Speaker 1: Hey guys. Before I start a quick programming note, you'll
Speaker 1: probably notice my audio quality is not as good as
Speaker 1: it normally is. That is not because I decided to
Speaker 1: record inside of a tin can. I don't exactly know
Speaker 1: what happened. Some sort of computer grimlin I think switched
Speaker 1: my audio inputs. So sorry about that, but I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy. Welcome to Creature, future production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on the show How to
Speaker 1: Speak to Aliens, we talk about the way that biological
Speaker 1: senses differ so vastly between humans, animals, and possibly aliens.
Speaker 1: We use real life biology to talk about how an
Speaker 1: alien encounter might actually go down and the infinitesimally small
Speaker 1: chance that we ever I've been to intelligent life. Joining
Speaker 1: me today is Prout of the show, particle physicist, host
Speaker 1: of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, and author
Speaker 1: of the new book Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson, Welcome,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: I am a particle physicist and I believe in science,
Speaker 2: but I also irrationally believe we have more than an
Speaker 2: infinitesimal chance to be visited by aliens?
Speaker 1: How big of the chance out of out of like
Speaker 1: one in five.
Speaker 2: One in ten, I would say seventeen infinitesimals, not just
Speaker 2: one infinitesimals.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, yeah, I mean that's a pretty decent chance.
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah. I mean so in your new book,
Speaker 1: you kind of talk about how you explore a lot
Speaker 1: of philosophical questions about aliens, and then you involved both
Speaker 1: like physics and also biology to talk about this how
Speaker 1: it would be to try to essentially communicate with aliens essentially,
Speaker 1: like you know, the whole thing and what was that
Speaker 1: a rival when it turned out the aliens communicate with
Speaker 1: coffee stains or something. But I find it a really
Speaker 1: interesting topic because I think it makes us kind of
Speaker 1: we get I think when we start to think about
Speaker 1: like biology and human communication, we're so primed to think
Speaker 1: about it in a very egocentric way because we're humans.
Speaker 1: We have a human brain, we have human thoughts. It's
Speaker 1: very hard to step outside of that. But when we're
Speaker 1: forced to try to think about how it would go
Speaker 1: down if we were actually talking to aliens, we have
Speaker 1: to kind of step outside of that, and consider the
Speaker 1: ways in which our experience is not objective reality but
Speaker 1: filtered through all of our human meat.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And nobody's more egotistical than physicists. Let me
Speaker 2: tell you the personal experience. Because physicists tend to believe
Speaker 2: that physics is sort of special among human sciences, like
Speaker 2: biology that's awesome, but probably only of interest to things
Speaker 2: on the Earth, and biology and alien planets probably vastly different.
Speaker 2: But physics is supposed to be universal. Physics, Newton told us,
Speaker 2: it doesn't just apply to apples. It also applies to
Speaker 2: the heavens, which means it determines what happens on distant galaxies.
Speaker 2: And they then take the next leap. And physicists mostly
Speaker 2: assume that not only do our laws of physics apply
Speaker 2: to denizens of distant galaxies, but those denizens would also
Speaker 2: come up with the same laws, so that when the
Speaker 2: aliens arrive, we can be like at the chalkboard, writing
Speaker 2: e F equals MA within about ten minutes and use
Speaker 2: physics to make a mental connection with the aliens. And
Speaker 2: that would be wonderful if it were true. But I
Speaker 2: feel like it's making the same mistake that physicists and
Speaker 2: cosmologists have been making for centuries, which is putting us
Speaker 2: at the center of the action, assuming that human physics
Speaker 2: is the physics the way we assume that, like the
Speaker 2: Earth is at the center of the universe because it
Speaker 2: kind of looks like it and it's also quite flattering.
Speaker 2: So while I'd love to sit down across the table
Speaker 2: and exchange coffee scenes with aliens to understand quantum gravity,
Speaker 2: I think it might be much more difficult. And so, Yeah,
Speaker 2: in this book, I try to pick apart some of
Speaker 2: the assumptions that underlie the feeling that physics could be
Speaker 2: used to communicate with aliens and we might be part
Speaker 2: of a galactic intellectual community all solving the same problems,
Speaker 2: and wonder if aliens might be much more alien than
Speaker 2: we expect, right.
Speaker 1: And I think part of that is that the way,
Speaker 1: like the way we think is influenced by our biology.
Speaker 1: We can't really escape that. We like to believe that
Speaker 1: we can escape that, right that once we start to
Speaker 1: get to these more and more complex intellectual exercises where
Speaker 1: it's like, but these are like fundamental truths about the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we don't have the sense being filtered through you
Speaker 1: know our brains, which are a biological organ that is,
Speaker 1: you know, it has its own biases and are also
Speaker 1: just everything that our brains are connected to our sensory
Speaker 1: experience so humans, and we don't even have to really
Speaker 1: look to aliens right to see that. Our specific experience
Speaker 1: of humans is very particular to us. Like so we
Speaker 1: have extremely developed eyes. We see in color, we see
Speaker 1: a lot of detail, so we focus a lot on
Speaker 1: visual cues. Our sense of hearing is good at close range.
Speaker 1: It's not great once you get too far away. But
Speaker 1: our communication style is very like close range in terms
Speaker 1: of like communicating with each.
Speaker 2: Other, unless you're trying to talk to a teenager who
Speaker 2: has AirPods, in which case nothing you say, we'll get're
Speaker 2: going to get through exactly that. They have the parental
Speaker 2: cancelation software.
Speaker 1: Nice, it's like it the it matches the pitch of
Speaker 1: your tone, encounters it exactly, so it cancels out any
Speaker 1: parent voice.
Speaker 2: There's some AI in there that's learned exactly my voice
Speaker 2: that it.
Speaker 1: Can cancel it out exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're exactly right, you put your finger on it.
Speaker 2: We look at the universe through a human lens, and
Speaker 2: it's very unlikely that that lens is completely unbiased. You know,
Speaker 2: if you're like looking inside some mystery box and you
Speaker 2: only have a few ways to probe it, what are
Speaker 2: the chances that you see the full information of what's
Speaker 2: going on inside that box. And because we can only
Speaker 2: probe the universe through our one lens, because we haven't
Speaker 2: talked to aliens, and so far we haven't cracked the
Speaker 2: language of dolphins or whales or anybody else, we don't
Speaker 2: know how much of the lens is influenced what we
Speaker 2: see and what we understand. And I think you're absolutely
Speaker 2: right that our perceptions shape our sense of reality. Like
Speaker 2: we have a we have a limited set of senses,
Speaker 2: and we can dig into into them in a minute.
