What is the Christian missionary responsibility if life is discovered on other planets?  Does the Great Commission call followers of Jesus to evangelize Alpha Centauri?

After all, John 3:16 says that God “so loved the world …” — not the worlds. Or moons.

In a speech titled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” German academic Christian Weidemann recently told attendees at a U.S. government-funded conference on space travel that discovery of other worldly life could raise some difficult questions.

The Orlando, Florida, event was billed as “The 100-Year Starship Symposium.”

“Weidemann, a professor at the Ruhr-University Bochum, said that the death of Christ, some 2,000 years ago, was designed to save all creation, writes Gavin Allen in the British newspaper the Daily Mail:

However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy.

That means that if intelligent life exists on other planets, then Jesus or God would have to have visited them too, and sacrificed himself equally for Martian-kind as well as mankind.

The alternative, posits Weidemann, is that Jesus chose earthlings as the single race to save and abandoned every other life form in the galaxy.

Or, it could have been because humans were the only race who had sinned and required ‘saving’, said Weidemann, who added: ‘You can grasp the conflict.’