WEBVTT - Do Aliens Speak Physics, with Daniel Whiteson 0:00:03.040 --> 0:00:06.760 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:12.720 --> 0:00:15.680 Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My 0:00:15.840 --> 0:00:19.520 name is Joe McCormick. Today on the podcast, we're going 0:00:19.560 --> 0:00:22.119 to be featuring an interview in which I talked to 0:00:22.280 --> 0:00:27.520 returning show guest physicist Daniel Whitson about his upcoming book, 0:00:27.960 --> 0:00:32.879 Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared in advance copy of 0:00:32.880 --> 0:00:35.320 this book with me and I think it's great. It 0:00:35.440 --> 0:00:39.880 is a fascinating book length thought experiment that is full 0:00:39.920 --> 0:00:43.640 of insights about what could be universal and what could 0:00:43.680 --> 0:00:49.839 be unique in surprising ways about human intelligence, science, language, mathematics, 0:00:49.840 --> 0:00:53.599 and culture. A bit of bio about Daniel. Daniel Whitson 0:00:53.760 --> 0:00:57.360 is a particle physicist and physics professor. He's the co 0:00:57.440 --> 0:01:01.520 host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe and 0:01:01.720 --> 0:01:06.040 co author of We Have No Idea, also co creator 0:01:06.160 --> 0:01:10.199 of the PBS kids show Eleanor Wonders Why. His book, 0:01:10.280 --> 0:01:14.080 Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is co written and illustrated by 0:01:14.200 --> 0:01:21.720 Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel. Daniel Whitson, 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:23.039 Welcome back to the show. 0:01:23.520 --> 0:01:25.680 Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk 0:01:25.720 --> 0:01:26.200 to you. Again. 0:01:27.319 --> 0:01:31.280 So the book is do aliens speak physics? And I 0:01:31.360 --> 0:01:35.120 have really really been enjoying this book. I planned to 0:01:35.440 --> 0:01:38.360 finish it with a full read for today, but my 0:01:38.640 --> 0:01:41.600 last night, my toddler was having some sleep disturbances. That 0:01:41.680 --> 0:01:43.320 was an all night thing, so I was rushing to 0:01:43.360 --> 0:01:46.280 get through the last couple chapters. Maybe you can fill 0:01:46.319 --> 0:01:49.040 me in with the greater detail that I missed in 0:01:49.080 --> 0:01:50.800 the skimming of the last two or three. 0:01:51.080 --> 0:01:52.960 Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler 0:01:52.960 --> 0:01:53.920 to help put them to sleep. 0:01:54.320 --> 0:01:57.840 Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations actually, 0:01:58.120 --> 0:02:00.320 but the problem is I had digital version, so that 0:02:00.360 --> 0:02:02.680 would involve showing it to her on a screen, which 0:02:02.720 --> 0:02:04.600 is a whole other thing. You know, that just turns 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:07.320 into want to see other things on the screen. So 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:10.560 can't wait for my print copy. That'll be slighting. But 0:02:10.840 --> 0:02:13.200 I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What 0:02:13.360 --> 0:02:16.400 is the central question you're exploring in this book. 0:02:17.240 --> 0:02:21.600 Yeah, the question the book asks is whether aliens do science, 0:02:21.639 --> 0:02:24.760 and specifically physics, the same way we do. You know, 0:02:24.960 --> 0:02:28.919 when aliens arrive, can they just tell us the secrets 0:02:28.919 --> 0:02:31.840 of the universe? Can they leap us forward a thousand, 0:02:31.919 --> 0:02:36.160 a million, a billion years into the scientific future. Is 0:02:36.240 --> 0:02:39.640 science really just one track that way, one line and 0:02:39.680 --> 0:02:42.240 we could just sort of like skip forward, you know, 0:02:42.520 --> 0:02:45.200 with the benefits of all their time and energy. Or 0:02:45.360 --> 0:02:49.040 is science more complicated? Is it multiple paths? Are there 0:02:49.120 --> 0:02:53.600 multiple solutions? Do aliens even do science? So this book 0:02:53.639 --> 0:02:58.239 is an exploration essentially of like how universal is our 0:02:58.400 --> 0:03:01.320 theory of physics? Is what we're learning something about the 0:03:01.440 --> 0:03:04.240 universe or is it something about the way we think? 