Speaker 2: But we've also extended those senses, right, we have new
Speaker 2: technological senses. We can see in the infrared and the
Speaker 2: ultraviolet and detect gravitational waves due to technology. But that
Speaker 2: doesn't change our experience of the universe, because what we
Speaker 2: tend to do is translate those new signals into the
Speaker 2: old into the old basis. You know, we take infrared
Speaker 2: and we don't look at them in the infrared. We
Speaker 2: translate them to the visuals. So we can see them.
Speaker 2: We convert gravitational waves to sound so we can hear them.
Speaker 2: And I think it's not just the senses that we have,
Speaker 2: but like what it's like to be a human, the
Speaker 2: experience of the sensorium, which is where the philosophy comes in,
Speaker 2: that could be very different from humans to octopy to aliens,
Speaker 2: and it could really change, like how you interpret what
Speaker 2: you're seeing and the framework you build to explain it.
Speaker 1: One of the examples that I really like is that
Speaker 1: when we look at math, right, because math seems very objective, Like,
Speaker 1: how can we be biased about math one plus one two?
Speaker 1: That's just true.
Speaker 2: Towered right in his biology one times one equals too.
Speaker 2: Maybe you could be.
Speaker 1: An alien, but it's like if you look at your hands,
Speaker 1: you have ten fingers, and it's generally understood that we
Speaker 1: we think in base ten because we've got ten fingers,
Speaker 1: and we can we use our fingers for counting because they,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're called digits, and.
Speaker 2: That anybody, anybody's ever had a digital proctal exam knows
Speaker 2: what it's called the digital exam.
Speaker 1: There's different kinds of digital. It turns out exactly really
Speaker 1: high tech exams exactly yeah, exactly, so so we have
Speaker 1: we we our mouth is in base ten, we think
Speaker 1: in base ten. We think like and I don't. It's
Speaker 1: really hard to wrap your head around if we had
Speaker 1: perhaps tentacles, or a different number of fingers, or a
Speaker 1: different way of counting, like instead of counting fingers, we
Speaker 1: had a certain pattern of like speckles on our bodies
Speaker 1: that we can change with chromatophores. Right, if we're an alien,
Speaker 1: that our entire mathematical system might be different, not necessarily,
Speaker 1: you know, contradictory to a base ten mathematical system. But
Speaker 1: if you had, like say base five or base two,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to do sort of like math problems,
Speaker 1: then one plus one does not necessarily equal to anymore,
Speaker 1: even though technically it still does. But the way of
Speaker 1: thinking about it and communicating it is different because of
Speaker 1: just a simple thing of like, how many of these
Speaker 1: little weird flanges do you have?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if you watched the show Alien Earth,
Speaker 2: but there's a scene where they tap out a few
Speaker 2: digits a pie and then the alien taps out the
Speaker 2: next few digits and they're like, whoa mind blow? But
Speaker 2: of course you know that's in base head, and so
Speaker 2: it's it's a little silly, but I'd love the show anyway.
Speaker 2: But you're exactly right. The bases are are a very
Speaker 2: simple way that we could be doing math differently from aliens,
Speaker 2: and even in human cultures. We don't all use base ten,
Speaker 2: like the Mayans use base sixty. Right, our computers use
Speaker 2: base two. But even beyond mine, you're the biologist, I
Speaker 2: don't know about that. I can't sign on to that.
Speaker 2: But even beyond that, like the question does one plus
Speaker 2: one equals two? Does it have to equal to everywhere
Speaker 2: in the universe? Sounds insane, right, But once you start
Speaker 2: digging into it, you discover that these things you assume
Speaker 2: have to be true everywhere. I actually rest on kind
Speaker 2: of fuzzy philosophical principles, like let's think about what it
Speaker 2: means for one plus one equals to make a concrete Like,
Speaker 2: say you have two apples on the table, right, you know,
Speaker 2: one apple plus one apple. That's two apples, obviously, but
Speaker 2: those two apples are not the same. One is bigger,
Speaker 2: one is smaller, one is darker, one is lighter. Why
Speaker 2: have you decided to group them together into this thing
Speaker 2: you call apples? Right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: An alien might be like, I don't know what you're
Speaker 2: talking about. That's this apple plus of that apple? What
Speaker 2: is this tube business? The concept of two assumes some groups,
Speaker 2: some set where you've decided what goes in it and
Speaker 2: what goes out of it. Or even if you don't
Speaker 2: have apples, what about you know, I'm one person, you're
Speaker 2: another person. I can argue I'm different from you. There's
Speaker 2: like a boundary between me and you, or a boundary
Speaker 2: between me and the universe. Where is that boundary exactly? Biologically?
Speaker 2: You know? If I cut off my arm, is my
Speaker 2: arm still part of me? These are fuzzy philosophical questions,
Speaker 2: not hard and fast, and it's not hard to imagine
Speaker 2: aliens that like exist in the atmosphere of stars and
Speaker 2: their plasma tendrils merge all the time, and for them,
Speaker 2: they might be like, why are you guys drawing these
Speaker 2: weird dotted lines between yourselves? We're all just part of
Speaker 2: the same flow, dude.
Speaker 1: Right, And so you could have like saying like one
Speaker 1: plus one equals two to an alien would be like
Speaker 1: maybe to us saying like, you know, one plus red
Speaker 1: equal Tuesday Tuesday exactly, like where it's like, what are
Speaker 1: you what are you talking about? But yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like things, like especially when it comes to physics,
Speaker 1: where when we look into how we view just fundamental
Speaker 1: concepts like time, it comes down to weird physiological quirks.
Speaker 1: So our sense of time is often related to distance.
