Question: What did E.T.’s mother ask him when he got home? Answer: “Where on earth have you been?” Right, Mom, but don’t be too hard on the little rascal. Unlike the malevolent Martians of the 1950s B-movies, extraterrestrials (ETs) are in favor these days. Indeed, they have long had admirers among philosophers and poets.

Consider John Locke. No one had more influence on our founding fathers, although his A Letter Concerning Toleration sidelines Catholics. Like many a philosopher, Locke professes modesty. In the Epistle to the Reader of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he tells us that “It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-laborer in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”

But Locke, like many a philosopher, wanted to say something about, well, everything. The sky’s the limit. Under the influence of the principle of continuity, an aspect of the great chain of being, he writes in the Essay:

When we consider the infinite power and wisdom of the Maker, we have reason to think that it is suitable to the magnificent harmony of the universe, and the great design and infinite goodness of the Architect, that the species of creatures should also, by gentle degrees, ascend upward from us toward his infinite perfection, as we see they gradually descend from us downwards.

And what follows from this? He boldly continues:

We have reason then to be persuaded that there are far more species of creatures above us than there are beneath; we being, in degrees of perfection, much more remote from the infinite being of GOD than we are from the lowest state of being, and that which approaches nearest to nothing. And yet of all those distinct species…we have no clear distinct ideas.

From Locke, we can turn to the poet Alice Meynell (1847–1922), decidedly British and a robustly Catholic friend of another poet, Francis Thompson. Consider her cheerful lyricism!

Christ in the Universe

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

Note that Meynell’s rhapsody envisioned the Good News as already at play throughout our solar system. Would it not serve to show God’s glory?

So widespread was the inclination to believe in ETs that John Henry Newman referenced this belief as one that rested on probability rather than empirical evidence. In his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, he draws a strategic comparison.

It is difficult to put a limit to the legitimate force of this antecedent probability. Some minds will feel it to be so powerful, as to recognize in it almost a proof, without direct evidence, of the divinity of a religion claiming to be the true [one], supposing its history and doctrine are free from positive objection…. Nor ought this trust in a presumption to seem preposterous to those who are so confident, on à priori grounds, that the moon is inhabited by rational beings.

Given the vastness of the universe, of which Newman was not aware, we might very well never have an empirical resolution of the existence of ETs. It is, after all, notoriously difficult to prove a negative.

Even so, for my part, I am skeptical that there are any ETs to be found. Were there such beings, one wonders why don’t they contact us? Some, of course, claim to have seen them or, at least, their space vehicles. Of late, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense have introduced the term UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon). But it is a mighty stretch from the vaguely anomalous to visiting ETs.

Our own search for ETs, we know, has been both costly and futile. Scientists, nonetheless, keep busy. A recent New York Times headline (Nov. 10, 2026, D3) announces, “Step Aside, Water: Sulfuric Acid May Sustain Life, Too.” Ah, well, if at first you don’t succeed, try again—if the budget allows you.

While I am skeptical that there are ETs, and even if there are, I am persuaded that there can be only a single Incarnation and that it is cosmic in scope. The analytic Thomist David Braine, in his posthumous The Fittingness of the Incarnation (CUA, 2025), argues for the uniqueness of the Incarnation for a pair of basic reasons. The first is that to be incarnate is to be bodily, and the Risen Christ establishes the bodily dimension of heaven. (So also does the Assumption of the Blessed Mother.) But it hardly makes sense to suppose that in heaven Christ could have more than one body. The second reason is that to be incarnate is to enter a created temporality within an intricate web of historical relationships. But each person has a unique identity and a single place in history. It is with this identity that each of us communicates with others to form the social networks in which we live our distinctive lives. Accordingly, it is fitting that the Incarnation itself is unique.

Nonetheless, the Incarnation is cosmic in scope. St. Paul tells us as much. In Romans 8:21-22 we read, “Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.” And in Ephesians 1:8-10 Paul writes, “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, that he set forth in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”

There is a unity in the whole of creation. It is a cosmos. And it was through the Word that all things were made, this same Word who will make all things new in the Kingdom which is to come. So we believe, so we pray.