Speaker 1: What's going to happen if we eventually meet space aliens,
Speaker 1: and specifically alien scientists. If these aliens could see electrons
Speaker 1: or smell photons, would their science look anything like ours?
Speaker 1: Is physics a universal language or just a local dialect
Speaker 1: of the human brain? Would alien scientists even use math
Speaker 1: and equations? Or might their truths be organized in a
Speaker 1: way that we just don't recognize. Are the laws of
Speaker 1: nature really laws or simply the stories that our species
Speaker 1: tells about its slice of reality? Could alien technology emerge
Speaker 1: from entirely different questions, things that we find boring or
Speaker 1: irrelevant or literally invisible. What would it mean if science
Speaker 1: itself is not universal but just another product of evolution.
Speaker 1: Today we'll speak with physicist Daniel Whitson, who's just written
Speaker 1: a new book called Do Aliens Speak Physics? So get
Speaker 1: ready for a terrific brain stretch. Welcome to Intercosmos with
Speaker 1: me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford
Speaker 1: and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three
Speaker 1: pound universe.
Speaker 2: To understand how we see the world.
Speaker 1: And sometimes how different creatures might see the world very differently.
Speaker 1: So let's start here when we imagine extraterrestrial life, we
Speaker 1: usually picture aliens through the only template that we know,
Speaker 1: which is a mashup of Earth creatures, including aliens we've
Speaker 1: seen in movies and television. We see animals stretched and
Speaker 1: tinted into something just foreign enough to qualify as aliens.
Speaker 1: They might have big eyes and green skin, and maybe
Speaker 1: tentacles or extra limbs. But quite possibly, when we do
Speaker 1: find alien life, we're going to find that it looks
Speaker 1: much much different than what we have pictured so far. Now,
Speaker 1: I just want to bring that up as a table
Speaker 1: setting for today's much deeper question. Not about what aliens
Speaker 1: might look like, it's about how they might think.
Speaker 2: Here's why this matters.
Speaker 1: Every creature on our planet already lives within its own
Speaker 1: private universe, a unique umvelt or sensory world. My dog,
Speaker 1: for example, navigates our neighborhood through a riot of smells.
Speaker 1: So to me, the fire hydrant is just a short
Speaker 1: metal post, but to him, it's a tapestry of stories
Speaker 1: that are woven from the animals that passed. And when
Speaker 1: I'm away from home and I pop in on a
Speaker 1: video call, my family is happy to see me, but
Speaker 1: my dog quickly loses interest. Here's my voice, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't smell like I'm there, and so to his brain,
Speaker 1: I'm not really there, and our human umvelt is shockingly limited.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in this, check out a talk I
Speaker 1: gave it ted some years ago. We humans are tuned
Speaker 1: into a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, like one
Speaker 1: ten trillionth of it, So we are blind to most
Speaker 1: of the light that makes up the world, and for
Speaker 1: that matter, we are deaf to most sound frequencies out there,
Speaker 1: and we have absolutely zero perception of lots of things
Speaker 1: around us, like neutrinos or dark matter. We stitch together
Speaker 1: our reality from a surprisingly thin trickle of signals, and
Speaker 1: then we build our sciences on top of that's gaffolding,
Speaker 1: which raises the question if our physics is built on
Speaker 1: our senses in some way, then what would science look
Speaker 1: like to a creature with utterly different senses.
Speaker 2: Imagine aliens who can see electrons, or smell photons, or
Speaker 2: feel dark matter the way that we see and smell
Speaker 2: and taste in apple. Would they arrive at the same
Speaker 2: equations we do? Would they describe the universe with particles
Speaker 2: and forces, or would those concepts feel to them something
Speaker 2: like Roman numerals, which we'll talk about in a bit now.
Speaker 1: The reason this is worth asking is because many physicists
Speaker 1: assume that uncovering the rules of nature is a universal project,
Speaker 1: one that any intelligent species anywhere in the galaxy would
Speaker 1: naturally embark on. But what if that's not true, and
Speaker 1: that the physics we uncover is going to be very specific,
Speaker 1: not only to our culture, but also to our cognition
Speaker 1: and our biology. What if physics is less like a
Speaker 1: mirror of the universe and more like a lens, like
Speaker 1: a little narrow straw we're looking through. These questions cut
Speaker 1: to the heart of what science is.