Speaker 1: So when we when we look at a timeline, for instance, right,
Speaker 1: we have a sense of going forwards in times or
Speaker 1: backwards in time. Right, it's this very a lot of
Speaker 1: words that we use to describe time are shared with distance, right,
Speaker 1: Like we have kind of this time is viewed as
Speaker 1: a linear progression but also kind of almost like like
Speaker 1: a line that you're walking on. Right. Uh, you look
Speaker 1: at illustrations of the evolution of man. He's like lined
Speaker 1: up in a line from from little fish thing to
Speaker 1: like upright, businessman. Here's the progress through time represented in
Speaker 1: this line, measured by distance. And we've actually found that
Speaker 1: when we do experiments where you have people in a
Speaker 1: study setting where they are measuring lengths both geometrically and temporally,
Speaker 1: they easily get confused. So like if you have a
Speaker 1: line on a screen, it's like either a short line
Speaker 1: or a long line, and then you have people say
Speaker 1: short or long. But you also have another condition, which
Speaker 1: is the length of time that it's on the screen,
Speaker 1: either a shorter amount of time or a longer amount
Speaker 1: of time. Interesting, and then when you start to mix
Speaker 1: the signals, like you're trying to do both tasks at once,
Speaker 1: and you get contradictory things like a long line that's
Speaker 1: on screen for a short period of time or vice versa,
Speaker 1: people make more mistakes. And the fun thing is pigeons
Speaker 1: make the same mistakes.
Speaker 3: So we've done this both the human beings into pigeons,
Speaker 3: and we've found pigeons also mess this up. So other
Speaker 3: animals also, like primates, will make similar mistakes. So a
Speaker 3: lot of animals will have this connection between distance and time.
Speaker 3: And is that because objectively speaking, somehow pigeons understand the
Speaker 3: physics of the universe and that time is something like distance,
Speaker 3: or is it because being able to use time and
Speaker 3: distance together helps them triangulate food sources that they use
Speaker 3: by that they're able to find using an internal biological clock,
Speaker 3: as well as signals from the sun that they triangulate
Speaker 3: with an understanding of distance to be able to understand that, hey,
Speaker 3: I can go to this place.
Speaker 1: At this time and get food, which is another thing
Speaker 1: that has been confirmed by research. I had to list
Speaker 1: it right in with a question once about like how
Speaker 1: does this pigeon know always how to find me? Because
Speaker 1: I come at a very specific time to give out
Speaker 1: some peanuts and this pigeon always knows how to find
Speaker 1: me and when to come. And it's because of this,
Speaker 1: this sort of ability to triangulate this internal clock as
Speaker 1: well as distance, position of the sun, and then it
Speaker 1: is a huge motivator to be able to triangulate food.
Speaker 2: So did you interview that pigeon. We couldn't get our
Speaker 2: schedules to the line up for some reason, wouldn't sign
Speaker 2: the release for him.
Speaker 1: But it's a really interesting idea that this are the
Speaker 1: whole way we view time right like generally speaking, where
Speaker 1: we kind of view it almost like this like track
Speaker 1: that you're running along, you're going forward in time. We
Speaker 1: fantasize about being able to travel backwards in time again
Speaker 1: like a distance related thing. And this could be an
Speaker 1: artifact of the just simple need to be able to
Speaker 1: use time in order to locate food sources, because we're
Speaker 1: animals and we need to eat and we need to
Speaker 1: find things, and we know that sometimes like in order
Speaker 1: to locate a certain food or do a certain survival thing,
Speaker 1: we need to be able to triangulate both distance and
Speaker 1: time to be in a certain location at a certain time.
Speaker 1: And we link those concepts very closely. So then when
Speaker 1: it comes to physics and we start to you know,
Speaker 1: get into some really weird things, that is really hard.
Speaker 1: I mean even understanding this about like you know, being
Speaker 1: human and maybe viewing time in this biased way, I
Speaker 1: still can't wrap my head around a lot of physics
Speaker 1: concepts because when you start talking about weird things with time,
Speaker 1: it's really hard for me to kind of get off
Speaker 1: of this like mental track of like I'm like walking
Speaker 1: down this road called time and that is where I am,
Speaker 1: and that's how I travel through time, and that's what
Speaker 1: it is. And then when physics starts introducing these other
Speaker 1: concepts relating to times, it's like very hard to get
Speaker 1: out of that sort of like rigid way of viewing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we experienced time over a certain set of scales, right,
Speaker 2: Like we can think about time in terms of a second,
Speaker 2: a year, maybe a decade. Really long time scales are
Speaker 2: hard for us to grock. You know, theories like the
Speaker 2: tectonic plates and glaciers initially were dismissed because they require
Speaker 2: things to happen over such long time periods. They seemed absurd,
Speaker 2: and we know that there's lots of physics that happens
Speaker 2: over millions or billions of years, Like the Solar system,
Speaker 2: if you look at it over a few years, seems
Speaker 2: pretty steady. If you look at it over billions of years,
Speaker 2: it's a chaotic mess, with planets moving in and out
Speaker 2: and being tossed out. And probably there were other planets
Speaker 2: in our Solar system which we've now a banded or
Speaker 2: the universe looks very, very different on short time scales.
Speaker 2: You know, you zoom in and you try to understand
Speaker 2: the universe and like the microphysics and the interactions of particles,
Speaker 2: and it looks vastly different from the way we do.
Speaker 2: So if aliens, for example, live on really long time scales,
Speaker 2: dark matter beings that take like a thousand years to
Speaker 2: think a thought, or quantum mechanical beings that you know,
Speaker 2: buzz here and there and pop in and out of
Speaker 2: existence on microscopic time scales, it could be very hard
Speaker 2: to communicate with them about these concepts of the universe,
Speaker 2: because our notion of time really does determine how we
Speaker 2: think about the universe and the kinds of physics that
Speaker 2: we're just sort of capable of digesting, even though we
Speaker 2: have you know, Einstein, who helped us understand the connection
Speaker 2: between space and time that apparently pigeons intuitively know, right,
Speaker 2: I mean I heard of pigeon English, but maybe this
Speaker 2: pigeon Einstein.
Speaker 1: Also pigeon Einstein knows where to get all the best breadcrumbs.
Speaker 1: Relatively yeah, yeah, relatively speaking, But it is really interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's even on Earth, like you don't even
Speaker 1: necessarily have to find an alien. Like the flicker frame rate,
Speaker 1: which is like our brain's processing ability of basically our
Speaker 1: eye sort of refresh rate, to put it in very
Speaker 1: simple terms, is different depending on what animal you are.
Speaker 1: So if you've ever wondered, like I want to, like
Speaker 1: like when you have an annoying fly and you're trying
Speaker 1: to swat it and it seems to live in bullet
Speaker 1: time like Neo and be able to like sense when
Speaker 1: your hand is coming down no matter how fast you are,
Speaker 1: it's because it is it has the ability to actually
Speaker 1: experience things very slowly, and so it is like it's
Speaker 1: these The ability for it to escape you is because
Speaker 1: like to it like your hand is coming down just
Speaker 1: sort of gradually and it's like easy, peasy, I can
Speaker 1: get away from that real fast.
