19 Amazing Facts

Guy Consolmagno is an astronomer and planetary scientist. He works at the Vatican observatory as a curator of the pope’s meteor collection. In an interview before his lecture at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, he stated that he would be excited if intelligent life was found somewhere in the universe. 

He would even be willing to baptize an alien! Though, he, of course, cautioned that he didn’t think it would ever happen. For Consolmagno, there are two prerequisites for being baptized. The first is that the creature would have a soul, that is to say it would “have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions.” It wouldn’t matter how the creature looked, whether it had tentacles or horns or looked utterly foreign, only that it had a soul. 

His second prerequisite is that the alien must ask for the baptism. This does make the likelihood of an alien baptism even less likely. It means that the alien must also be able to communicate with humans in some way. 

The likelihood of the alien being intelligent and able to ask for a baptism is next to nothing, and especially since we haven’t actually found any aliens. Do you think there could be intelligent life elsewhere?

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