WEBVTT - From the Vault: Do Aliens Speak Physics, with Daniel Whiteson 0:00:06.240 --> 0:00:08.560 Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My 0:00:08.680 --> 0:00:11.200 name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have 0:00:11.240 --> 0:00:13.560 a vault episode for you. This one is going to 0:00:13.600 --> 0:00:17.079 be an interview that Joe conducted with a friend of 0:00:17.120 --> 0:00:21.720 the show, Daniel Whitson, titled Do Alien Speak Physics? And 0:00:21.760 --> 0:00:26.239 of course this concern is Whitson's new book, Do Alien 0:00:26.320 --> 0:00:29.240 Speak Physics out now wherever you get your books. So 0:00:29.280 --> 0:00:35.360 without further ado, let's jump right into this interview episode. 0:00:35.760 --> 0:00:39.519 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:45.440 --> 0:00:48.440 Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My 0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:52.239 name is Joe McCormick. Today on the podcast, we're going 0:00:52.320 --> 0:00:54.840 to be featuring an interview in which I talked to 0:00:55.000 --> 0:01:00.360 returning show guest physicist Daniel Whitson about his upcoming book book, 0:01:00.680 --> 0:01:05.600 Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared an advance copy of 0:01:05.640 --> 0:01:08.080 this book with me, and I think it's great. It 0:01:08.160 --> 0:01:12.600 is a fascinating book length thought experiment that is full 0:01:12.640 --> 0:01:16.400 of insights about what could be universal and what could 0:01:16.440 --> 0:01:22.600 be unique in surprising ways about human intelligence, science, language, mathematics, 0:01:22.600 --> 0:01:26.360 and culture. A bit of bio about Daniel. Daniel Whitson 0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:30.119 is a particle physicist and physics professor. He's the co 0:01:30.200 --> 0:01:34.280 host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe and 0:01:34.440 --> 0:01:38.759 co author of We Have No Idea, also co creator 0:01:38.880 --> 0:01:42.920 of the PBS kids show Eleanor Wonders Why. His book 0:01:43.040 --> 0:01:46.800 Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is co written and illustrated by 0:01:46.920 --> 0:01:54.520 Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel Daniel Whitson, 0:01:54.720 --> 0:01:55.760 Welcome back to the show. 0:01:56.280 --> 0:01:58.400 Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk 0:01:58.440 --> 0:01:58.920 to you again. 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:04.040 So the book is Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:07.880 have really really been enjoying this book. I plan to 0:02:08.200 --> 0:02:11.079 finish it with a full read for today. But my 0:02:11.360 --> 0:02:14.320 last night, my toddler was having some sleep disturbances. That 0:02:14.400 --> 0:02:16.080 was an all night thing, so I was rushing to 0:02:16.080 --> 0:02:19.000 get through the last couple chapters. Maybe you can fill 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:21.760 me in with the greater detail that I missed in 0:02:21.800 --> 0:02:23.639 the skimming of the last two or three. 0:02:23.800 --> 0:02:25.680 Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler 0:02:25.720 --> 0:02:26.640 to help put them to sleep. 0:02:27.080 --> 0:02:30.560 Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations. Actually, 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:33.080 but the problem is I had digital versions, so that 0:02:33.080 --> 0:02:35.399 would involve showing it to her on a screen, which 0:02:35.440 --> 0:02:37.320 is a whole other thing. You know, that just turns 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:40.040 into want to see other things on the screen. So 0:02:40.120 --> 0:02:43.320 can't wait for my print copy. That'll be exciting. But 0:02:43.600 --> 0:02:45.919 I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What 0:02:46.120 --> 0:02:49.120 is the central question you're exploring in this book? 0:02:50.000 --> 0:02:53.799 Yeah, the question the book asks is whether aliens do 0:02:53.919 --> 0:02:57.520 science and specifically physics, the same way we do. You know, 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:01.639 when aliens arrive, can they just tell us the secrets 0:03:01.639 --> 0:03:04.600 of the universe? Can they leap us forward a thousand, 0:03:04.680 --> 0:03:08.880 a million, a billion years into the scientific future? Is 0:03:08.960 --> 0:03:12.400 science really just one track that way, one line and 0:03:12.440 --> 0:03:14.960 we could just sort of like skip forward, you know, 0:03:15.280 --> 0:03:17.960 with the benefits of all their time and energy. Or 0:03:18.080 --> 0:03:21.760 is science more complicated? Is it multiple paths? Are there 0:03:21.840 --> 0:03:26.320 multiple solutions? Do aliens even do science? So this book 0:03:26.400 --> 0:03:31.000 is an exploration essentially of like how universal is our 0:03:31.120 --> 0:03:34.040 theory of physics? Is what we're learning something about the 0:03:34.160 --> 0:03:37.000 universe or is it something about the way we think? 0:03:37.160 --> 0:03:40.000 Or both? And can we try to figure that out 0:03:40.120 --> 0:03:41.800 before the aliens arrive. 0:03:42.600 --> 0:03:45.480 One of the metaphors or kind of shorthand that you 0:03:45.640 --> 0:03:48.080 use in the book is the idea of an interplanetary 0:03:48.120 --> 0:03:52.920 physics conference. You're asking the question, if we ever make, 0:03:53.400 --> 0:03:56.760 you know, undeniable contact with an alien species, can we 0:03:56.920 --> 0:04:00.480 get our heads together and communicate meaningfully about the laws 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:05.000 of physics? And so to illustrate those kinds of meetings, 0:04:05.400 --> 0:04:07.080 one thing I really liked about your book is that 0:04:07.120 --> 0:04:10.760 each chapter comes with what you call a contact hypothetical, 0:04:11.160 --> 0:04:13.040 where you kind of tell a little story. There's some 0:04:13.080 --> 0:04:16.240 fiction writing in this book. It's mostly, you know, nonfiction, 0:04:16.360 --> 0:04:19.880 scientific writing and philosophical writing. But I like these little 0:04:19.880 --> 0:04:22.520 fictional scenarios, and I think we might want to get 0:04:22.520 --> 0:04:24.440 into a couple of these as we go along. But 0:04:24.480 --> 0:04:29.400 before we do that, to sort of frame how you 0:04:29.440 --> 0:04:32.520 explore the question of do aliens speak physics? And could 0:04:32.560 --> 0:04:36.839 we communicate about physics with them? You extend the classic 0:04:37.120 --> 0:04:40.919 Drake equation, So could you explain that, maybe first explain 0:04:41.560 --> 0:04:44.920 what the original Drake equation is and how it works, 0:04:45.320 --> 0:04:48.039 and then also explain the way you extend it and 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:50.000 the terms you added to it to get at this 0:04:50.120 --> 0:04:51.719 alien physics conference question. 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:56.920 Yes, so the Alien Physics Conference is in there because 0:04:57.160 --> 0:05:00.280 it's a literal fantasy of mine, you know, I mean, 0:05:00.320 --> 0:05:03.040 I got into physics to understand the universe, and I 0:05:03.080 --> 0:05:05.800 want to figure it out, but sometimes I feel like, gosh, 0:05:05.960 --> 0:05:10.160 progress is frustratingly slow, and you know what if there 0:05:10.160 --> 0:05:12.360 are aliens out there that just have the answers, it's 0:05:12.360 --> 0:05:15.640 so tantalizing and frustrating to think that, like somebody out 0:05:15.640 --> 0:05:18.640 there has figured out what is quantum gravity? How do 0:05:18.680 --> 0:05:21.679 you build wormholes? How did the universe begin? Like somebody 0:05:21.800 --> 0:05:23.920 maybe knows these answers and they could just tell us, 0:05:24.200 --> 0:05:27.160 beam them to us, email us your textbooks. You know, 0:05:28.120 --> 0:05:32.400 imagine you know, Newton getting to read Einstein's a relativity theory, 0:05:32.800 --> 0:05:36.200 or you know, Aristotle getting to read modern physics, like 0:05:36.279 --> 0:05:38.920 that could be us. Wow, so that's in there because 0:05:39.320 --> 0:05:43.159 that's my literal, like I can taste it, but you know, 0:05:43.240 --> 0:05:45.839 I also wonder if it's really true, and so I 0:05:45.920 --> 0:05:49.080 sort of The book is a meditation on like all right, Daniel, 0:05:49.120 --> 0:05:53.279 calm down. Maybe those answers aren't actually out there. And 0:05:53.279 --> 0:05:57.520 we wrote those little fictional interludes to try to give 0:05:57.640 --> 0:06:01.760 like more concrete examples rather than just thinking theoretically about 0:06:02.120 --> 0:06:04.120 the nature of physics and the structure of and the 0:06:04.120 --> 0:06:07.200 philosophical underpinnings, like let's walk through what it might be 0:06:07.320 --> 0:06:10.680 like to give people a concrete example. And also we 0:06:10.680 --> 0:06:13.000 didn't want to tackle the whole question at once, like 0:06:13.080 --> 0:06:15.560 it's a lot of pieces, and so we were inspired 0:06:15.600 --> 0:06:18.600 by the way Drake took apart the question of are 0:06:18.640 --> 0:06:22.080 there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them? 0:06:22.560 --> 0:06:25.080 He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating 0:06:25.880 --> 0:06:28.440 how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of 0:06:28.480 --> 0:06:32.279 those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with 0:06:32.360 --> 0:06:35.960 life might develop civilization, how long do those civilizations last. 0:06:36.320 --> 0:06:38.080 It's a classic approach in science. You have a problem 0:06:38.120 --> 0:06:40.160 that's too big to solve, so you break it into 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:42.880 a bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve, 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:44.400 but some of which you can make a little bit 0:06:44.400 --> 0:06:47.200 of progress on. So you're not completely stymied by your 0:06:47.200 --> 0:06:49.360 inability to make progress one area, because you can move 0:06:49.400 --> 0:06:52.159 in another area. And for example, we now know that 0:06:52.240 --> 0:06:54.720 there are lots and lots of stars in the universe. 0:06:55.200 --> 0:06:58.480 Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions 0:06:58.480 --> 0:07:01.240 of stars, and there's hung's of billions of galaxies. So 0:07:01.360 --> 0:07:04.360 the number of stars out there just in the observable 0:07:04.440 --> 0:07:08.839 universe is very, very vast, and shockingly, We've made progress 0:07:08.839 --> 0:07:12.160 on other aspects, like how many planets does an average 0:07:12.160 --> 0:07:15.680 star have? And the answer again is surprisingly big. You know, 0:07:16.080 --> 0:07:18.440 there's a lot of uncertainty there and depends on how 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:21.120 you define earth like planet, But like something like twenty 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:25.360 five percent of stars out there have rocky planets that are, 0:07:25.480 --> 0:07:28.400 you know, earth like according to some definition. So we're 0:07:28.440 --> 0:07:32.000 talking a huge number of earth like planets in the universe. 0:07:32.960 --> 0:07:36.640 But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative. The number 0:07:36.640 --> 0:07:39.200 of aliens that contact us is the number of stars 0:07:39.480 --> 0:07:42.840 times the fraction that have life, times the fraction that 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:45.640 are technological, et cetera. So if any of those numbers 0:07:45.640 --> 0:07:49.160 are zero, we're screwed. And we don't know what fraction 0:07:49.240 --> 0:07:51.720 of those planets have life, and what fraction of that 0:07:51.800 --> 0:07:55.160 life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts. So 0:07:55.520 --> 0:07:58.000 that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we thought 0:07:58.000 --> 0:07:59.440 it was a natural thing to do to extend that 0:07:59.480 --> 0:08:02.520 to answer the qu question how many alien civilizations are 0:08:02.520 --> 0:08:05.920 there out there that we can talk science with? And 0:08:06.040 --> 0:08:08.160 so to do that we broke it into several questions. 0:08:08.240 --> 0:08:11.520 We said, well, what fraction of them do science? You know, 0:08:11.720 --> 0:08:15.000 is that even a thing aside of Earth, is science 0:08:15.120 --> 0:08:17.680 like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by 0:08:17.680 --> 0:08:21.480 the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific. 0:08:22.120 --> 0:08:24.680 And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them? 0:08:24.920 --> 0:08:26.800 You know, can we figure out a way to have 0:08:26.880 --> 0:08:31.120 a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask 0:08:31.200 --> 0:08:33.080 the same kind of questions that we ask? 0:08:33.160 --> 0:08:33.319 Are? 0:08:33.679 --> 0:08:37.160 Are we curious about the same things? Do they find 0:08:37.280 --> 0:08:40.719 and accept intuitively the same kind of answers? Would they 0:08:40.760 --> 0:08:44.079 even take the same path as we would? So rather 0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:46.080 than tackling this whole big question all at once, and 0:08:46.120 --> 0:08:50.360 the whole question and even its parts are essentially unanswerable, 0:08:50.600 --> 0:08:52.360 but to even make some progress, we thought it was 0:08:52.440 --> 0:08:54.000 useful to break it into some pieces. 0:08:54.400 --> 0:08:56.800 So let's look at a few of these pieces one 0:08:56.840 --> 0:09:00.240 by one. One of the earliest questions you look at 0:09:00.240 --> 0:09:04.760 in the book is the question do aliens wonder? Why 0:09:05.280 --> 0:09:09.559 do they even have the motivation to pursue scientific questions? 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:13.920 It's hard for me to imagine that aliens would ever 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:19.120 develop the ability to travel or communicate between stars without 0:09:19.320 --> 0:09:22.679 having something like science. Obviously, you can imagine us traveling 0:09:22.720 --> 0:09:25.520 out and going to other star systems and finding bacteria 0:09:25.559 --> 0:09:28.319 and other things that we wouldn't think of as technological 0:09:28.320 --> 0:09:32.120 intelligences but are live on other planets. But assuming that 0:09:32.160 --> 0:09:34.840 they are able to somehow get in contact with us, 0:09:35.880 --> 0:09:39.240 a desire to understand and model the principles of how 0:09:39.280 --> 0:09:43.000 reality works just seems like it would almost be a 0:09:43.080 --> 0:09:45.920 must have. But you came up with a hypothetical contact 0:09:45.960 --> 0:09:49.679 scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of 0:09:49.720 --> 0:09:53.439 sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons 0:09:53.480 --> 0:09:58.280 for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars 0:09:58.400 --> 0:10:00.800 or travel between stars with out science. 0:10:01.480 --> 0:10:04.200 Yeah, this is really counterintuitive. And when I first started 0:10:04.200 --> 0:10:07.600 digging into this, I also thought like, of course, you know, 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:09.400 everybody out there is going to be doing science because 0:10:09.400 --> 0:10:11.480 they're gonna be curious about the universe, and science is 0:10:11.480 --> 0:10:14.120 the way to figure it out. But the more I 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:17.640 talk to historians and philosophers, the more I understood that, 0:10:17.679 --> 0:10:20.280 you know, science has a lot of humanity in it, 0:10:20.960 --> 0:10:24.959 the structure, the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent. 0:10:25.000 --> 0:10:27.720 It's something we've been doing, you know, in the way 0:10:27.720 --> 0:10:30.000 we call science for only a few centuries, which is 0:10:30.040 --> 0:10:32.160 a blip of time. And so it could be like 0:10:32.200 --> 0:10:35.480 an intermediate step towards something greater, a better way to 0:10:35.760 --> 0:10:38.640 learn about the universe. And so you know, it's not 0:10:38.720 --> 0:10:42.240 that I don't think that aliens are doing science. It's 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:44.720 just that I wanted to make the strongest argument I 0:10:44.760 --> 0:10:48.839 could that maybe they aren't, because you know, deeply, because 0:10:48.840 --> 0:10:52.360 deep down, I feel like we're biased towards thinking aliens 0:10:52.360 --> 0:10:53.840 are going to be like us, the sort of star 0:10:53.880 --> 0:10:56.640 trek fallacy, like they're us with wrinkles on their forehead 0:10:56.720 --> 0:10:59.839 or with pointy ears, right, but fundamentally they're human, and 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:01.520 I think that that's narrow minded. 0:11:01.559 --> 0:11:03.280 So I'm trying to break out of it. 0:11:03.679 --> 0:11:05.840 And you know, the book is an exercise essentially and 0:11:05.880 --> 0:11:10.600 convincing myself that aliens might be more alien than we imagine. 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:14.120 And so your question is, like, is it possible to 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:17.640 explore the stars to come visit Earth and not be scientific, 0:11:17.679 --> 0:11:21.000 to be deeply technological? And you only have to look 0:11:21.040 --> 0:11:23.200 back at a history on Earth to see that, like, 0:11:23.280 --> 0:11:26.160 we have technology, well before we have science, you know, 0:11:26.240 --> 0:11:30.560 people have been like fermenting yeast into bread and beer, 0:11:30.679 --> 0:11:34.480 which is you know, fairly technological without understanding anything about 0:11:34.480 --> 0:11:36.280 what was going on in it or people have been 0:11:36.320 --> 0:11:39.720 making swords, you know, which requires if you want to 0:11:39.800 --> 0:11:43.320 understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of like solid 0:11:43.320 --> 0:11:46.840 state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters making incredible 0:11:46.880 --> 0:11:51.640 devices well before they understood why, and even people exploring 0:11:51.640 --> 0:11:53.880 the earth. Right if you say science began a few 0:11:53.960 --> 0:11:57.320 hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like venturing from 0:11:57.360 --> 0:12:00.640 shore to shore for thousands of years. And so I 0:12:00.679 --> 0:12:03.160 took that as an inspiration and try to come up 0:12:03.200 --> 0:12:06.840 with an example of how aliens might get here without 0:12:06.880 --> 0:12:10.800 being scientific. And I was thinking about a planet where 0:12:10.840 --> 0:12:14.439 you have some critters and they're floating through their oceans, 0:12:15.120 --> 0:12:18.520 and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker than it 0:12:18.559 --> 0:12:21.280 is on ours, and so the boundary between the ocean 0:12:21.400 --> 0:12:24.920 and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and so it's 0:12:24.960 --> 0:12:28.280 not so crazy to imagine that they might stumble across 0:12:28.320 --> 0:12:31.080 some way to not just navigate their oceans, but also 0:12:31.160 --> 0:12:34.280 navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did. And 0:12:34.320 --> 0:12:37.720 in this case, these folks are like little bladders that 0:12:37.920 --> 0:12:41.199 can absorb, can emit air into order to go up, 0:12:41.320 --> 0:12:44.480 or accept ballasts to go down. They're like little submarines essentially, 0:12:44.760 --> 0:12:47.839 but they learned to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's 0:12:47.880 --> 0:12:50.199 not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they 0:12:50.280 --> 0:12:52.920 also figure out how to coat themselves in something so 0:12:53.000 --> 0:12:56.560 they can navigate above the atmosphere through their solar system. 0:12:56.720 --> 0:12:59.000 And in their solar system, they don't just have a star. 0:12:59.040 --> 0:13:01.120 They have a binary star system, one of which is 0:13:01.160 --> 0:13:04.600 a black hole. And so they spend millions of years 0:13:04.640 --> 0:13:07.640 like whizzing around this black hole, and they develop an 0:13:07.679 --> 0:13:11.400 intuitive understanding of space and curvature. So they don't have 0:13:11.400 --> 0:13:13.880 an Einstein who's given them an equation. They just have 0:13:13.920 --> 0:13:17.160 a feeling for curvature. You know, the way that curvature 0:13:17.200 --> 0:13:20.160 is very counterintuitive to us. It's like, weird to think 0:13:20.200 --> 0:13:23.160 about space being bent between here and there and distances 0:13:23.160 --> 0:13:26.280 are oscillating, and what It's very hard for people to 0:13:26.360 --> 0:13:30.199 really grock general relativity because we grew up in a 0:13:30.240 --> 0:13:32.240 place where we imagine space is always flat. It's always 0:13:32.280 --> 0:13:34.560 our experience. But what if you didn't, and what if 0:13:34.559 --> 0:13:37.079 you spent millions of years whizzing around a black hole 0:13:37.120 --> 0:13:40.960 and really experiencing curvature and somehow intuited your way into 0:13:41.000 --> 0:13:45.560 manipulating spatial curvature and traveling the stars, and so that 0:13:45.720 --> 0:13:48.800 was like hypothetical scenario to try to make a concrete 0:13:49.040 --> 0:13:51.280 to give an example of how aliens could arrive here 0:13:51.679 --> 0:13:54.960 with warped technology effectively and not be able to explain 0:13:55.000 --> 0:13:57.280 it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like, 0:13:57.320 --> 0:13:59.320 here's how you do it? What do you mean why? 0:13:59.440 --> 0:14:05.000 How? That kind of thing does seem hard to imagine, 0:14:05.000 --> 0:14:07.240 But I like the way you really like put the 0:14:07.280 --> 0:14:09.520 work in to sketch it out and compare it to 0:14:09.640 --> 0:14:12.280 I mean, as you're saying, it seems like it would 0:14:12.280 --> 0:14:14.079 depend on a lot of trial and error, so it 0:14:14.120 --> 0:14:16.920 might be a much slower process than the progress of 0:14:17.000 --> 0:14:22.000 human science human technology. But a sort of branching question 0:14:22.080 --> 0:14:26.840 off of that is, do you think the desire to 0:14:26.960 --> 0:14:31.120 understand why, to ask the question why is a core 0:14:31.360 --> 0:14:36.280 feature of intelligence or could that be a specific feature 0:14:36.720 --> 0:14:41.240 of just human minds? You know, I was trying to 0:14:41.240 --> 0:14:44.320 think about this, and I had a suspicion that I 0:14:44.360 --> 0:14:48.200 don't know. I suspect that the question why has got 0:14:48.280 --> 0:14:52.359 to be pretty fundamental to intelligence because we define intelligence 0:14:52.440 --> 0:14:57.240 largely by the ability to solve problems or learn, which 0:14:57.280 --> 0:15:02.200 is almost always going to be accelerated by understanding underlying principles. 0:15:03.120 --> 0:15:06.400 But I don't know. I could definitely be missing things there. 0:15:06.440 --> 0:15:08.440 They are contingencies I'm not seeing. 0:15:09.160 --> 0:15:11.400 I think you put your finger on the deepest part 0:15:11.400 --> 0:15:14.520 of this question, and that's really what we're going to 0:15:14.520 --> 0:15:16.720 get an answer to when the aliens come, is how 0:15:16.800 --> 0:15:20.040 much overlap do we have with them? If they do 0:15:20.120 --> 0:15:22.440 wonder why the same way we do, then we're gonna 0:15:22.440 --> 0:15:23.760 have a lot in common and we're gonna be able 0:15:23.760 --> 0:15:26.080 to learn a lot from them. But if they don't, 0:15:26.160 --> 0:15:28.720 then it's going to tell us something. It's going to 0:15:28.800 --> 0:15:33.000 tell us that we are unusual in some way. And 0:15:33.040 --> 0:15:36.800 that's really my fantasy. I mean, I got into this thinking, Wow, 0:15:36.920 --> 0:15:39.320 it would be wonderful if aliens show up and they're 0:15:39.360 --> 0:15:41.480 basically just like us, but further ahead, because then we 0:15:41.520 --> 0:15:43.920 can zoom forward in science. But actually, I think that 0:15:44.000 --> 0:15:46.560 might be the most boring outcome. It might be the 0:15:46.600 --> 0:15:49.800 most amazing. We might learn the most, not necessarily about 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:52.720 quantum field theory, but about the nature of humanity and 0:15:52.800 --> 0:15:56.040 intelligence and the experience of being alive in this universe. 0:15:56.280 --> 0:15:59.400 If they're so fundamentally weird and different that they're like, 0:16:00.040 --> 0:16:02.440 don't that these questions don't make sense to them, or 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:04.920 they don't even ask these questions that they have another 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:07.480 way of having a relationship with the universe. Because I 0:16:07.520 --> 0:16:11.080 agree with you, it feels like it's essential. It's part 0:16:11.120 --> 0:16:13.920 of being intelligent, building a model in your mind and 0:16:14.000 --> 0:16:16.560 probing that model and using it to solve your problem, 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:18.560 even if that problem is like, hey, how do we 0:16:18.600 --> 0:16:21.360 take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how 0:16:21.360 --> 0:16:24.000 do I solve this social problem with my neighbor, you know, 0:16:24.080 --> 0:16:26.280 which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of 0:16:26.320 --> 0:16:29.440 thousands of years. But it could be not. You know, 0:16:29.600 --> 0:16:32.520 it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating 0:16:32.560 --> 0:16:35.040 sweet things for breakfast. You know, the first time I 0:16:35.120 --> 0:16:38.880 went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have 0:16:39.000 --> 0:16:41.960 like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even 0:16:42.320 --> 0:16:45.320 imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast. 0:16:45.440 --> 0:16:47.360 Or the first time I saw like a toilet in 0:16:47.360 --> 0:16:49.320 a country where like you don't just sit, you know, 0:16:49.400 --> 0:16:52.600 I was like, oh, WHOA, mind blowing. There's so many 0:16:52.640 --> 0:16:57.840 areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience. And I'm 0:16:57.840 --> 0:17:01.040 hopeful when the aliens come that they're gonna blow our 0:17:01.080 --> 0:17:04.199 minds with their different way of having a relationship with 0:17:04.240 --> 0:17:07.479 the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe they 0:17:07.560 --> 0:17:10.840 used to do science. Maybe science is some sort of 0:17:10.840 --> 0:17:13.199 primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they have 0:17:13.400 --> 0:17:16.800 is like, you know, science plus the way we think 0:17:16.800 --> 0:17:20.640 about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and we're like, cool, bro, 0:17:20.920 --> 0:17:23.160 you made a lot of progress just thinking about stuff. 0:17:23.520 --> 0:17:27.080 Why didn't you think about doing experiments? You know, empiricism 0:17:27.160 --> 0:17:29.680 is obvious, like, come on, just go outside and try 0:17:29.680 --> 0:17:32.320 it for ten minutes. Why argue for hours and hours 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:35.560 and hours? It seems obvious to us. And in that way, 0:17:35.680 --> 0:17:38.840 maybe the aliens have upgraded their science. They're like, yeah, 0:17:38.840 --> 0:17:39.960 we used to do it that way, but then we 0:17:40.000 --> 0:17:42.719 came up with this other trick that's so much better. 0:17:43.119 --> 0:17:45.800 I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever. 0:17:46.480 --> 0:17:48.800 And so it could be that they don't do science 0:17:48.840 --> 0:17:52.320 because they've left it behind for something even more powerful. 0:18:02.720 --> 0:18:07.199 So another one of the questions you look at is 0:18:07.480 --> 0:18:12.600 assuming that aliens do ask the question why they do 0:18:12.680 --> 0:18:16.119 have some kind of scientific understanding, would we be able 0:18:16.200 --> 0:18:19.639 to communicate with them about it and you asked this 0:18:19.680 --> 0:18:21.600 in a number of different ways. I definitely want to 0:18:21.600 --> 0:18:24.080 get into the question of math in just a second. 0:18:24.080 --> 0:18:26.000 But before we look at math, I want to look 0:18:26.040 --> 0:18:31.160 at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw 0:18:31.240 --> 0:18:37.320 the analogy with difficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could 0:18:37.320 --> 0:18:39.840 you talk a bit about that, and how illuminating that 0:18:40.000 --> 0:18:42.640 those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are. 0:18:43.200 --> 0:18:45.840 Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met 0:18:45.840 --> 0:18:48.639 aliens if we don't know what amiling language is like, 0:18:49.280 --> 0:18:52.040 so you can speculate endlessly. But I wanted to try 0:18:52.040 --> 0:18:55.159 to dig into something more concrete, and the best example 0:18:55.240 --> 0:19:00.679 we have of intelligent civilizations who are little alien to 0:19:00.800 --> 0:19:04.240 us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig 0:19:04.280 --> 0:19:07.199 into what was it like to try to translate the 0:19:07.240 --> 0:19:11.520 writings of ancient intelligent human civilizations who are not around 0:19:11.560 --> 0:19:13.800 to explain it to us, because I thought that would 0:19:13.800 --> 0:19:18.320 be helpful to teach us, like what's important. How challenging 0:19:18.480 --> 0:19:20.800 is this? When do we succeed? When do we fail? 0:19:21.560 --> 0:19:24.840 And I'm kind of shocked to learn the answer, which 0:19:24.920 --> 0:19:26.600 was that this is a lot harder than I thought. 0:19:26.600 --> 0:19:28.840 I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:31.080 brain as we do, they live in the same world 0:19:31.119 --> 0:19:34.920 as we do, they have the same senses, the same environment. 0:19:36.080 --> 0:19:38.680 They have lots and they left us lots of examples, 0:19:38.680 --> 0:19:42.800 but in same cases, we still have not decoded their writing. Like, yes, 0:19:42.960 --> 0:19:46.399 we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, there's an important caveat in 0:19:46.440 --> 0:19:50.359 that story, but we have not, for example, decoded Etruscan writing. 0:19:50.440 --> 0:19:52.960 And the Etruscans like lived just a couple thousand years 0:19:53.000 --> 0:19:55.439 ago next to the Romans, and the Romans talk all 0:19:55.440 --> 0:19:58.240 about them, and we have lots of examples, and yet 0:19:58.280 --> 0:20:03.119 it still remains in undecipherable. It's incredible to me. It 0:20:03.200 --> 0:20:07.640 tells me that like the barrier to accessing another intelligence, 0:20:07.760 --> 0:20:11.760 even one hosted on the same substrate, is very, very challenging. 0:20:12.200 --> 0:20:15.639 And it hints that in order to make these mental connections, 0:20:15.880 --> 0:20:20.240 you need one essential thing, which is common context. You 0:20:20.280 --> 0:20:22.760 need to be able to like point at something and say, 0:20:22.880 --> 0:20:25.119 this is an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple, 0:20:25.640 --> 0:20:29.600 or you know, this is one, this is two, and 0:20:29.760 --> 0:20:32.640 you know, I read a really interesting set of articles 0:20:32.640 --> 0:20:36.840 by the folks at SETI or actually anthropologists analyzing SETI, 0:20:37.240 --> 0:20:40.639 and you know. Their conclusion essentially was that it's hopeless 0:20:41.240 --> 0:20:43.560 if the aliens communicate with us, if they send us 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:47.359 a message SETI like, but they don't show up, so 0:20:47.400 --> 0:20:49.720 we can't like point to things and say here's an apple, 0:20:49.760 --> 0:20:54.560 here's a doughnut. That it's essentially impossible to decode just 0:20:54.680 --> 0:20:57.399 written language from an alien species because we have no 0:20:57.480 --> 0:20:59.800 idea what it's supposed to look like. How do you 0:20:59.880 --> 0:21:02.280 know when you've decoded it correctly? You have no clues, 0:21:02.320 --> 0:21:04.960 no handles. And the best example of that, I think 0:21:05.119 --> 0:21:08.159 is Egyptian hieroglyphics. You know, there is this famous story 0:21:08.240 --> 0:21:12.400 the Rosetta Stone. We had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them. 0:21:12.600 --> 0:21:16.080 Then we found this cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek 0:21:16.160 --> 0:21:19.000 on it, and it's got the same stuff in hieroglyphics. 0:21:19.000 --> 0:21:21.160 Since you're like, oh, I know how to translate these 0:21:21.160 --> 0:21:22.840 words from one to the other, I can go from there, 0:21:22.920 --> 0:21:25.760 dot dot dot, I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the 0:21:25.800 --> 0:21:28.400 way it happened. The way it happened is they found 0:21:28.400 --> 0:21:31.560 the Rosetta Stone and it still took them twenty years. 0:21:32.320 --> 0:21:37.080 Twenty years when they had examples of decoded text in 0:21:37.119 --> 0:21:40.439 both languages. Why did it take so long Because they 0:21:40.480 --> 0:21:45.919 were making a fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics. 0:21:46.280 --> 0:21:48.160 They looked at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these 0:21:48.160 --> 0:21:51.680 are pictograms. The ones that are look like birds are 0:21:51.920 --> 0:21:54.280 mean birds someway. The ones that look like water mean 0:21:54.359 --> 0:21:58.000 water some way, but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out 0:21:58.040 --> 0:22:01.719 to be phonetic in the same way that our language is, 0:22:01.760 --> 0:22:05.160 and so like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea. 0:22:05.880 --> 0:22:07.640