Speaker 2: And because we have selected four flies that survive our swaters, right,
Speaker 2: every time you swatter fly, you're making the average fly faster.
Speaker 2: Every time you kill a mosquito, you're selecting for more deadly,
Speaker 2: more evasive mosquito. So thanks everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, fly swater resistant bugs. They're going to
Speaker 1: start to develop little helmets all because of us. But yeah,
Speaker 1: before we move on to kind of talking more about
Speaker 1: animals instead of well, people are animals, but you know,
Speaker 1: cooler animals. One of the interesting things is that I
Speaker 1: think when we look at like how we communicate, right,
Speaker 1: and one of the ideas is that, well, like with
Speaker 1: our human language, that basically shapes entirely how we think.
Speaker 1: So we would never we could never pass think like
Speaker 1: an alien because we have human language, which is a
Speaker 1: specific thing, specific style of communication that completely shapes how
Speaker 1: we think. Like we wouldn't think the way we do,
Speaker 1: maybe we wouldn't even think at all if we didn't
Speaker 1: have language. And there's actually been some research into that.
Speaker 1: And it's not to say that language does not influence thought,
Speaker 1: because it certainly does, but thinking and language right are
Speaker 1: actually not completely dependent on each other, which is weird.
Speaker 1: So ah, there were researchers at MIT and UC Berkeley
Speaker 1: who used fMRIs to look at parts of the brain
Speaker 1: that were active when people were doing tasks like anything
Speaker 1: from reading to doing a saduco puzzle. I mean, for me,
Speaker 1: they would find no brain activity because I'm really bad
Speaker 1: at those. But in general, what they found is that
Speaker 1: the language areas of the brain were not going off
Speaker 1: all the time as they were thinking through these processes,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't as we may have this experience of
Speaker 1: like when you're sitting and you're kind of like thinking,
Speaker 1: sometimes you have an internal narration where you hear you're
Speaker 1: almost having a conversation with yourself in your head, where
Speaker 1: you hear your own voice, you hear your own thoughts.
Speaker 1: Not everyone actually has that, Like, not everyone experiences that.
Speaker 1: There's variation in human thought, which we take for granted
Speaker 1: we're all thinking the same, but there are people who
Speaker 1: have a fantasia where they don't think in images, and
Speaker 1: people who think almost entirely in images and don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of that internal narration. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of variability even among people, even within the same language.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, we can think without language. People who
Speaker 1: suffer a stroke, who actually have brain damage in the
Speaker 1: region's responsible for producing an understanding language, and who can't
Speaker 1: do either, can still sometimes do things like math problems,
Speaker 1: play music so or even make future plans. So our
Speaker 1: ability to think is not that it's completely independent from language.
Speaker 1: These are parallel processes that influence each other but are
Speaker 1: not completely integrated with one another. So we can think
Speaker 1: without necessarily using our language center and as you probably
Speaker 1: know listening to other people and politicians, you can also
Speaker 1: use your language without thinking very much. People can talk
Speaker 1: without necessarily being conscious or thinking about what they're saying.
Speaker 1: That's not even just a joke like people can use.
Speaker 1: There can be like sort of weird situations in which
Speaker 1: someone is not actually conscious but is like talking and
Speaker 1: not necessarily thinking, but is using language. So in this sense,
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of maybe a little optimistic, because
Speaker 1: even if we have a huge language barrier with another
Speaker 1: alien and maybe they don't even have a language, they're
Speaker 1: still potentially thinking, and we might share a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of ways in which we think. Of course
Speaker 1: it's going to be different, but there's still there's still
Speaker 1: thinking going on that maybe we're sharing. That might be
Speaker 1: really hard to bridge that gap, but it still exist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you that language captures some of
Speaker 2: what we're thinking, but it isn't the same thing, because
Speaker 2: when you go from the ideas in your head to language,
Speaker 2: you're making this arbitrary translation to like these from these
Speaker 2: ideas to these symbols. And we've just like agreed on
Speaker 2: these symbols and what they mean so that when you
Speaker 2: hear them, they create in your mind the same ideas
Speaker 2: that I was trying to convey. But in order for
Speaker 2: that to work, you have to know what that mapping
Speaker 2: is from the ideas to the symbols. So you can
Speaker 2: invert it, right, you can back it out and say
Speaker 2: when Katie says pigeon, I know what that means. I
Speaker 2: have this idea of a pigeon. It's connected to this
Speaker 2: word pigeon, which I either hear or I see. And
Speaker 2: the issue with that is that the mapping is arbitrary. Right,
Speaker 2: there's no symbol which can only be mapped to one idea,
Speaker 2: and there's no mapping, which like, well, how you have
Speaker 2: to choose this symbol for this idea, which means if
Speaker 2: you see a bunch of symbols, you have no idea
Speaker 2: what ideas they might map to. And this is evidenced
Speaker 2: by like our attempts to you know, decode whale song
Speaker 2: or dolphins, or even languages from extinct human civilizations. These
Speaker 2: are like equivalent biological humans with ideas probably very similar
Speaker 2: to our own, but we just don't know how to
Speaker 2: crack their ancient languages because it's an arbitrary mapping between
Speaker 2: the ideas and the symbols. And you know, we've done
Speaker 2: it in some cases, like for the Egyptians, but that
Speaker 2: only with a cheat sheet of the Rosetta Stone, plus
Speaker 2: a lot of cultural context and clues and going down
Speaker 2: the wrong path for like sometimes twenty years. So we
Speaker 2: should be really skeptical that we'll ever have a chance
Speaker 2: to decode alien languages. I mean, I'm a big fan
Speaker 2: of Seti, for example, and I think they should do it.
Speaker 2: And Jill Titar is fantastic and none of this is
Speaker 2: news to her, but the idea that we could get
Speaker 2: a message from space, understand, recognize that it's an alien message,
Speaker 2: and then somehow decode it into concepts is almost fantastical
Speaker 2: without an alien there to interact with and to interrogate
Speaker 2: and like point it stuff and say donut, pigeon, apple
Speaker 2: or whatever. So I think that task is going to
Speaker 2: be really, really hard, and that's why some people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: you should begin with math. But even math has symbols, right,
Speaker 2: representing one and two or pi or whatever. There's always
Speaker 2: a symbol there, and that's always arbitrary. And if you
Speaker 2: look at what physicists have done already trying to communicate
Speaker 2: with aliens, it's you know, it's earnest and it's well intentioned,
Speaker 2: and it's a great effort, and I don't have a
Speaker 2: better idea, but it's also kind of hopeless. You know.