Speaker 2: Is it a singular, convergent.
Speaker 1: Path towards truth or is it a story where different observers,
Speaker 1: bound by their unique sensory limits, tell very different tales
Speaker 1: about reality. That's the territory we get to explore today
Speaker 1: with my guest physicist and author Daniel Whitson. These are
Speaker 1: exactly the questions that he has been asking. If and
Speaker 1: when we meet aliens, will their breakthroughs unlock mysteries that
Speaker 1: we still fumble with, or will their science maybe be
Speaker 1: something we wouldn't even recognize as science. Daniel Whitson is
Speaker 1: a particle physicist that you see Irvine and he's the
Speaker 1: co host of the podcast Daniel N. Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 1: He's also the co author of SI several books exploring
Speaker 1: the big questions at the edge of physics. His latest book,
Speaker 1: which comes out this week, is called Do Aliens Speak Physics?
Speaker 1: And it dives straight into this puzzle what aliens might
Speaker 1: know that we don't know, and how their science might
Speaker 1: diverge from ours in ways we haven't considered.
Speaker 2: So let's dive in.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, Daniel, when sociologists look across cultures, they find
Speaker 1: various things where they say, look, this is culturally arbitrary.
Speaker 1: This just happens to come from the history of this
Speaker 1: particular culture. Now, the question you're asking is when we
Speaker 1: discover alien life, will we realize that something about our
Speaker 1: math in physics islet's say, culturally arbitrary or is there
Speaker 1: something fundamental about that?
Speaker 2: So let's dive into that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think it's a really important question we haven't spent
Speaker 4: enough time thinking about. But like lots of questions about aliens,
Speaker 4: either answer is amazing, like, either the aliens are doing
Speaker 4: physics the way that we are, which means that we're
Speaker 4: luck uncovering the truth. We're like revealing the nature of
Speaker 4: the universe itself, which makes our physics incredibly powerful and relevant.
Speaker 3: Across the galaxy.
Speaker 4: Or aliens are doing physics in a very different way
Speaker 4: than we are. Maybe they're perceiving a different slice of
Speaker 4: the universe, or they're asking different questions, or they have
Speaker 4: found different answers, or they just take a different approach
Speaker 4: because of their path through exploring the universe. In that case,
Speaker 4: we have an opportunity to learn something really fascinating about
Speaker 4: the lens of the human experience, how our humanity has
Speaker 4: colored the physics the explanations that we've developed about our experience. So,
Speaker 4: either way, when we discover aliens, you can get to
Speaker 4: try to talk physics with them.
Speaker 3: We're going to learn something fantastic.
Speaker 1: And so the way that you go about this in
Speaker 1: your fantastic new book is you say, look, this is
Speaker 1: the Drake equation, and I'm going to propose sort of
Speaker 1: an extension of it. So let's remind our listeners what
Speaker 1: the Drake equation is first, and then tell us by
Speaker 1: your extension.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the Drake equation is a way to try
Speaker 4: to estimate how many aliens are out there that we
Speaker 4: could communicate with, and this seems like a really overwhelming question.
Speaker 4: And so the beauty of the Drake equation, though it's
Speaker 4: so simple it's just a bunch of numbers multiplied together,
Speaker 4: is that it expresses it in parts. It says, well,
Speaker 4: let's just start by asking how many stars are there
Speaker 4: out there in the galaxy, and that turns out to
Speaker 4: be a huge number. We now know hundreds of billions,
Speaker 4: which is a great start. But then it asks, well,
Speaker 4: what fraction of those stars have planets where life might evolve,
Speaker 4: And then what fraction of those planets might have life,
Speaker 4: and what fraction of that life might be intelligent, what
Speaker 4: fraction of those intelligent civilizations might develop technology that could
Speaker 4: communicate with us, and what fraction of those exist in
Speaker 4: the right time period to talk to us. So the
Speaker 4: structure of the Drake equation, multiplying all these terms together
Speaker 4: emphasizes something really important, which is for this to work,
Speaker 4: for there to be aliens out there in the universe
Speaker 4: that are similar enough for us to talk to them,
Speaker 4: everything has to fall into place. You need a star,
Speaker 4: you need a planet, you need life, you need intelligence,
Speaker 4: you need civilization, you need technology, and you need the time.