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:07.239 Or both? And can we try to figure that out 0:03:07.360 --> 0:03:09.079 before the aliens arrive. 0:03:09.880 --> 0:03:12.760 One of the metaphors or kind of shorthand that you 0:03:12.919 --> 0:03:15.360 use in the book is the idea of an interplanetary 0:03:15.360 --> 0:03:20.160 physics conference. You're asking the question, if we ever make 0:03:20.639 --> 0:03:24.359 you undeniable contact with an alien species, can we get 0:03:24.400 --> 0:03:28.840 our heads together and communicate meaningfully about the laws of physics? 0:03:29.440 --> 0:03:32.960 And so to illustrate those kinds of meetings. One thing 0:03:33.000 --> 0:03:35.000 I really liked about your book is that each chapter 0:03:35.080 --> 0:03:38.680 comes with what you call a contact hypothetical, where you 0:03:38.760 --> 0:03:41.040 kind of tell a little story. There's some fiction writing 0:03:41.080 --> 0:03:44.400 in this book. It's mostly you know, nonfiction scientific writing 0:03:44.600 --> 0:03:48.280 and philosophical writing. But I like these little fictional scenarios, 0:03:48.400 --> 0:03:50.040 and I think we might want to get into a 0:03:50.040 --> 0:03:52.280 couple of these as we go along. But before we 0:03:52.320 --> 0:03:57.200 do that, to sort of frame how you explore the 0:03:57.280 --> 0:04:00.480 question of do aliens speak physics? And could we communicate 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:05.120 about physics with them? You extend the classic Drake equation, 0:04:05.400 --> 0:04:09.240 So could you explain that? Maybe first explain what the 0:04:09.280 --> 0:04:12.880 original Drake equation is and how it works, and then 0:04:13.040 --> 0:04:15.880 also explain the way you extend it and the terms 0:04:15.920 --> 0:04:18.120 you added to it to get at this alien physics 0:04:18.160 --> 0:04:18.960 conference question. 0:04:19.920 --> 0:04:24.160 Yes, so the Alien Physics Conference is in there because 0:04:24.400 --> 0:04:27.560 it's a literal fantasy of mine, you know. I mean 0:04:27.600 --> 0:04:30.279 I got into physics to understand the universe and I 0:04:30.320 --> 0:04:33.080 want to figure it out. But sometimes I feel like, gosh, 0:04:33.240 --> 0:04:37.440 progress is frustratingly slow, and you know what if there 0:04:37.440 --> 0:04:39.640 are aliens out there that just have the answers, It's 0:04:39.640 --> 0:04:42.920 so tantalizing and frustrating to think that, like somebody out 0:04:42.920 --> 0:04:45.880 there has figured out what is quantum gravity? How do 0:04:45.920 --> 0:04:48.919 you build wormholes? How did the universe begin? Like somebody 0:04:49.080 --> 0:04:51.200 maybe knows these answers and they could just tell us, 0:04:51.440 --> 0:04:56.080 beam them to us, email us your textbooks, you know, imagine, 0:04:56.160 --> 0:04:59.640 you know, Newton getting to read Einstein's a relativity theory, 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:03.440 or you know, Aristotle getting to read modern physics, like 0:05:03.560 --> 0:05:06.200 that could be us. Wow, so that's in there because 0:05:06.560 --> 0:05:10.440 that's my literal, like I can taste it, but you know, 0:05:10.480 --> 0:05:13.120 I also wonder if it's really true, and so I 0:05:13.160 --> 0:05:16.360 sort of The book is a meditation on like, all right, Daniel, 0:05:16.360 --> 0:05:20.520 calm down, Maybe those answers aren't actually out there. And 0:05:20.560 --> 0:05:24.800 we wrote those little fictional interludes to try to give 0:05:24.880 --> 0:05:29.040 like more concrete examples rather than just thinking theoretically about 0:05:29.360 --> 0:05:31.360 the nature of physics and the structure of and the 0:05:31.400 --> 0:05:34.440 philosophical underpinnings, like let's walk through what it might be 0:05:34.600 --> 0:05:37.920 like to give people a concrete example. And also we 0:05:37.960 --> 0:05:40.280 didn't want to tackle the whole question at once, like 0:05:40.320 --> 0:05:42.840 it's a lot of pieces, and so we were inspired 0:05:42.839 --> 0:05:45.880 by the way Drake took apart the question of are 0:05:45.880 --> 0:05:49.320 there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them? 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:52.360 He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating 0:05:53.160 --> 0:05:55.680 how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of 0:05:55.760 --> 0:05:59.520 those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with 0:05:59.600 --> 0:06:03.720 life develop civilization? How long do those civilizations. Last, it's 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:05.560 a classic approach in science. You have a problem that's 0:06:05.560 --> 0:06:07.480 too big to solve, so you break it into a 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:10.200 bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve, 0:06:10.240 --> 0:06:11.640 but some of which you can make a little bit 0:06:11.680 --> 0:06:14.480 of progress on. So you're not completely steymied by your 0:06:14.480 --> 0:06:16.440 inability to make progress in one area because you can 0:06:16.480 --> 0:06:19.200 move in another area. And for example, we now know 0:06:19.360 --> 0:06:22.000 that there are lots and lots of stars in the universe. 0:06:22.440 --> 0:06:25.679 Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions 0:06:25.720 --> 0:06:28.520 of stars, and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, so 0:06:28.600 --> 0:06:31.600 the number of stars out there just in the observable 0:06:31.680 --> 0:06:36.080 universe is very, very vast, and shockingly, we've made progress 0:06:36.120 --> 0:06:39.400 on other aspects like how many planets does an average 0:06:39.440 --> 0:06:42.920 star have? And the answer again is surprisingly big. You know, 0:06:43.320 --> 0:06:45.720 there's a lot of uncertainty there and depends on how 0:06:45.720 --> 0:06:48.400 you define earth like planet, but like something like twenty 0:06:48.440 --> 0:06:52.440 five percent of stars out there have rocky planets that 0:06:52.480 --> 0:06:55.479 are you know, earth like according to some definition, So 0:06:55.520 --> 0:06:58.520 we're talking a huge number of earth like planets in 0:06:58.560 --> 0:07:03.160 the universe. But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative 0:07:03.520 --> 0:07:06.000 the number of aliens that contact us is the number 0:07:06.000 --> 0:07:09.280 of stars times the fraction that have life, times the 0:07:09.279 --> 0:07:12.320 fraction that are technological, et cetera. So if any of 0:07:12.360 --> 0:07:15.800 those numbers are zero, were screwed, and we don't know 0:07:15.880 --> 0:07:18.720 what fraction of those planets have life, and what fraction 0:07:18.800 --> 0:07:22.280 of that life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts. 0:07:22.320 --> 0:07:25.040 So that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we 0:07:25.040 --> 0:07:26.600 thought it was a natural thing to do to extend 0:07:26.640 --> 0:07:29.760 that to answer the question how many alien civilizations are 0:07:29.800 --> 0:07:33.200 there out there that we can talk science with? And 0:07:33.280 --> 0:07:35.480 so to do that we broke it into several questions. 0:07:35.480 --> 0:07:38.760 We said, well, what fraction them do science? You know, 0:07:38.960 --> 0:07:42.239 is that even a thing aside of Earth is science 0:07:42.360 --> 0:07:44.920 like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by 0:07:44.960 --> 0:07:48.720 the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific. 0:07:49.360 --> 0:07:51.960 And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them, 0:07:52.200 --> 0:07:54.080 you know, can we figure out a way to have 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:58.400 a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask 0:07:58.480 --> 0:08:01.200 the same kind of questions that we ask? Are are 0:08:01.240 --> 0:08:04.600 we curious about the same things? Do they find and 0:08:04.720 --> 0:08:08.280 accept intuitively the same kind of answers? Would they even 0:08:08.360 --> 0:08:11.480 take the same path as we would So rather than 0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:13.640 tackling this whole big question at once, and the whole 0:08:13.680 --> 0:08:18.080 question and even its parts are essentially unanswerable, but to 0:08:18.120 --> 0:08:20.080 even make some progress, we thought it was useful to 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:21.239 break it into some pieces. 0:08:21.680 --> 0:08:24.080 So let's look at a few of these pieces one 0:08:24.120 --> 0:08:27.480 by one. One of the earliest questions you look at 0:08:27.520 --> 0:08:32.040 in the book is the question do aliens wonder? Why 0:08:32.520 --> 0:08:36.839 do they even have the motivation to pursue scientific questions. 0:08:37.840 --> 0:08:41.160 It's hard for me to imagine that aliens would ever 0:08:41.240 --> 0:08:46.440 develop the ability to travel or communicate between stars without 0:08:46.559 --> 0:08:49.880 having something like science. Obviously, you can imagine us traveling 0:08:49.960 --> 0:08:52.760 out and going to other star systems and finding bacteria 0:08:52.800 --> 0:08:55.559 and other things that we wouldn't think of as technological 0:08:55.559 --> 0:08:59.360 intelligences but are live on other planets. But assuming that 0:08:59.440 --> 0:09:02.120 they are a to somehow get in contact with us, 0:09:03.160 --> 0:09:06.480 a desire to understand and model the principles of how 0:09:06.559 --> 0:09:10.240 reality works just seems like it would almost be a 0:09:10.360 --> 0:09:13.200 must have. But you came up with a hypothetical contact 0:09:13.200 --> 0:09:16.959 scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of 0:09:16.960 --> 0:09:20.720 sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:25.560 for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars 0:09:25.640 --> 0:09:28.080 or travel between stars without science. 0:09:28.720 --> 0:09:31.440 Yeah, this is really counterintuitive. And when I first started 0:09:31.480 --> 0:09:34.880 digging into this, I also thought like, of course, you know, 0:09:34.960 --> 0:09:36.640 everybody out there is going to be doing science because 0:09:36.679 --> 0:09:38.719 they're gonna be curious about the universe and science is 0:09:38.720 --> 0:09:41.400 the way to figure it out. But the more I 0:09:41.440 --> 0:09:45.160 talk to historians and philosophers, the more I unders you know, 0:09:45.640 --> 0:09:48.880 science has a lot of humanity in it, the structure, 0:09:49.000 --> 0:09:52.720 the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent. It's something 0:09:52.720 --> 0:09:55.360 we've been doing, you know, in the way we call 0:09:55.440 --> 0:09:57.680 science for only a few centuries, which is a blip 0:09:57.720 --> 0:09:59.880 of time, and so it could be like an intermed 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:03.240 it stepped towards something greater, a better way to learn 0:10:03.280 --> 0:10:06.040 about the universe. And so, you know, it's not that 0:10:06.200 --> 0:10:09.640 I don't think that aliens are doing science. It's just 0:10:09.679 --> 0:10:12.320 that I wanted to make the strongest argument I could 0:10:12.720 --> 0:10:16.560 that maybe they aren't because you know, deeply, because deep down, 0:10:16.600 --> 0:10:19.840 I feel like we're biased towards thinking aliens are going 0:10:19.880 --> 0:10:21.880 to be like us, the sort of star trek fallacy, 0:10:21.960 --> 0:10:24.200 like they're us with wrinkles on their forehead or with 0:10:24.280 --> 0:10:27.720 pointy ears. Right, But fundamentally they're human, and I think 0:10:27.760 --> 0:10:30.240 that that's narrow minded. So I'm trying to break out 0:10:30.280 --> 0:10:32.600 of it. And you know, the book is an exercise 0:10:32.720 --> 0:10:37.040 essentially convincing myself that aliens might be more alien than 0:10:37.080 --> 0:10:39.960 we imagine. And so your question is, like, is it 0:10:40.040 --> 0:10:43.920 possible to explore the stars, to come visit Earth and 0:10:43.960 --> 0:10:47.800 not be scientific, to be deeply technological? And you only 0:10:47.800 --> 0:10:49.840 have to look back at a history on Earth to 0:10:49.920 --> 0:10:53.080 see that, Like, we have technology, well before we have science. 0:10:53.200 --> 0:10:57.280 You know, people have been like fermenting yeast into bread 0:10:57.320 --> 0:11:01.160 and beer, which is you know, fairly technological without understanding 0:11:01.200 --> 0:11:03.280 anything about what was going on in it. Or people 0:11:03.320 --> 0:11:06.720 have been making swords, you know, which requires if you 0:11:06.720 --> 0:11:10.000 want to understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of 0:11:10.040 --> 0:11:13.320 like solid state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters 0:11:13.320 --> 0:11:18.000 making incredible devices well before they understood why, and even 0:11:18.040 --> 0:11:20.920 people exploring the earth. Right if you say science began 0:11:20.960 --> 0:11:23.560 a few hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like 0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:27.480 venturing from shore to shore for thousands of years. And 0:11:27.600 --> 0:11:30.120 so I took that as an inspiration and try to 0:11:30.120 --> 0:11:33.240 come up with an example of how aliens might get 0:11:33.280 --> 0:11:37.320 here without being scientific. And I was thinking about a 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:40.839 planet where you have some critters and they're floating through 0:11:40.880 --> 0:11:45.480 their oceans, and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker 0:11:45.480 --> 0:11:47.800 than it is on ours, and so the boundary between 0:11:47.880 --> 0:11:51.679 the ocean and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and 0:11:51.760 --> 0:11:54.400 so it's not so crazy to imagine that they might 0:11:54.720 --> 0:11:58.000 stumble across some way to not just navigate their oceans, 0:11:58.000 --> 0:12:00.880 but also navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did. 0:12:01.440 --> 0:12:04.319 And in this case, these folks are like little bladders 0:12:04.840 --> 0:12:08.440 that can absorb, can emit air into order to go up, 0:12:08.559 --> 0:12:11.720 or accept ballast to go down. They're like little submarines essentially, 0:12:12.000 --> 0:12:15.120 but they learn to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's 0:12:15.160 --> 0:12:17.480 not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they 0:12:17.559 --> 0:12:20.200 also figure out how to coat themselves in something so 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:23.880 they can navigate above the atmosphere through their solar system. 0:12:24.000 --> 0:12:26.240 And in their solar system, they don't just have a star. 0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:28.400 They have a binary star system, one of which is 0:12:28.440 --> 0:12:31.840 a black hole, and so they spend millions of years 0:12:31.880 --> 0:12:34.920 like whizzing around this black hole, and they develop an 0:12:34.960 --> 0:12:38.679 intuitive understanding of space and curvature, so they don't have 0:12:38.679 --> 0:12:41.120 an Einstein who's given them an equation. They just have 0:12:41.200 --> 0:12:44.400 a feeling for curvature, you know, the way that curvature 0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:47.439 is very counterintuitive to us. It's like, weird to think 0:12:47.480 --> 0:12:50.400 about space being bent between here and there and distances 0:12:50.440 --> 0:12:53.520 are oscillating, and what It's very hard for people to 0:12:53.640 --> 0:12:57.480 really grock general relativity because we grew up in a 0:12:57.480 --> 0:12:59.480 place where we imagine space is always flat. It's always 0:12:59.520 --> 0:13:01.839 our experience. But what if you didn't, and what if 0:13:01.840 --> 0:13:04.360 you spent millions of years whizzing around a black hole 0:13:04.400 --> 0:13:08.240 and really experiencing curvature and somehow intuited your way into 0:13:08.280 --> 0:13:12.840 manipulating spatial curvature and traveling the stars. And so that 0:13:12.960 --> 0:13:16.079 was like hypothetical scenario to try to make a concrete 0:13:16.280 --> 0:13:18.520 to give an example of how aliens could arrive here 0:13:18.960 --> 0:13:22.200 with warped technology effectively and not be able to explain 0:13:22.240 --> 0:13:24.520 it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like, 0:13:24.600 --> 0:13:26.559 here's how you do it? What do you mean why? 0:13:26.720 --> 0:13:27.400 How Like. 0:13:29.720 --> 0:13:32.319 That kind of thing does seem hard to imagine, But 0:13:32.760 --> 0:13:34.760 I like the way you really like put the work 0:13:34.800 --> 0:13:37.160 in to sketch it out and compare it to I mean, 0:13:37.920 --> 0:13:39.960 as you're saying it seems like it would depend on 0:13:40.000 --> 0:13:41.640 a lot of trial and error, so it might be 0:13:41.679 --> 0:13:44.959 a much slower process than the progress of human science 0:13:46.280 --> 0:13:49.640 human technology. But a sort of branching question off of 0:13:49.679 --> 0:13:55.400 that is, do you think the desire to understand why 0:13:55.679 --> 0:13:59.360 to ask the question why is a core feature of 0:13:59.480 --> 0:14:04.400 intelli or could that be a specific feature of just 0:14:04.600 --> 0:14:09.000 human minds? You know, I was trying to think about this, 0:14:09.080 --> 0:14:12.040 and I had a suspicion that I don't know. I 0:14:12.440 --> 0:14:16.040 suspect that the question why has got to be pretty 0:14:16.040 --> 0:14:21.200 fundamental to intelligence, because we define intelligence largely by the 0:14:21.280 --> 0:14:25.840 ability to solve problems or learn, which is almost always 0:14:25.840 --> 0:14:29.480 going to be accelerated by understanding underlying principles. 0:14:30.400 --> 0:14:31.560 But I don't know. 0:14:31.880 --> 0:14:35.000 I could definitely be missing things there. There are contingencies 0:14:35.040 --> 0:14:35.720 I'm not seeing. 0:14:36.440 --> 0:14:38.640 I think you put your finger on the deepest part 0:14:38.680 --> 0:14:41.760 of this question, and that's really what we're going to 0:14:41.800 --> 0:14:43.960 get an answer to when the aliens come, is how 0:14:44.040 --> 0:14:47.280 much overlap do we have with them? If they do 0:14:47.400 --> 0:14:49.560 wonder why the same way we do, then we're going 0:14:49.600 --> 0:14:50.880 to have a lot in common and we're gonna be 0:14:50.880 --> 0:14:53.320 able to learn a lot from them. But if they don't, 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:56.000 then it's going to tell us something. It's going to 0:14:56.040 --> 0:15:00.280 tell us that we are unusual in some way. And 0:15:00.320 --> 0:15:04.080 that's really my fantasy. I mean, I got into this thinking, Wow, 0:15:04.200 --> 0:15:06.600 it would be wonderful if aliens show up and they're 0:15:06.600 --> 0:15:08.720 basically just like us, but further ahead, because then we 0:15:08.760 --> 0:15:11.160 can zoom forward in science. But actually, I think that 0:15:11.240 --> 0:15:13.840 might be the most boring outcome. It might be the 0:15:13.840 --> 0:15:17.080 most amazing. We might learn the most, not necessarily about 0:15:17.120 --> 0:15:20.000 quantum field theory, but about the nature of humanity and 0:15:20.040 --> 0:15:23.320 intelligence and the experience of being alive in this universe. 0:15:23.560 --> 0:15:26.640 If they're so fundamentally weird and different that they're like, 0:15:27.200 --> 0:15:29.680 don't that these questions don't make sense to them, or 0:15:29.880 --> 0:15:32.160 they don't even ask these questions, that they have another 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:34.760 way of having a relationship with the universe. Because I 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:38.360 agree with you, it feels like it's essential. It's part 0:15:38.360 --> 0:15:41.200 of being intelligent, building a model in your mind and 0:15:41.240 --> 0:15:43.800 probing that model and using it to solve your problem, 0:15:43.880 --> 0:15:45.800 even if that problem is like, hey, how do we 0:15:45.840 --> 0:15:48.640 take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how 0:15:48.640 --> 0:15:51.280 do I solve this social problem with my neighbor? You know, 0:15:51.320 --> 0:15:53.520 which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of 0:15:53.560 --> 0:15:56.720 thousands of years. But it could be not you know, 0:15:56.880 --> 0:15:59.680 it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating 0:15:59.720 --> 0:16:02.320 sweat things for breakfast. You know, the first time I 0:16:02.400 --> 0:16:06.160 went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have 0:16:06.240 --> 0:16:09.360 like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even 0:16:09.600 --> 0:16:12.640 imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast. 0:16:12.680 --> 0:16:14.600 Or the first time I saw like a toilet in 0:16:14.640 --> 0:16:16.640 a country where like you don't just sit, you know, 0:16:16.680 --> 0:16:19.840 I was like, oh, whoa mind blowing. There's so many 0:16:19.920 --> 0:16:25.080 areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience, and I'm 0:16:25.120 --> 0:16:28.040 hopeful when the aliens come that they're going to blow 0:16:28.120 --> 0:16:31.359 our minds with their different way of having a relationship 0:16:31.360 --> 0:16:34.560 with the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe 0:16:34.600 --> 0:16:38.000 they used to do science. Maybe science is some sort 0:16:38.000 --> 0:16:40.360 of primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they 0:16:40.400 --> 0:16:43.840 have is like you know, science plus the way we 0:16:43.880 --> 0:16:46.680 think about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and 0:16:46.680 --> 0:16:49.240 we're like, cool, bro, you made a lot of progress 0:16:49.320 --> 0:16:53.080 just thinking about stuff. Why didn't you think about doing experiments? 0:16:53.360 --> 0:16:56.200 You know, empiricism is obvious, like come on, just go 0:16:56.280 --> 0:16:58.840 outside and try it for ten minutes. Why argue for 0:16:58.880 --> 0:17:01.840 hours and hours and hours. It seems obvious to us. 0:17:01.880 --> 0:17:06.080 And in that way, maybe the Aliens have upgraded their science, like, yeah, 0:17:06.119 --> 0:17:07.240 we used to do it that way, but then we 0:17:07.280 --> 0:17:09.960 came up with this other trick that's so much better. 0:17:10.400 --> 0:17:13.040 I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever. 0:17:13.720 --> 0:17:16.080 And so it could be that they don't do science 0:17:16.080 --> 0:17:19.560 because they've left it behind for something even more powerful. 0:17:30.000 --> 0:17:34.439 So another one of the questions you look at is 0:17:34.720 --> 0:17:39.879 assuming that aliens do ask the question why they do 0:17:39.960 --> 0:17:43.399 have some kind of scientific understanding, would we be able 0:17:43.480 --> 0:17:46.879 to communicate with them about it? And you asked this 0:17:46.920 --> 0:17:48.840 in a number of different ways. I definitely want to 0:17:48.840 --> 0:17:51.280 get into the question of math in just a second. 0:17:51.320 --> 0:17:53.280 But before we look at math, I want to look 0:17:53.280 --> 0:17:58.440 at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:04.560 the analogy with differentficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could 0:18:04.560 --> 0:18:07.080 you talk a bit about that and how illuminating that 0:18:07.240 --> 0:18:10.200 those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are. 0:18:10.440 --> 0:18:13.560 Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met aliens. 0:18:14.000 --> 0:18:16.639 If we don't know what Amilien language is like so 0:18:16.760 --> 0:18:19.359 you can speculate endlessly, but I wanted to try to 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:22.600 dig into something more concrete. And the best example we 0:18:22.720 --> 0:18:27.919 have of intelligent civilizations who are a little alien to 0:18:28.040 --> 0:18:31.520 us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig 0:18:31.560 --> 0:18:34.439 into what was it like to try to translate the 0:18:34.520 --> 0:18:38.840 writings of ancient intelligent human civilizations who are not around 0:18:38.840 --> 0:18:41.040 to explain it to us, because I thought that would 0:18:41.040 --> 0:18:45.600 be helpful to teach us, like what's important. How challenging 0:18:45.720 --> 0:18:48.040 is this? When do we succeed? When do we fail? 0:18:48.800 --> 0:18:52.119 And I'm kind of shocked to learn the answer, which 0:18:52.200 --> 0:18:53.840 was that this is a lot harder than I thought. 0:18:53.880 --> 0:18:56.120 I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same 0:18:56.119 --> 0:18:58.280 brain as we do, they live in the same world 0:18:58.359 --> 0:19:00.960 as we do, they have the same senses, that's the 0:19:01.000 --> 0:19:05.000 same environment, and they have lots and they left us 0:19:05.040 --> 0:19:07.439 lots of examples. But in some cases we still have 0:19:07.600 --> 0:19:12.240 not decoded their writing. Like, yes, we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, 0:19:12.320 --> 0:19:15.439 there's an important caveat in that story, but we have not, 0:19:15.480 --> 0:19:19.280 for example, decoded Etruscan writing. And the Etruscan's like lived 0:19:19.280 --> 0:19:21.800 just a couple thousand years ago next to the Romans, 0:19:21.800 --> 0:19:23.879 and the Romans talk all about them, and we have 0:19:24.000 --> 0:19:28.399 lots of examples, and yet it still remains, you know, undecipherable. 0:19:28.720 --> 0:19:31.679 It's incredible to me. It tells me that like the 0:19:31.800 --> 0:19:36.280 barrier to accessing another intelligence, even one hosted on the 0:19:36.280 --> 0:19:41.000 same substrate, is very, very challenging. And it hints that 0:19:41.119 --> 0:19:43.840 in order to make these mental connections you need one 0:19:43.960 --> 0:19:47.879 essential thing, which is common context. You need to be 0:19:47.920 --> 0:19:50.439 able to like point at something and say, this is 0:19:50.440 --> 0:19:53.000 an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple, or 0:19:53.440 --> 0:19:57.239 you know, this is one, this is two. And you know, 0:19:57.440 --> 0:20:00.119 I read a really interesting set of articles by the 0:20:00.160 --> 0:20:04.879 folks at SETI, or actually anthropologists analyzing SETI, and you know, 0:20:04.920 --> 0:20:09.359 their conclusion essentially was that it's hopeless if the aliens 0:20:09.440 --> 0:20:12.080 communicate with us, if they send us a message SETI like, 0:20:12.800 --> 0:20:15.480 but they don't show up, so we can't like point 0:20:15.520 --> 0:20:17.720 to things and say, here's an apple, here's a doughnut. 0:20:18.240 --> 0:20:22.919 That it's essentially impossible to decode just written language from 0:20:22.960 --> 0:20:25.960 an alien species because we have no idea what it's 0:20:25.960 --> 0:20:27.720 supposed to look like. How do you know when you've 0:20:27.720 --> 0:20:30.800 decoded it correctly? You have no clues, no handles, and 0:20:30.840 --> 0:20:33.720 the best example of that, I think is Egyptian hieroglyphics. 0:20:34.080 --> 0:20:37.320 You know, there's this famous story the Rosetta Stone. They 0:20:37.320 --> 0:20:40.760 had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them. Then we found this 0:20:40.880 --> 0:20:44.280 cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek on it, and it's 0:20:44.280 --> 0:20:47.119 got the same stuff in hieroglyphics. Since you're like, oh, 0:20:47.240 --> 0:20:49.040 I know how to translate these words from one to 0:20:49.080 --> 0:20:50.760 the other, I can go from there, do dot dot, 0:20:50.840 --> 0:20:53.960 I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the way it happened. 0:20:54.400 --> 0:20:56.480 The way it happened is they found the Rosetta Stone, 0:20:56.760 --> 0:21:02.120 and it still took them twenty years. Twenty years when 0:21:02.160 --> 0:21:05.800 they had examples of decoded text in both languages. Why 0:21:05.840 --> 0:21:08.320 did it take so long Because they were making a 0:21:08.400 --> 0:21:13.880 fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics. They looked 0:21:13.880 --> 0:21:16.240 at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these are pictograms. 0:21:17.000 --> 0:21:20.080 The ones that look like birds are mean birds, someway. 0:21:20.119 --> 0:21:22.440 The ones that looked like water mean water some way, 0:21:22.760 --> 0:21:26.159 but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out to be phonetic 0:21:26.760 --> 0:21:29.240 in the same way that our language is, and so 0:21:29.400 --> 0:21:33.280 like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea. They 0:21:33.320 --> 0:21:35.400 only realized this when they were doing a deep comparison 0:21:35.440 --> 0:21:38.320 with the Greek and they found some phrases in Greek 0:21:38.359 --> 0:21:41.479 that translated to sounds, and they noticed that these sounds 0:21:41.480 --> 0:21:46.000 were common across these across the translation. And so it 0:21:46.040 --> 0:21:49.159 was only because not only did they have examples of 0:21:49.200 --> 0:21:52.120 the translated Greek, but they understood how this Greek was spoken, 0:21:52.480 --> 0:21:55.080 that they could crack this code. So the key was 0:21:55.200 --> 0:21:58.679