It's not surprising, then, that he was beleaguered by a wide assortment of well-meaning people who purported to have been in contact with aliens. As Sagan notes, he was often asked "Do you believe in UFOs?" To him that was the wrong question, because it is a question of belief, of faith, and not of evidence or hard science. A better question would have been "How valid is the evidence that UFOs are actually alien spacecraft?" But no one would ask him that question.
To his lament, he says in the book that people today who would ordinarily be skeptics, or humanists, cling to the magical thinking of New Age metaphysics and alien abductions. To them, religion no longer satisfies that need to dispel mystery, to provide solace. Somehow, this trust in alien intervention does.
From time to time he would be approached by people who claimed to be in contact with intelligent alien entities. They would ask Sagan to think of any question, because the aliens were so much more advanced. He would ask for a proof of Fermat's last theorem. Apparently, the aliens didn't have an answer for that.
Then Sagan suggests there be a contest of ten things to ask an alien. But what can you ask an alien, I wonder? First off, that's taking on the assumption that this alien entity is more intelligent than we are. What is intelligence, anyway? Would aliens be bothered by aⁿ+bⁿ=cⁿ only if the positive integers are greater than 2? Would aliens use the same math? We see the universe as computational. But we may be limiting ourselves to computation and ignoring maybe greater laws of physics, ones that we haven't recognized. We understand gravity; we understand the speed of light. But physicists are often presented with quandary about observations of things that don't quite fit. Tachyons, for example. Tachyons cease to exist before they exist because they travel faster than the speed of light. So how do we know they're there? Would aliens be able to laugh patronizingly at us and say "Ah, you poor Earthlings. Don't you see that the speed of light is really only constant in a three-dimensional universe?"
How would aliens communicate with us? We assume that somehow they would learn to speak English. What if aliens are trying to communicate with us on a cellular level? What if viruses were really alien essays? How do we know aliens aren't desperately asking us for answers now?
I remember as a child learning that sound waves were really on the same continuum as light waves. I thought then about aliens who could see microwaves and sound waves. If there were such creatures, the Earth must look like a convoluted mess to them, with snarls of microwaves everywhere.
Another problem with asking an alien a question is recognizing there's a life form in the first place. How do we know that there isn't already life discovered on Mars or on the Moon? Right now on Earth we are discovering life forms that 50 years ago we were told couldn't have survived, but these life forms thrive. There are the sulphur cave worms. There are tiny organisms that live within grains of sand. There are life forms in dense saline "wells" in the ocean. We make an awful lot of assumptions about what constitutes life: that it's carbon-based, that it respires, that it replicates. How do we know that life requires these aspects?
If we discover bacteria on Mars, or methane-breathing worms on Titan, what questions could we ask then? What can you ask a bacteria?
These questions all seem childish. Yet, I think they are valid. Like Sagan, I would love to find out that Earth is not the only planet that has living organisms. I would love to know we're not alone. And yet, our search for alien life forms is so much like our search for proof of biblical events. We spend a lot of time making assumptions about a paradigm that keeps shifting. In essence, our search for aliens really is our search for a confirmation of God. We may be looking for footprints by someone who has no feet.