Speaker 4: If any of those numbers are zero, then you got
Speaker 4: to know aliens. Like people often say, look, of course
Speaker 4: they're aliens out there. Look at the number of planets.
Speaker 4: There's a huge number of planets out there. Yeah, but
Speaker 4: if the fraction of those that have life is one
Speaker 4: over ten to the fifty, then we're alone in the
Speaker 4: galaxy despite the huge number of stars and planets. So
Speaker 4: that's the concept behind the Drake equation, but the structure
Speaker 4: of it really emphasizes how you need all these pieces
Speaker 4: to come together in order to have that contact with aliens.
Speaker 1: Now, what you've proposed is an extension to that. Tell
Speaker 1: us about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I'm not just satisfied with there being aliens
Speaker 4: out there. I want to talk to aliens about physics.
Speaker 4: I want to know are they on the same path
Speaker 4: as we are, but maybe like a thousand, a million,
Speaker 4: a billion years ahead, Like we have been banging our
Speaker 4: heads on, you know, the question of quantum gravity for
Speaker 4: one hundred years. How do we reconcile Einstein's theory of
Speaker 4: relativity with our knowledge that the universe is fundamentally uncertain.
Speaker 4: These two things just don't fit together, and we've been
Speaker 4: trying and struggling, and there's many deep questions in physics
Speaker 4: that we could answer. But what are the aliens just
Speaker 4: know the answers? You know, what have they have this
Speaker 4: figured out? They've have answers to questions we haven't even
Speaker 4: imagined yet. That would be so fantastic. So in this book,
Speaker 4: I imagine or try to estimate what fraction of the aliens
Speaker 4: out there could talk to us about physics. And in
Speaker 4: order for that to happen, a lot of things have
Speaker 4: to fall into place, and that's sort of the structure.
Speaker 3: Of the book. Number one.
Speaker 4: They have to be interested in these questions, have to
Speaker 4: be doing science in the first place, Like how do
Speaker 4: we know that aliens wonder why? And like lots of
Speaker 4: the questions in the book, your initial reaction is, well,
Speaker 4: of course they do, or you know they have to.
Speaker 4: But that's exactly the intuition I want to dig into
Speaker 4: because often we're biased as humans. We tend to think
Speaker 4: that our example, the way we do things, the place
Speaker 4: we live, our location in the universe is important or
Speaker 4: central or fundamental, and the history of science has taught us,
Speaker 4: or a history of philosophy has taught us that unpacking
Speaker 4: those skepticism is very valuable.
Speaker 1: So for example, you know, kangaroos don't particularly care about
Speaker 1: any questions that we have here.
Speaker 2: Or you can.
Speaker 1: Imagine space aliens that care about a very different set
Speaker 1: of questions than we do.
Speaker 2: We'll be an example of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the kind of things that we're excited about
Speaker 4: are like, hey, how do planets form? You know, what
Speaker 4: are the conditions under which planets form? And how long
Speaker 4: do they survive?
Speaker 3: Etc.
Speaker 4: Why Because we have all done a planet and so
Speaker 4: we tend to think planets are really important, but planets
Speaker 4: are sort of an arbitrary, made up thing. And the
Speaker 4: whole like argument in the last ten years about what
Speaker 4: is a planet is plue to a planet?
Speaker 3: How do you define a planet? Really reveals that.
Speaker 4: I mean, planets are tiny little dots around stars. Think
Speaker 4: about the way that we depict the Solar System. You know,
Speaker 4: typically we have the Sun, we have all the planets,
Speaker 4: and they're roughly the same size, which means that we've
Speaker 4: like taken the planets and blown them up right way
Speaker 4: beyond their real size because they're important to us.
Speaker 2: Whereas the Sun is actually one million times larger than
Speaker 2: the areth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Solar System is basically the Sun plus a
Speaker 4: couple little details, right, the.
Speaker 3: Sun, Jupiter, dot dot dot.
Speaker 4: But in our depictions we blow up the planets, and
Speaker 4: you know, the definition of a planet isn't even something
Speaker 4: that people agree on. Art astroomers are still arguing about it.
