Baptising aliens

[Last Things]

Pope Francis has said that he would be willing to baptise aliens if they came to the Vatican, asking “who are we to close doors” to anyone - even Martians.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...60632.html

So he'd baptise aliens, but not cats or dogs? What's the difference in the Church's eyes? Why do aliens and humans get souls but not every other species on Earth?

Not that aliens would be stupid enough to get baptised by Catholics or anything.

He was trying to make a point about offering baptism to those that ask, not make a metaphysical argument about the nature of aliens. As usual the Pope isn't careful with flippant examples and the media make a big deal about it.

However, to answer your question, any being which would ask for such a thing would be considered to have the power of language, that is, reason. For Thomas Aquinas, intelligence, is the immortal part of the human being that survives death.

Animals cannot ask for baptism or understand what it means.

[Heywood]

If we take the amount of time that elasped on earth between the first single cell Prokaryotes and the first creature that can use fire and work metal to be roughly typical of how long this sort of things generally take in the universe, then we can expect a large number of earth like planets able to bear life would have evolved technological civilizations when the planet reaches 4-5 billion years old.

Based on our current understanding of cosmology, the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and conditions would have existed to form earth like planets for at least 10 billion years in a typical galaxy like the Milky way.

This suggests the most advanced civilization would be roughly 5 billion years more advanced then we are. They would have been traveling in space when earth was still settling out of the dust of the primordial solar nebula.

Now ask yourself this, can you anticipate how a creature as much more advanced than us, as we are more advanced than the most primitive bacteria, would behave?

Going from Prokaryote to Eukaryote may be the nearly insurmountable hurdle. I wouldn't be surprised if we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy.