Space aliens.

Rarely, but every once in a while, someone’ll ask me whether I believe in aliens. By which they don’t mean strangers from other countries; they mean extraterrestrials. Space aliens. Little green men… or tall skinny gray ones with big eyes; whatever they’d rather imagine more.

My usual answer is, “I do—and so do you. Is God from Earth?” This usually surprises them, and the obvious response is no, he’s not.

Probably no heavenly being originated on Earth. But we don’t actually know; the scriptures don’t tell us a thing about the creation of angels, nor lowercase-G “gods,” nor spirits, nor evil spirits. Revelation tells us about Satan’s fall, but—despite the Lucifer myth, and how Christians claim it’s totally in the bible—it actually doesn’t tell us how Satan was created. Only that it was an accuser, and now it’s a full-on enemy.

But people presume God must’ve created some heavenly beings before he created us. When he says, “Let us make humans in our image,” Ge 1.26 NRSVue he was talking to someone. The other beings round his throne, perhaps; the living creatures and 24 elders and anyone else who was present. And maybe that’s true. But again, we don’t know. Bible doesn’t say.

Now there’s a popular teaching which claims when God said “us” and “our,” this was the persons of the trinity talking to one another—the Father telling the Son and Holy Spirit what the game plan was. Since the scriptures do say the Son was doing all the creating, Jn 1.3 this popular teaching would be wrong; it’s the Son telling the Father and Holy Spirit what he was gonna do next. This is why I keep telling people to read those bibles, and try harder not to overlook important points like this.

But I digress. Back to heavenly extraterrestrials: Yeah, they exist.

Still, when people ask me whether there are space aliens, they’re not talking about heavenly beings. They wanna know whether I believe in beings from other planets like the ones we see in fiction. Benevolent ones like Superman or E.T.; hostile ones like in the Alien and Predator movies. The simple, obvious answer is that, same as them, I don’t know whether there are denizens of other worlds out there in space. No one does.

As an historian, I can certainly tell you humanity has always kinda suspected there was. As soon as the ancients figured out how vast space was, and how far away our nearby planets were, they started imagining life out there. Many mythologies believed the underworld was in fact a whole other world. Norse mythology obviously—they had multiple other planets as part of their belief system, and fantasy novels have borrowed heavily from that mythology. Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings novels and movies isn’t Earth. J.R.R. Tolkien gave it a whole different creation story.

Medieval Christians were entirely sure our nearby planets were inhabited. Why else would God make other worlds, as large or bigger than Earth, and not put beings on ’em? Seems like a mighty big waste of space. In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, our neighbor planets are most definitely inhabited. Dante figured the planets are in “the heavens,” therefore they’re part of heaven, and populated with saints and angels.

These medieval ideas clearly influenced Latter-day Saint beliefs, with Brigham Young himself once saying he believed there was life on the moon, Mars, and even the sun. But Mormons don’t talk about that; they believe if they follow God as they should, perhaps in heaven they might merit godhood, and become God over one of those other planets, just like our heavenly Father became God over Earth. Yep, that’s an official LDS teaching; they don’t believe God has always existed, but was created by his heavenly Father and Mother—like Zeus, but without the patricide. It’s one of the big, big differences between the LDS and orthodox Christianity.

Well anyway. We find life all over Earth; sometimes in places we couldn’t imagine finding life. It’s easy to imagine we’d find it all over space, too. When we first started sending out the space probes, we totally thought we would. We didn’t. Too bad. Though it sounds a lot more cool that Mars is entirely populated by robots.

But as for further out in space, on the planets orbiting other worlds; the ones the Mormons hope to rule someday—we call ’em “exoplanets”—maybe, just maybe, God put life out there. Why not? But we’re never gonna know until we can figure out how to see them better, travel there, or establish communications. So for now, we simply have no idea.

Would we do them any good?

The distances in space are so vast, it’s profoundly unlikely we’ll make contact with another world anytime soon. Gotta invent the technology first. Science fiction has some ideas, like hyperspace and wormholes, but hyperspace probably doesn’t exist, and we’ve never found a wormhole big enough to travel through. Maybe scientists can prove these statements wrong someday; maybe not.

But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, this might be for the best: Humanity has just the worst track record whenever we encounter new cultures.

No, really. Lookit the neo-Babylonian Empire, conquering and deporting all its neighbors around in the hopes of homogenizing them into one big empire. Lookit Alexander the Great, conquering every city-state he came across and forcing Greek culture upon them. Lookit the conquistadors, who murdered the Indians of the Americas for their gold, then forced ’em into slavery and killed them if they wouldn’t become Catholic. Lookit the men who turned the United Kingdom into the worldwide British Empire, and oppressed and corrupted and trod upon every country they could get their hands around.

Lewis was far more concerned with humanity exporting our depraved human nature. We are pretty messed up in that way… and what if the space aliens we encounter had never fallen into sin the way we humans have? That’s the premise of Lewis’s 1938 space fantasy novel Out of the Silent Planet, in which Mars is populated by beings who’d never known sin, and ruled by angels. Earth in this book is “the silent planet,” cut off from the rest of the heavens ever since our ruling angel went wrong. (Not that the bible states Satan was ever a ruling angel, but y’know, mythology.) But I prefer Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Fire Balloons” better—it was overtly about missionaries from Earth who wanted to share the gospel with Martians, only to discover the Martians had never fallen, and knew God far better than we do.

That’s actually the premise in a lot of science fiction: Innocent, benevolent, kindly space creatures, who wanna help humanity out. Sometimes they used to be greedy, warlike, and untrustworthy like us humans, but they evolved beyond all that. Other times they were always that way; innocence was somehow part of their biology. You find this trope about as often as its opposite: Alien conquistadors who wanna plunder our resources, and enslave or kill us all—in other words, beings just like us.

So if we somehow did leave our world and visit another, and find intelligent life on it, would we be benevolent space creatures like we see in Star Trek? Or evil conquistadors, like we see in the mirror universe in Star Trek? As things currently stand, my money’s on the second one. Maybe we should first wait till Jesus takes over the world.