Speaker 4: And the reason is that it's important to us. It's
Speaker 4: not fundamentally important to the universe. The Solar System turns
Speaker 4: out to be, you know, mostly the Sun plus a
Speaker 4: bunch of rocks of different sizes and shapes. And we
Speaker 4: have drawn arbitrary dotted lines around this concept of a
Speaker 4: planet because we grew up on one, so we think
Speaker 4: it's important. What if aliens evolved in the atmospheres of
Speaker 4: stars and they're like planets, who cares, or you know,
Speaker 4: around in an ocean on a moon and they're like, yeah, planets,
Speaker 4: you know, are not the most important thing. I think
Speaker 4: the experience of our humanity that leads us to things
Speaker 4: that certain things are fundamental and important, and aliens might
Speaker 4: come out of from a different way and ask different questions,
Speaker 4: and so that's another element of this extended ray equation. First,
Speaker 4: I ask do aliens do science at all? Because if not,
Speaker 4: what can we talk to them about if they don't
Speaker 4: even care? And then I ask, could we actually make
Speaker 4: a mental contact with them? Could we establish communication? Could
Speaker 4: we learn to translate these concepts in our minds into
Speaker 4: alien brains? And back and forth? And then as you say,
Speaker 4: do they ask the same questions? Are they interested in
Speaker 4: the same things? Do they perceive the same parts of
Speaker 4: the universe even? And then finally the answer is the
Speaker 4: juicy thing I ask in the book, could we understand
Speaker 4: alien answers? Or is it possible aliens have an alternative
Speaker 4: theory of physics that works just as well as ours
Speaker 4: but tells a very, very different story about what's happening
Speaker 4: in the universe. So, because this question of like do
Speaker 4: aliens do physics like we do? Is too big and overwhelming,
Speaker 4: I extended the Drake equation use the same structure to
Speaker 4: ask in turn, like do they do science? Can we
Speaker 4: communicate with them? Do they have the same questions? And
Speaker 4: do they have the same answers? Those are other terms
Speaker 4: and the extended Drake equation.
Speaker 1: So let's start with this issue about would aliens use
Speaker 1: math and physics the kind of tools that we use,
Speaker 1: or might they use something else?
Speaker 3: Entirely.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is something that's often cited as a great
Speaker 4: way to start talking to aliens is to begin with mathematics,
Speaker 4: because mathematics is so basic to our science, and some
Speaker 4: people think it must be fundamental to the universe. And
Speaker 4: there's lots of good arguments that math is part of
Speaker 4: the universe. We as human physicists, have found many times
Speaker 4: that math leads us to the truth, the pure mathematics
Speaker 4: of it. You know, there's an example of group theory.
Speaker 4: This is a concept and abstract algebra that math nerds
Speaker 4: have played around with, you know, hundreds of years ago,
Speaker 4: just because they thought it was cool. They're like, look
Speaker 4: at these patterns. You can play these games. This is
Speaker 4: super awesome. They didn't care who it was relevant. One
Speaker 4: hundred years after they figured it out, the physicists were like, ooh, actually,
Speaker 4: it turns out this perfectly describes the interactions to fundamental
Speaker 4: particles and shows us patterns we hadn't imagined and it
Speaker 4: just clicked into place beautifully. So the math was there
Speaker 4: before the physics, right, and it suggests that the math
Speaker 4: reflects the nature of reality itself. Right, that's not our
Speaker 4: description of reality, but it's somehow revealing the source code itself,
Speaker 4: and of course that's what we want it to be true.
Speaker 4: We want as physicists, we're hoping to unravel the nature
Speaker 4: of reality, not just tell a story about it. We
Speaker 4: want to be describing the territory, not just a random
Speaker 4: map of the territory. So great arguments that math could
Speaker 4: be fundamental, that a math might.
Speaker 3: Be part of the universe.
Speaker 4: But because it's philosophy, of course, there are great arguments
Speaker 4: on the other side also, and there are strong hints
Speaker 4: that suggests that maybe math is a human way of thinking,
Speaker 4: in a way to express human ideas compactly, that maybe
Speaker 4: it's very very useful for doing physics, but maybe it's
Speaker 4: not absolutely necessary in aliens could have a different approach.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if they see the world very differently,
Speaker 1: not picking up on our little tiny window of electromagnetic radiation,
Speaker 1: maybe not picking up on air compression waves the way
Speaker 1: that we do, but living in a really different sort
Speaker 1: of umvelt this notion of what signals you pick up
Speaker 1: from the environment. The question is would they have an
Speaker 1: extraordinarily different way of picking up on information and expressing
Speaker 1: it other than math and physics.
Speaker 4: Exactly, And this is something you must know a lot
Speaker 4: about as a neuroscientist, But our experience of the world
Speaker 4: doesn't perfectly mirror the actual reality out there. Right, we
Speaker 4: have these narrow little conduits from which we get information
Speaker 4: about the world site, sense, touch, et cetera, and they
Speaker 4: create in our minds this sense of what the world is.
Speaker 4: But we also know obviously that is incomplete. Right, Like
Speaker 4: we see certain wavelengths of light, but this light everywhere
Speaker 4: that's invisible to us. We know that there are particles
Speaker 4: flowing through us all the time. Neutrinos are everywhere, and
Speaker 4: they're not and they're not rare. There's like billions of
Speaker 4: neutrinos passing through your fingernails every second. If you could
Speaker 4: see neutrinos, it'd be all you could see. Right, There's
Speaker 4: dark matter out there. There's all sorts of crazy stuff
Speaker 4: that we cannot sensor interact with. So our slice of
Speaker 4: the universe that we perceive is desperately incomplete, which means
Speaker 4: that our sensorium, the idea we have about where we
Speaker 4: are in the universe is something sort of concocted to
Speaker 4: allow us to survive. And you know, evolutionary biology, you said,
Speaker 4: neuroscientist knew much more about that than I do. But
Speaker 4: what we know is that it's incomplete, and that suggests
Speaker 4: that aliens who might evolve in different circumstances and have
Speaker 4: different needs, could develop a different set of senses. And
Speaker 4: even here on Earth we see a vast diversity of
Speaker 4: senses among the animals.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, and in fact, in nineteen eleven this
Speaker 1: Baltic physiologists suggested this idea of the umveldt, which is,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, this idea of what are the signals
Speaker 1: that you're picking up on from around you. So, for example,
Speaker 1: in the world of the tick, it's just picking up
Speaker 1: on temperature and uteric acid.
Speaker 2: That's all it picks up on. For the black.
Speaker 1: Ghost knife fish as it's called, it's just picking up
Speaker 1: on perturbations and electrical fields. For the blind echo locating bat,
Speaker 1: it's picking up on air compression waves returning to it.
Speaker 2: And so the.
Speaker 1: Question is would you develop parallel physics if you had
Speaker 1: a very different umvelt And obviously we can point at
Speaker 1: the creatures on Earth, but let's imagine there are dark
Speaker 1: matter civilizations that are living in dark matter and living
Speaker 1: right next to us, but we can't see them, and
Speaker 1: they can't see us. That's your question is would they
Speaker 1: be asking the same kind of questions are entirely different ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question, you know, sort of an
Speaker 4: extension of the famous philosophical question like what is it
Speaker 4: like to be about? Now we're asking what would it
Speaker 4: like to be like to be an alien physicist? And
Speaker 4: it matters because we can extend our sensations technologically, like
Speaker 4: we develop infrared sensors and we develop sensors that can
Speaker 4: detect neutrinos.
Speaker 3: Et cetera.
Speaker 4: But in the end, we're always translating it back into
Speaker 4: the language we find intuitive. The job of physics, of
Speaker 4: human physics, at least, is to take the unfamiliar and
Speaker 4: make it familiar. Think about how we describe photons. Photons
Speaker 4: are something new and weird and quantum will never fully grasp,
Speaker 4: but we describe them in terms of intuitive concepts that
Speaker 4: make sense to us. We say, oh, it's a particle,
Speaker 4: it's a wave, it's somehow a weird combination of both.
