"Alien" literally just means "foreign". The reason we calls them "aliens" is essentially a contraction of "space aliens", which suggests that they're foreign from the perspective of the people of the Earth. The term "extraterrestrial" essentially means the same thing. There's nothing innately monstrous or offensive about the term, unless you think not being from where you are is somehow offensive.
You see, though, how that same exact logic can be applied to calling some of our fellow human beings "aliens"...and yet that itself is a pretty contentious issue (for good reason)?
"Extraterrestrial" has both a different precise meaning and a different connotation. Ain't really about what's innately bad.
Either way, I truly have no dog in this fight, lol. I can just see the argument. If interaction with extraterrestrial beings became some normalized fact of life, chances are these kind of issues would come up. Specificity would be called for, we'd be more conscious of othering, Earth vs. not from Earth might become less casually centralized in our discourse around the subject (in both directions: how we see ourselves, how we see life from elsewhere).
Even if you disagree with where Demi landed here, it's not innately ridiculous to engage with the subject this way. "Oh, now we're worried about offending aliens?? AYYY LMAOOO" Just like we can speculate about what they'd look like, where they are, whether or not we'd be able to fuck them, we can also take these basic toolsets to evaluate language we've all come to know and apply it to them, as well. It's a fun enough exercise.
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