Speaker 2: There's a guy who literally drew, literally scraped out canals
Speaker 2: in the desert, filled them with kerosene, and lit them
Speaker 2: on fire from and wrote mathematical equations in the Sahara,
Speaker 2: hoping the Martians would read them and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: there's intelligent life on Earth.
Speaker 1: They're probably like, my god, they're burning their own planet.
Speaker 1: It's very unintelligent life on Earth. Well, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break. When we get back, I will
Speaker 1: talk about some of the unique ways that animals sense
Speaker 1: the world that shapes their intelligence and their social lives
Speaker 1: as a way to kind of perhaps conceptualize how this
Speaker 1: might work for aliens. So we've mostly talked about the
Speaker 1: human sensory experience, but the animal senses. I talk a
Speaker 1: lot about like our similarities with animals on the show,
Speaker 1: but also I highlight very different like in terms of
Speaker 1: a lot of fundamental things in their There a lot
Speaker 1: of times it comes down to their sensory experience. So like,
Speaker 1: for instance, your dog, who we relate really well with dogs.
Speaker 1: We've co evolved to the point where we communicate really well.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we don't speak the exact same language, but
Speaker 1: it's actually really remarkable how well we communicate with dogs
Speaker 1: and vice versa.
Speaker 2: You can tell when a dog is happy or sad.
Speaker 2: What you can you feel, you emotionally feel their experience. Ye,
Speaker 2: it's amazing that happens.
Speaker 1: Exactly even though they don't smile in the way that
Speaker 1: we do. They don't laugh, but we can. You know,
Speaker 1: we have learned how to understand their body language, their
Speaker 1: gestures and to the point where you know, we were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we get when a dog is happy, when a dog
Speaker 1: is upset, But dogs also have this huge experience that
Speaker 1: is just beyond us, which is their sense of smell,
Speaker 1: which is incredible. Uh. And so often you'll take your
Speaker 1: dog to a park and it's just like smelling everything,
Speaker 1: and you're like, this is super boring. I don't you
Speaker 1: want to run around, I don't want to play fetch,
Speaker 1: And all the dog wants to do is smell some
Speaker 1: gross little patch of unidentified liquid on the ground. And
Speaker 1: it's you know, to the owner, it's like, I don't
Speaker 1: understand why you don't want to play, why you don't
Speaker 1: want to exercise, You're just doing all this boring smelling.
Speaker 1: But to the dog, it's like going to an art
Speaker 1: gallery of just like so many interesting smells. It's like, uh,
Speaker 1: or scrolling through Facebook, right, because it's like I'm smelling
Speaker 1: the pee of another dog. This is a female, she's
Speaker 1: reproductively active. But also this is from two days ago,
Speaker 1: so tough luck for me. And so yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: so they get all this information, and to us, it's
Speaker 1: just this kind of like locked world because we don't
Speaker 1: have that experience of smells and it really influences dog's
Speaker 1: social ba behavior. That's why they're so obsessed with smelling everything.
Speaker 1: They are probably seeing us staring at our TVs with
Speaker 1: like kind of some moving lights and stuff to that.
Speaker 1: To them, it's like, I guess that's okay, but I
Speaker 1: don't know why they're so fascinated by that. That seems
Speaker 1: really boring because like for a dog, their eyesight is
Speaker 1: not really as powerful as their sense of smell, where
Speaker 1: they just have such an incredible minute ability to smell.
Speaker 1: For them, going to a park smelling all the smells
Speaker 1: is probably as fun as reading a book or watching
Speaker 1: a TV show exactly.
Speaker 2: And there's two components of that. There's the biological senses, right,
Speaker 2: like their nose is complicated, it's got these different receptors,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. But then there's like what is
Speaker 2: it like to be that dog? Like how does your
Speaker 2: brain their brain interpret it? What are the quality of
Speaker 2: as philosophers would say, of that senses and what is
Speaker 2: it What kind of mental model of the universe are
Speaker 2: they building if it's built on sense? Right, as you say,
Speaker 2: we're so visually cute that we were trying to imagine
Speaker 2: a dog's world, I immediately art with like a mental
Speaker 2: map of the room, but like, I don't even know
Speaker 2: if that's like dogs put that in a sort of
Speaker 2: space and time in their heads the same way we do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they could have, like they could think and smells,
Speaker 1: which is very weird for us because our sense of
Speaker 1: smell is not great. It's good enough to be able
Speaker 1: to smell something good sometimes. I mean, I guess the
Speaker 1: closest we could get is sometimes you have like a
Speaker 1: smell dependent memory, like maybe peppermint makes you think of winter,
Speaker 1: maybe pumpkin spice makes you think of fall, right, like,
Speaker 1: so we do have some ability to map smells to emotions,
Speaker 1: to thoughts and feelings. But you know, if our smell
Speaker 1: is like, you know, a hundred times more powerful in
Speaker 1: the way that like dogs have this extremely powerful smell,
Speaker 1: I think like we might think more in smells and odors.
Speaker 1: So you're thinking, and you're having a memory of a
Speaker 1: smell or maybe several smells, and that's kind of basically
Speaker 1: a whole thought to you.
Speaker 2: There's some dog podcast where the host is like smelling
Speaker 2: is not thinking.
Speaker 1: They'd have to do some kind of dog podcasts that's
Speaker 1: in smellovision court to be fun for dogs. There's definite
Speaker 1: impacts of the way that animals sense the world on
Speaker 1: their social structures. So like, for instance, with bats, they
Speaker 1: use echolocation, particularly insectivorous bats, because they need to hunt
Speaker 1: down the insects, little fly insects usually, and so using echolocation,
Speaker 1: they send out a sound that bounces off their environment,
Speaker 1: comes back to them, gets captured those giant amazing ears.
