Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life

There was a time when I was skeptical about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life for theological reasons, and so I'd have fitted the first proposition in the following quote from this article Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life: "finding intelligent other-worldly life 'will be inconsistent with the existence of God or at least organized religions.' But such predictions tend to come from outside Christianity. From within, theologians have debated the implications of alien contact for centuries. And if one already believes in angels, no great leap of faith is required to accept the possibility of other extraterrestrial intelligences."
I think that, for me, it revolved around the idea of incarnation. I don't think I had a problem with God creating (or setting up and holding a process in being that led to) other life and intelligence. No, the difficulty was that if God became human then that seems to imply a uniqueness; how could God also become !$aaq*% ? In this I may have been unduly influenced by CS Lewis whose novel Perelandra /Voyage to Venus (the second of the trilogy) had the people of that planet being created in the form of human beings (not like the sentient beings on Mars) because of the incarnation, which set the template, so to speak. I took that idea on board but I'm not sure that it need to be given the weight I did give it. For one thing, could there be other incarnations in other flesh? Maybe. Would it be necessary? Maybe or maybe not. It would depend on sin in other races, and that is something, I gather, that the Vatican document wrestles with. But it may be that even if a remedy for sin is needed for other races, perhaps Jesus would still be that remedy. However, if (as some theologies suggest) God's desire for incarnation is 'prior' to the need for atonement, then God may have incarnated in other forms, if there are such. I can't think of a theological reason why not. The once-for-all-ness of atonement may or may not have an exclusively human reference. A more important issue may be to do with whether other races would be fallen, unfallen or something else, and what our meeting might mean. Anyway the article goes over all this, briefly.

There are a number of science fiction wrestlings with this kind of issue (I commend The Sparrow, for example). Most seem to conclude that there is no problem for Christians to take this on board. But if there are real theological difficulties; I'd like to know what they would be. The comments raise some interesting hypotheticals (leaving aside the sillinesses of the rentamob atheists with axes to grind): I liked the ones about whether an alien could be ordained. I'd add the issues of whether sexual relations could be envisaged (in a somewhat humanoid fashion, eg Star Trek) and if so, what would we make of them theologically?