Well, it looks like the British Science Festival is going to be a whole lot stranger than the World Science Festival was:
"Pope's astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him"
Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. "Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul." Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."
Oh, I can only hope that nobody asks me about Neandertals...