What Do We Do if We Meet Aliens? by Daniel Swanson
"So," one might reasonably ask, on step three, which is to discuss religion. of souls. Human souls have the capacity
"what do we do if we meet aliens?" If you're asking about what we will actually do, then I have no idea (though if the non-Trek SciFi I'm familiar with is any indication, it will probably be disastrous). However, on the matter of what we should do I present the following plan of action. The first step would be to throw a bunch of linguists at them and replicate the first half of Arrival (I don't recommend the second half, but, if atemporal perspectives are available and you really like barely averted global war, then go for it). Once we can speak the same language, step two would be offering a trade of board games and spaceship blueprints (those who can travel the stars hardly lack access to natural resources). If we are the ones providing board games, I would recommend Tak and Go since both are simple, interesting, and easily divorced from their original cultural context. Beyond this point the plan gets rather complicated (and, even before this, there are complexities that I'm ignoring) so I'm going to spend the rest of this article
2 | What do we do if we meet aliens?
Since time, space, your attention, and my knowledge are all limited, the actions and implications discussed below are limited to those that are significant to Christianity, and not even necessarily all of Christianity. Doubtless some religions would be fundamentally contradicted and others radically transformed, some would claim to have been validated and others would be unaffected, while dozens more would spring into existence - but all these are outside my present concern.
The first thing to ask would be whether or not they are spiritual creatures like we are. The first thing to ask would be whether or not they are spiritual creatures like we are. A traditional understanding of the soul is that it is what distinguishes a living being from a corpse. There are various types
for rational and abstract thought and can survive the death of the body, whereas the souls of animals and plants do not have that capacity and probably don't survive death. If the aliens that we meet fall into the latter category, then they would seem not to be "in the image of God" as we are, and so there wouldn't really be anything more to discuss with them in terms of religion. In the case that the aliens we meet are robots, the definition of the soul given above works out to either a stream of electrons or nothing at all. Either way, I don't think they can really be said to be alive, and if they aren't alive then they aren't really people in the relevant sense and we again don't have much to discuss (though we probably should treat them as we would if they were people, to avoid encouraging immoral tendencies in ourselves, if for no other reason). However, it is quite possible that the beings who created them were people, and we could potentially learn useful things by asking about those creators. Of course, simply asking "Do you have