Speaker 4: The reality is it's either it's something new and bizarre
Speaker 4: and we're struggling to understand it because we insist on
Speaker 4: doing this translation back into something that's intuitive. For us,
Speaker 4: and I think that our sensations are sensorium, the senses
Speaker 4: we used to interact with the universe determine what's intuitive
Speaker 4: to us. You know, when I think about answering the
Speaker 4: question like how is the orbit of Saturn affecting this
Speaker 4: or that, I'm thinking geometrically, I'm thinking visually. I'm thinking
Speaker 4: spatially because that's the way my brain works. So now
Speaker 4: imagine an alien and maybe these aliens are microscopic, and
Speaker 4: so they have some sort of quantum senses that are
Speaker 4: natural and intuitive to them. Maybe they can see photons
Speaker 4: in superposition without collapsing them, And so to them, what's intuitive,
Speaker 4: what makes sense? The language they want to translate the
Speaker 4: universe into could be vastly different, and their explanations might
Speaker 4: make no sense to us, and ours might be very
Speaker 4: confusing to them. And so I think the question and
Speaker 4: perception not just determines what you initially see, but ultimately
Speaker 4: it's the language you used to express yourself what it's
Speaker 4: like to be a human or an alien physicist in
Speaker 4: the universe.
Speaker 1: So I love that, And what it reminds me of
Speaker 1: is an idea that I've been writing about lately, which
Speaker 1: is umvelt hacking, which is a term I first searched
Speaker 1: from my friend Eric Weinstein. But the idea of umbelt
Speaker 1: hacking is just that we take things that, for example,
Speaker 1: are very small, and we expand them so that we
Speaker 1: can see them. Or we take let's say, light that
Speaker 1: we cannot see, like ultraviolet and infrared, and we translated
Speaker 1: into what we can see.
Speaker 2: So we're constantly taking.
Speaker 1: Everything that we're discovering in the universe and translating it
Speaker 1: to the little window that we can perceive directly. But
Speaker 1: what you're suggesting is is even the step just beyond that,
Speaker 1: which is what is intuitive to us, like what can
Speaker 1: we even understand? So we take photons and translate them
Speaker 1: into a little story that makes sense to us.
Speaker 4: Or think about like gravitational waves. When they were discovered,
Speaker 4: they were described as sound waves, like we know they're
Speaker 4: not sound waves, there's no compression waves, but they're called chirps,
Speaker 4: and they were translated into literal little sounds.
Speaker 3: That you could play.
Speaker 4: You press a button in it and hear the gravitational wave, right,
Speaker 4: And people talk about it as if the universe is
Speaker 4: speaking to us now, and like that's not what gravitational
Speaker 4: waves are. But of course it makes sense to translate
Speaker 4: them into sound waves so that we can sort of
Speaker 4: digest them.
Speaker 3: We do this all the time.
Speaker 4: We take the pictures from the James Webspace telescope and
Speaker 4: then don't put them on your computer screen in the
Speaker 4: IR because they would just look black. They shift them
Speaker 4: into the visual and a lot of people might not
Speaker 4: be aware that they're seeing, you know, color altered versions
Speaker 4: of those pictures. So we do this oomwel attacking all
Speaker 4: the time, but we're always translating it, right, And so
Speaker 4: imagine we meet aliens and they have a different umwalt,
Speaker 4: and so you know, for them, these explanations could be
Speaker 4: very different. Or it would be incredible to be able
Speaker 4: to be released from that, to just be able to
Speaker 4: experience the universe in its natural form and not have
Speaker 4: to always translate it back into things that like, you know,
Speaker 4: these hairy apes find intuitive, I.
Speaker 1: Think, and I think that might actually be impossible. And
Speaker 1: in chapter six of your book you suggest that maybe
Speaker 1: instead of revealing a fundamental truth, physics will turn out
Speaker 1: to be like the film rachiam On. So for any
Speaker 1: listeners who don't know that film, tell us about the
Speaker 1: film Russiamon and then tell us why physics might turn
Speaker 1: out that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Russia Moon is a great film, a classic one
Speaker 4: where you know, some sequence of events happens, but several
Speaker 4: people tell a different story about it, and so they
Speaker 4: don't have to disagree on the facts, but they can
Speaker 4: disagree about why things happened and what it means. And
Speaker 4: that's important to remember when we're doing physics, because in physics,
Speaker 4: what we're doing is filling in the gaps between observations.