Speaker 1: That works a bit like SETI because it's just these
Speaker 1: huge panels that take in all these sounds, and then
Speaker 1: that's how they can like sort of be able to
Speaker 1: find the movement of little moth or a mosquito. And
Speaker 1: bats generally speaking are quite social actually, particularly smaller species
Speaker 1: like insectiv wares. They live in these huge colonies. But
Speaker 1: you'll notice they don't necessarily hunt in massive groups, and
Speaker 1: they don't, which is actually because of a limitation of
Speaker 1: their echolocation. When they're roosting, they're all together, they're having
Speaker 1: a nice time, a lot of socializing and grooming. When
Speaker 1: they're out hunting, they are usually in smaller groups, maybe
Speaker 1: a handful of them, but certainly not a huge group
Speaker 1: of them. All feeding like you actually see sometimes swifts,
Speaker 1: which is a type of bird, and huge groups like
Speaker 1: going around feeding all going bananas, having mosquitoes, and even
Speaker 1: like spie little spiders that are floating in the air.
Speaker 1: You don't see this with bats as much. They usually
Speaker 1: try to fan out, and that's because there's interference if
Speaker 1: there's too many bats in one area. Using echolocation, they
Speaker 1: up to a certain point they actually get some benefit
Speaker 1: from other bats echo locating near them. Interesting, they yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like because the feedback from the other bats
Speaker 1: is letting them know the location of some insects, and
Speaker 1: so up until a certain point, like a certain number
Speaker 1: of bats, like they actually see a benefit they hunt
Speaker 1: more efficiently. And then after that point, when it gets
Speaker 1: too crowded and the bat density gets to be too much,
Speaker 1: it falls off where they there's too much interference and
Speaker 1: they don't hunt as well. So their entire system of
Speaker 1: ecco location completely changes their little bat society, like it's
Speaker 1: it limits how many of them can be cooperating and
Speaker 1: hunting together at once. Whereas like you think of humans,
Speaker 1: we have both verbal communication and visual communication. We're able
Speaker 1: to plan, so we could get into we could get
Speaker 1: together in a massive group and hunt together, like go
Speaker 1: after some big prey and be hunting together and remain
Speaker 1: relatively silent because we don't have to keep going like hey,
Speaker 1: to be a to see where the the masdon we're
Speaker 1: hunting is. So we you know, not that we did
Speaker 1: too much of that, but you know, like when we're
Speaker 1: when we're trying to hunt animals, we can be in
Speaker 1: relatively large groups and work together. We can also plan,
Speaker 1: we can communicate, so then that shapes human society. A
Speaker 1: really weird example of communication is one of the strangest mammals,
Speaker 1: which is the naked mole rat, which is one of
Speaker 1: the only use social mammals in the world. There's uh there.
Speaker 1: You've probably seen them. They're little weird looking, very weird looking,
Speaker 1: a little scrotle. They're there. They have they're almost completely hairless.
Speaker 1: They have a few sensory hairs, but they're pink and wrinkling,
Speaker 1: kind of ugly or cute depending on your perspective. But
Speaker 1: they live in these vast underground tunnels. Uh. And they're
Speaker 1: use social, which means that they have defined roles, and
Speaker 1: they have reproductive roles. So there is a reproductive queen
Speaker 1: and all of the other females don't reproduce. And it's
Speaker 1: actually really interesting how they do this because unlike ants
Speaker 1: or termites, insects that are used social often have like
Speaker 1: these like weird genetic shenanigans, happily diploid where you found
Speaker 1: this high relatedness between the queen's offspring and the worker
Speaker 1: ants to the point where you see some benefit of
Speaker 1: not necessarily everyone reproducing, and then also a lot of
Speaker 1: pheromone communication. With naked morats, you don't have that sort
Speaker 1: of weird genetic shenanigans. So the enforcement of the sexual
Speaker 1: hierarchy where the queen is the only one reproducing is
Speaker 1: really interesting. They have really bad eye sight. They mostly
Speaker 1: communicate through touch, smell, and sound and sense. The smell
Speaker 1: is really good, and they do a lot of weird
Speaker 1: kind of poop related communications. So the number one thing
Speaker 1: is they have public toilets which everyone goes in and
Speaker 1: does their business in, and they'll go in and they'll
Speaker 1: roll around in the public toilet and get everyone sent
Speaker 1: on them. And that's because you're basically this is your
Speaker 1: identification card, your membership to the colony, where it's like
Speaker 1: I'm part of this colony. Because I smell like everyone's poop,
Speaker 1: and so when they smell each other, it's like, great,
Speaker 1: I know that you're part of this colony. We have
Speaker 1: no problems with each other because you smell like everyone's crap,
Speaker 1: and so do I. And we love it because otherwise,
Speaker 1: like sometimes these these big naked molerat colonies can like
Speaker 1: intersect with each other, right, you have a different colony,
Speaker 1: and then their tunnels intersect, and they might run into
Speaker 1: a stranger, and how do they know it's a stranger
Speaker 1: if they're they're blind and they all look like weird
Speaker 1: little pink, wrinkly things. The smell like if it smells
Speaker 1: like some other colonies communal toilet and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: you're not you don't belong here, And then there's a conflict.
Speaker 2: And so the different communal toilets smell different, like the
Speaker 2: Ohio naked mole rats smell different from the California naked
Speaker 2: mule rats, and they can tell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the Seven eleven toilets smell different from the
Speaker 1: Harvey's toilets.
Speaker 2: We all believe that, I believe.
Speaker 1: But also even weirder is a way that the queen
Speaker 1: enforces the hierarchy through poop. So one of the questions
Speaker 1: is like, how we know that the presence of the
Speaker 1: queen suppresses reproductive hormones in the females. So they have
Speaker 1: this gonadotropin hormone that is suppressed, and it only develops
Speaker 1: when the queen is removed from the colony or and
Speaker 1: individuals removed from the colony. So there's all these females
Speaker 1: and they can't reproduce because they are their hormones aren't
Speaker 1: allowing them to reproduce, which seems to be enforced by
Speaker 1: some kind of weird combination of social enforcement, potentially bullying
Speaker 1: from the queen or her enforcers, but also potentially through
Speaker 1: her poop. So naked roller routes regularly eat each other's poop.
Speaker 1: This is a behavior that starts since their pups. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they eat their own poop. It's not so uncommon for
Speaker 1: rodents to do this because eating like they will digest,
Speaker 1: they'll poop, and then if they re eat the poop,
Speaker 1: they might be able to extract more nutrients from the poop.
Speaker 1: Don't try this at home. We have a different digestive system.
Speaker 1: You don't want to do that, but for them, it works,
Speaker 1: and something that researchers found is that when workers eat
Speaker 1: the queen's poop, it seems like it has a hormone
Speaker 1: in it that causes them to go and take care
Speaker 1: of the queen's pups. So there is like a brainwashing
Speaker 1: hormone in the queen's poop that is telling these workers like,
Speaker 1: go and babysit my kids, which is you know, this
Speaker 1: is a whole method of communication that is just completely
Speaker 1: separate from any hopefully any human experience.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, it's hard to imagine what that's even like
Speaker 2: what it means for them and whether you know, they
Speaker 2: could even explain it to us if we like develop
Speaker 2: some amazing AI connection with these communities, is there a
Speaker 2: way to translate these ideas into something that makes sense
Speaker 2: to us? And you know, this is something like again
Speaker 2: on Earth, developing the same biome as us and yet
Speaker 2: having such a vastly different experience. You can use that
Speaker 2: to try to like extrapolate what it might be like
Speaker 2: to be a creature on another planet and how different
Speaker 2: that sensorium could be in their social ste structure and
Speaker 2: how that's all connected. And that's going to definitely affect
Speaker 2: like the things they wonder about and the explanations they
Speaker 2: accept and the way they describe the universe around them,
Speaker 2: And so I think that we're hopelessly inadequate in extrapolating
Speaker 2: to other species on Earth, and therefore, like deeply, it's
Speaker 2: deeply impossible for us to anticipate what it could be
Speaker 2: like to be an alien and how they might foster
Speaker 2: and build explanations about the universe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like Close Encounters of the
Speaker 1: Third Kind would be a very different movie if those
Speaker 1: aliens communicated through coop rather than a light show.
Speaker 2: So the mash potatoes, they were kind of getting there
Speaker 2: with the mashed potatoes.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, but I just all I know is
Speaker 1: the Simpsons version of that where Homer really wants to
Speaker 1: go learn to be a clown at a circus, so
Speaker 1: he's shaping his mashed potatoes in the shape of a circus.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: a couple of examples showing how strange our behavior could
Speaker 1: seem to aliens and vice versa, using incomprehensible behavior of
Speaker 1: a couple of animals, and then we'll play the Mystery
Speaker 1: Animal sound game. All right, So I feel like one
Speaker 1: thing that could potentially happen in a human alien cultural
Speaker 1: crossover is that we do not understand why the heck
Speaker 1: we're doing certain things right, Like our behaviors might seem
Speaker 1: completely counterintuitive, self destructive, and strange to aliens, particularly if
Speaker 1: they don't understand how we communicate. And one example of
Speaker 1: this when we look at our own planet is the
Speaker 1: habit of hermit crabs crawling en mass into a plastic
Speaker 1: bottle or a glass jar and then dying and then
Speaker 1: you'll find, yeah, you'll it's very sad. You'll find these
Speaker 1: like glass jars full of dead hermit crabs. So it's
Speaker 1: it's very weird behavior. It's like, did these hermit crabs
Speaker 1: join like a cult? Are they are they all kind
Speaker 1: of coming in? Is this like a crab thunderdome? Or
Speaker 1: they came in and did combat to the death. Is
Speaker 1: this a crab graveyard where they're all kind of going
Speaker 1: off to this area to die? Uh, It's it seems
Speaker 1: very mysterious, like not knowing anything about how crabs communicate,
Speaker 1: Like can you come up with a guess of why
Speaker 1: these hermit crabs are all going inside like on mask
Speaker 1: going inside these bottles to die.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It could be like a bug in
Speaker 2: their system. Like hermit crabs don't. They exchange shells, and
Speaker 2: they sometimes like give up a shell to move into
Speaker 2: a bigger shell. So maybe they it seems like a
Speaker 2: shell to them or something. That's my guess, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's You're exactly on the right track. So that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways they communicate in terms of
Speaker 1: the exchange of shells is that when a hermit crab dies,
Speaker 1: it lets off a particular odor as it's decaying, which
Speaker 1: attracts other hermit crabs to its location. Because like for
Speaker 1: some for us, right when we smell decay, we're like,
Speaker 1: oh no, gross, stay away. That could be diseased. There
Speaker 1: could be something dangerous there. To the hermit crab, it's
Speaker 1: saying free house. So like they'll smell a dead hermit
Speaker 1: crab and go like, hey, I should check out to
Speaker 1: see if this dead guy's house fits me. And it's
Speaker 1: unfortunately what happens with something unnatural right, like hermit crabs
Speaker 1: did not co evolve with sprite bottles, is the hermit
Speaker 1: crab will see the opening of a sprite bottle crawl inside,
Speaker 1: maybe thinking it's a home, maybe thinking it's an interesting
Speaker 1: little cranny to go into, and it can get in
Speaker 1: because of the friction of the sand. Then once it's in,
Speaker 1: it's all slippery, it's slick. It can't get back out,
Speaker 1: so it dies, and then it gives off the odor
Speaker 1: that another hermit crab is going like, oh, hey, that's
Speaker 1: the smell of a dead crab. I don't sense any
Speaker 1: danger necessarily. That just means a free house to me.
Speaker 1: So then it goes and crawls inside the bottle, and
Speaker 1: then it finds this dead hermit crab and it's like, great,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna check out this free house. And then it
Speaker 1: finds it can't get out of the bottle. And this
Speaker 1: happens over and over again until you get a bottle
Speaker 1: full of dead hermit crabs. And it's all because they're
Speaker 1: communicating there thinking, and their communication is through this, like
Speaker 1: you know, these chemoreceptive organs, and then their interpretation of
Speaker 1: it is when they smell, you know, a bunch of
Speaker 1: dead hermit crabs, it's not oh, that's probably dangerous. I
Speaker 1: should not go over there. It's a bunch of free houses.
Speaker 1: That's great. I'll go over there and check out if
Speaker 1: I can get a free house. So you have this
Speaker 1: feedback loop for these poor little crabs who are kind
Speaker 1: of helpless in the face of their biology in the
Speaker 1: way they sense the world, and get stuck in this trap.
Speaker 2: It's like a bunch of millennials looking for an apartment.
