colonizing space amid alien life

Would you take part in colonizing another world? It's meant as a serious sci-fi question.

I myself would love to, and probably if it were to come when I was in my early 20s, I would jump at the chance. Now that I'm 33, married and have two children -- and all that that entails -- reality almost certainly would prevent me from leaving, since that would mean uprooting all of us from all our friends, family and loved ones. The separation would be too irrevocable, and I don't think I'd be able to content myself just with lightspeed communication, given the number of years that would pass between communiques.

And since superluminal travel is out of the question, well, like I said, I couldn't see myself doing such a thing at this point in my life, though I would always think wistfully of our distant kin.

My initial thought would be a world where there is no other life, but the question of intelligent life on other worlds is an interesting one.

Someone -- I think it was Beethoven Brucker -- mentioned a story where a Christian missionary tried to bring the gospel to an alien race, who had no understanding of the Christian concept of sin. The evangelism didn't go very well. The aliens were utterly freaked out, and ended up crucifying the missionary, thereby introducing their own fall.

Ray Bradbury has done two stories on the subject. In one, "The Man," he has a crew of astronauts landing on a world where Christ has just been and just departed. I don't remember much else about it. I think it was included in "The October Country." His second one was in "The Martian Chronicles," and showed a missionary trying and utterly failing to interest the Martians in his religion since it was something they had no use for.

Some time ago I toyed with the idea of a story around space travelers encountering intelligent life on other worlds, only to discover that the intelligent life in question is human, having been there since humanity was scattered after the Tower of Babel. Still might be a story worth developing at some time.

In any event, I think the question of bringing sin to other planets is a moot one. I don't think there is life elsewhere, and if we talk about a barren planet, I don't think the planet will suffer much for being awakened by life. If there is life elsewhere, I rather imagine it's fallen too. If not, true, we would bring our own sin to it, but think of what we could learn of grace by mingling with an unfallen people.