Extraterrestrial life and traditional religions

Conflicts between religion and science, particularly between the Roman Catholic version of Christianity and evolving astronomical science, have been around for centuries, a major conflict being that between the Catholic Church and Copernicus (1473-1543), who maintained that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. This continuing conflict was so strong that the Dominican monk Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was burnt at the stake for his published view that 'The universe is infinite ...There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths revolve around those suns'. Fortunately Christianity has evolved somewhat since then, and other religions have not been so intolerant of scientific views and are at least able to contemplate the possibility that we are not alone in the universe.