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, maybe somebody died in there, let's go
Speaker 2: in if it's available, and then they die, and it
Speaker 2: just leads to more and more.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly, there's it's got There's got to
Speaker 1: be like some corror movie where it's like teenagers keep
Speaker 1: going to the same haunted place, the same scary, scary house,
Speaker 1: and then they live stream in and it makes even
Speaker 1: more teenagers go over to see what exactly and other
Speaker 1: So another example of this of the importance of chemical
Speaker 1: communication and how it could result in really bizarre behaviors
Speaker 1: that are really hard to interpret once before you stand
Speaker 1: what they do. It's like ants will sometimes army ants
Speaker 1: specifically will sometimes start marching in a circle, and is
Speaker 1: it's like just this endless circle that they're marching in
Speaker 1: until they die of exhaustion, which again just seems like
Speaker 1: why are these ants doing this? Is this some kind
Speaker 1: of weird ant cult. Do they have an ant religion
Speaker 1: or they're sacrificing themselves to an ant god. Well, no,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, they are army. Ants do not
Speaker 1: have good eyesight, they're mostly blind, so they're completely dependent
Speaker 1: on pheromone communication. And when they're on an ant trail,
Speaker 1: it happens is another ant is basically, as it's making
Speaker 1: a trail, it lays down a small amount of pheromones
Speaker 1: that may or may not compel another ant to come
Speaker 1: join it. But the stronger the signal, the more like
Speaker 1: the ant is to follow it. And so this allows
Speaker 1: the ants to have this communication style where it's like
Speaker 1: voting with their little tiny ant feet and their pheromones.
Speaker 1: So the more ants go down and trail, it's like, ah,
Speaker 1: this is the right trail to go down, because there's
Speaker 1: this like democracy of the ants marching down this trail,
Speaker 1: laying down pheromones, it makes that signal really strong. When
Speaker 1: that trail gets interrupted, and then the ants sometimes like
Speaker 1: loop back on themselves. What can happen is essentially this
Speaker 1: marching circle where they get confused, they lose the trail,
Speaker 1: they start to follow the old pheromone trail in this loop,
Speaker 1: and because they're all following it, and the more ants
Speaker 1: that make the same mistake, the stronger the signal gets,
Speaker 1: and the more ants join in, and then this even
Speaker 1: stronger the signal gets and then you get this like
Speaker 1: death spiral, and we would have no idea why they're
Speaker 1: doing this very counterintuitive behavior without understanding this invisible thing, like,
Speaker 1: you know, imagine a human being before we understood what
Speaker 1: ant pheromones are. It just seems like the ants are
Speaker 1: possessed by demons, right and doing a little circle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And it's hard to imagine doing that. But
Speaker 2: then you know, like obviously humans are affected by trends,
Speaker 2: and you know, all the teenagers in my life are
Speaker 2: saying the same six to seven joke over and over again,
Speaker 2: death marching to the end of humor, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so you know, back to the context of aliens,
Speaker 2: like it could be so foreign to us why they're
Speaker 2: doing what they're doing and what it means to them,
Speaker 2: and how to crack into that. It's going to be
Speaker 2: a real challenge.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Aliens take one look at us, see how many
Speaker 1: latle boo boos we have, and just assume that that
Speaker 1: must be their offspring, right, Like, why else would they
Speaker 1: propagate so many lat booboos? All right, so before we go,
Speaker 1: we got to play a little game called Guests Who
Speaker 1: Squawk of the Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I
Speaker 1: play Mystery Animal sound and you, the guests, need the
Speaker 1: listener guess who is making that sound. Last week's hint
Speaker 1: was this ret row. All right, so Daniel, you got
Speaker 1: any guesses as to who could be making that beautiful sound.
Speaker 2: M that sounds to me like a bird.
Speaker 1: It's not quite a bird. It's the bird of the woods,
Speaker 1: also known as the road deer.
Speaker 2: Or something.
Speaker 1: No, no, it's the it's the bird. It's the bird
Speaker 1: of the ungulate world, which is the road deer. No,
Speaker 1: it's it sounds I get bird because there's kind of
Speaker 1: a screeching sound. But yeah, road deer. It's found all
Speaker 1: over continental Europe and it barks when it's alarmed. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's interesting because when we see deer, we
Speaker 1: kind of imagine them as these beautiful, graceful, silent creatures
Speaker 1: who do not make any kind of upsetting noise because
Speaker 1: you look at Bambie and they're all so gentle and
Speaker 1: but yeah, they can they can be quite noisy when
Speaker 1: they're defending themselves, when they're alarmed, when they're defending their territory.
Speaker 1: When this is just a fun little fact about roe deer.
Speaker 1: When they mate, they chase each other round in rings,
Speaker 1: which leaves behind sort of deer crop circles. So there's
Speaker 1: these like they call them row rings. But if you
Speaker 1: didn't know it was caused by deer, it'd be like,
Speaker 1: are there aliens in the woods like creating these little circles?
Speaker 2: Oh and now I get the hint, got it all right?
Speaker 2: That made me think of dogs and let me down
Speaker 2: the wrong. Very tricky kid, you very tricky.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I'm sneaky like that. All right,
Speaker 1: onto this week's mystery animals sound. The hint is this.
Speaker 1: It may sound like a cat call, but I assure
Speaker 1: you this animal wants nothing to do with cats. All right, Danielle,
Speaker 1: you got any guesses?
Speaker 2: I'm gonna have to go for bird again. That sounds
Speaker 2: like a bird? Am I wrong? Twice?
Speaker 1: Well? We will find out next week on Creature Feature.
Speaker 1: If you think you know who is making that woo
Speaker 1: woo sound, you can write to me at Creature Feature
Speaker 1: Pod at gmail dot com. Daniel, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: coming on the show today. Where can people find you
Speaker 1: and where can people buy your book?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can buy my book anywhere people sell books,
Speaker 2: but also go to the website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com.
Speaker 2: If you order it before the release date, you can
Speaker 2: get a free set of alien stickers drawn by my
Speaker 2: friend and co author Andy Warner, who's a gifted cartoonist,
Speaker 2: So go check it out. I'm also the co host
Speaker 2: of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe by iHeartRadio, which you
Speaker 2: can find on all nice podcast platforms. And it's been
Speaker 2: a pleasure to talk to you about aliens. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much, Katie.
Speaker 1: Maybe somedays aliens will read this book and be like, Nah, Daniel,
Speaker 1: ye got it all wrong. We understand English.
Speaker 2: Come and tell me how wrong I got it. Aliens.
Speaker 2: I want to hear it. I can't even guess birds
Speaker 2: versus dear.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: If you have any questions about animals, you can write
Speaker 1: to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the Space Coassics for their super awesome song
Speaker 1: XO Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: ap Apple podcasts, or Hey, guess what one of you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you what to do. Uh, but you know
Speaker 1: if you always wear clean underwear just in case you
Speaker 1: get abducted by aliens, you don't want to be embarrassed.
Speaker 1: See you next Wednesday.
Speaker 2: I gotta go change mind to wear hold on