A British priest and theologist is helping advise the American space agency about what they should do if alien life is found.
Rev Dr Andrew Davison says the prospect for finding life on another planet is becoming ever more real.
The theologian at Cambridge University, who has a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford, has been working with NASA and has published his own book which is due to be released next year.
He was one of 24 religious experts who took part in the in a NASA-sponsored programme at the Centre for Theological Inquiry at Princeton University in New Jersey to assess how religions would react to news that life exists on worlds beyond our own.
In Dr Davison's book Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, he looks at the big questions:
Could God have created life elsewhere in the universe?
Could he have sent a saviour to die for the sins of an alien species?
Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life require religions to rewrite their creation stories? Or would it be accepted with ease by faiths?
If you believe that a God or gods created all creatures great and small, why not apply that across the universe?
The Bishop of Buckingham, the Right Rev Alan Wilson, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue and Imam Qari Asim of the Makkah Mosque in Leeds told The Times that they agreed that Christian, Jewish and Islamic teaching would be untroubled by the discovery of alien life.
Carl Pilcher, head of Nasa’s Astrobiology Institute until 2016, said NASA wanted theologians to “consider the implications of applying the tools of late 20th [and early 21st]-century science to questions that had been considered in religious traditions for hundreds or thousands of years”.
He said it was “inconceivable” that Earth is the only place in the universe to harbour life.
“That’s just inconceivable when there are over 100 billion stars in this galaxy and over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”
