life, of course, but at least so far life on this planet is the only one we are sure exists, so it makes sense, to ask if other places are similar. Ideally, scientists would like to know whether the atmosphere of the earth-like exoplanets contains oxygen and methane, or maybe traces of chlorophyll.

. . . Ok, you may say, but this will in the best case give us an indication for microbial life and really you’d rather know if there is intelligent life out there. For this you need an entirely different type of search. Such searches for extraterrestrial intelligence have been conducted for about century. They have largely relied on analyzing electromagnetic radiation in the radio or micro-wave range that reaches us from outer space. For one that’s because this part of the electromagnetic spectrum is fairly easy to measure without going into the upper atmosphere. But it’s also because our own civilization emits in this part of the spectrum. This electromagnetic radiation is then analyzed for any kind of pattern that is unlikely to be of natural, astrophysical origin.

As you already know, no one found any sign of intelligent life on other planets, except for some false alarms.

She goes so far as to suggest we don't know enough about space-time to have a realistic discussion. Let's say the amateurs at SETI actually receive a pattern of transmissions that provably come from an intelligent civilization. The trouble is that, if they travel at the speed of light, they're probably already millions of years old, and this is about as useful as finding a yellowed message in a bottle dated 1657 washed up on a beach.

Where is St Thomas Aquinas when we need him? I would go talk to Fr Sam. Let's think this through. The universe follows a single set of rules, which come from a single Creator. If life emerged on some unimaginably distant planet, it emerged under the same set of rules the Creator set out for life on earth -- Dr Hossenfelder is clearly acknowledging this when she asks "whether the conditions [for life to emerge] on any of these planets are similar to the conditions on Earth."

She also basically agrees that if there are alien jellyfish-like creatures on the planet ZDF7846, this is only of mild interest; the question is whether there are intelligent beings. And at that point, we've got to deal with the question of what an "intelligent" creature is. Can an "intelligent" creature be without either an intellect or a will? That would be a chat I'd love to have with Fr Sam. but I tend to think that if you probed Dr Hossenfelder on this question, she would pretty much have to acknowledge that an "intelligent" life form would, by definition, have to be something human, with intellect and will.

So at that point, having emerged -- we don't really need to use "created" -- as beings with intellect and will, it's hard to avoid moving toward the question of whether they've somehow emerged in God's image. How do we get around the idea that they're creatures of God and subject to the same conditions of creation that we are?

So, once the flying saucer lands and the aliens step out, a basic task would be to determine the intellectual conditions under which they see their existence, since we acknowledge they're creatures with intellects, by definition. Do they have a concept of a Fall and a need for redemption?

I think Fr Sam's question, sidestepping the question of whether they exist but going straight to the issue of whether they should be baptized, may well be better than the question of whether we're looking for them in the right way.