Would human extraterrestrials still be considered Human if they were not from Earth?

[brainbomb]

Would an alien who has identical or near identical DNA to a human be called a human or an alien or an extraterrestrial if they happened to have been born on another planet?

And what if they had their own Jesus also. what would this mean

[Octavious]

What are you talking about here? Do you mean humans from Earth who have colonised other planets for a few generations and who may now genetically differ slightly from the earthbound norm, or do you mean a life form that independently evolved on another planet along near identical lines to humans on Earth?

[Jamiet99uk]

Why is this in the "forum games" section?

[brainbomb]

If Humans were discovered in other parts of the Universe; who evolved under similar circumstances; how would that change our understanding of what we call human and alien. and also What about Jesus

[Jamiet99uk]

What about Jesus?

God does not exist.

Can you clarify your question about Jesus?

[Octavious]

They wouldn't be human. They'd be aliens who are remarkably similar to humans. In all honesty I don't think it would change our understanding of anything. We are quite used to remarkably similar animals having very different evolutionary histories. Rabbits and hares, for example.

Besides, a lot of evolutionary traits will be universal. Two eyes facing front to get basic depth perception and aid hunting, a mouth at the bottom of the face so that food drops away from sensitive organs, a nose above the mouth to check the food for contaminates, ears either side to give full coverage and directionality to where the sound is coming from. A very different alien would be something of a surprise.

And I don't think an alien Jesus like figure will be any more of a shock than the Jesus like figures from other earthbound religions

[brainbomb]

If they had a Jesus and it was still alive. And it claimed to be the first galactic christ, would we refute it or claim it as the second coming

[Theodoric]

We are quite used to remarkably similar animals having very different evolutionary histories. Rabbits and hares, for example.

I want to quibble slightly with your reasonable response to this silly question.

Rabbits and hares share a recent common ancestor. There are other examples where distantly related animals end up evolving similar characteristics (i.e. convergent evolution)--the most famous is the many different animals that have evolved crab-like bodies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation). However, in those cases, you have very different genetics producing similar anatomy, and the anatomy is often more similar in a big-picture sense than in the details. The different "fake crabs" have different numbers of limbs than real crabs, stuff like asymmetrical abdomens, etc.

So, it wouldn't be surprising from an evolutionary perspective to find aliens with a similar basic body design as humans, because there's plenty of reasons to pair intelligence with hands and height. It would be surprising if aliens were genetically similar to humans, or if the more arbitrary and minute aspects of their anatomy were similar to humans (e.g. if they had appendixes, vestigial tails, color vision built around three colors, etc.). Were this the case, we'd have to either discard evolution or believe that humans developed spaceflight and traveled to other planets prior to the advent of recorded history. This would likely require a pretty dramatic rethinking of the evolutionary history of humans, since the earliest Homo Sapiens are not old enough to have had a space-faring civilization (as we understand it, at least) that would leave no archaeological record. Maybe the most likely explanation would be that a whole different group of aliens took some humans as a seed population for another planet.

As for Jesus, I think we already have a useful analogue because the Americas were entirely disconnected from Eurasia during the period in which Christianity arose. My understanding is that most Christians believe that there was one Jesus, in the Middle East, who counted as Jesus for all of the humans on earth, rather than there being one Jesus for Eurasia and a different Jesus for the Americas. However, Mormons dispute this, believing that the one Jesus went to the Americas after dying in the Middle East and did a whole other thing over there.

Thus, if the Mormons are correct about Jesus, we would expect the extraterrestrial pseudo-humans to have their own religious tradition around Jesus (though it would be possible that this tradition would have died out, as it supposedly did in the Americas). If either mainstream Christians or non-Christians are right, the one Middle-Eastern Jesus would be the only Jesus anybody gets.

[Jamiet99uk]

If they had a Jesus and it was still alive. And it claimed to be the first galactic christ, would we refute it or claim it as the second coming

Define "a Jesus".

[brainbomb]

a Jesus would be a person whose DNA can be directly tested and traced back to a Greater Deity.