Speaker 4: You know, you have your data, you measure this, you
Speaker 4: measure that, you measured the other thing, and now you're
Speaker 4: telling a story about why that happened. For example, you
Speaker 4: have an electron and you have it between two plates
Speaker 4: and it accelerates. Now you tell a story about why
Speaker 4: did the accel electron accelerate. And the typical story is, oh,
Speaker 4: there's an electric field created by the plates and that
Speaker 4: pushes on the cool But is the field really there
Speaker 4: or is it just part of the story. Nobody's ever
Speaker 4: observed a field itself. They only observe the effects of
Speaker 4: the fields. The fields are the invisible story we tell
Speaker 4: to explain the data. And we do this all the
Speaker 4: time in physics, it's unavoidable, and it might be that
Speaker 4: aliens come and they have Oh no, they have a
Speaker 4: different story, like it's not fields, it's Schmields or something
Speaker 4: totally different. And there's a huge philosophical debate about whether
Speaker 4: this is possible. Does the universe have to have a single,
Speaker 4: unique explanation for what's going on, or is it possible
Speaker 4: to have two different theories of physics, fundamentally conceptually different,
Speaker 4: that tell different stories about what's happening invisibly behind the curtain,
Speaker 4: that both work just as well. And what would that
Speaker 4: mean about the nature of the universe. Like, if you
Speaker 4: have just started to think about this, your initial reaction is, no,
Speaker 4: that bonkers the universe. There's a reality out there. Happened
Speaker 4: for a reason, right, there are laws that must be followed.
Speaker 4: But that's a philosophical assumption. We don't know that's true.
Speaker 4: And the beauty of this question about aliens is that
Speaker 4: it might uncover some basic assumptions about the universe we've
Speaker 4: been making forever.
Speaker 3: We didn't even realize.
Speaker 1: So do you think that there are universal problems that
Speaker 1: every technological species would have to confront?
Speaker 2: What's your intuition on.
Speaker 4: That Wow, I don't know if we can make any
Speaker 4: universal statements about any intelligent species.
Speaker 3: I mean, they might have.
Speaker 4: Such different evolutionary experiences and face different challenges. You might
Speaker 4: be tempted to say, like, well, everybody's got to get
Speaker 4: off planet, right, and so everybody's got to develop some
Speaker 4: sort of.
Speaker 3: Like technology to get lift.
Speaker 4: But you know, that's a challenge that exists on our
Speaker 4: planet because we've kind of a massive planet.
Speaker 3: And you can.
Speaker 4: Imagine aliens evolving on much smaller moons where it's easier
Speaker 4: to get off planet, for example.
Speaker 1: But they still think of gravity, right, They would still
Speaker 1: have to conceptualize that in some way.
Speaker 4: I think probably, But you know, and it might be
Speaker 4: even more important. Imagine that dark matter aliens you were
Speaker 4: talking about, Like, we don't know what kind of interactions
Speaker 4: dark matter might have with itself. Currently, we imagine it
Speaker 4: only has gravitational interactions. You can imagine some sort of
Speaker 4: dark matter alien that's incredibly vast, that only has very
Speaker 4: weak gravitational interactions with itself and so evolves very slowly.
Speaker 4: That's time scales could be like you know, millennia, that
Speaker 4: millions of years, So it's I think it's impossible to
Speaker 4: say that there's anything that aliens have to have in
Speaker 4: common if you take the broadest possible view of aliens.
Speaker 4: And that's my preference because the aliens I want to
Speaker 4: meet are not the star trek aliens, you know, humans
Speaker 4: with little fuzz on their forehead or point to ears
Speaker 4: or whatever. I want to meet the aliens that blow
Speaker 4: our minds, that make us think what I didn't even
Speaker 4: imagine that was possible, or that's not something we ever considered,
Speaker 4: because that's someone when we learn the most about the
Speaker 4: nature of life in the universe and intelligent life and
Speaker 4: the experience of being human exactly.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is what happens in biology
Speaker 1: all the time, is we find creatures, we think, wait, what, how.
Speaker 2: Does that thing exist?
Speaker 1: And that expands our internal model of what we think
Speaker 1: is possible. So I agree with you that when people
Speaker 1: think about space aliens, we typically think about creature like
Speaker 1: you know, the star trek, some woman in a tight
Speaker 1: jumpsuit or something living on a different planet.
Speaker 2: But of course they don't have to be from planets
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: They could be really giant things that span galaxies and
Speaker 1: live in the dark matter part, and they have a
Speaker 1: totally different set of issues.
Speaker 4: But in order for us to connect with them, right,
Speaker 4: we have to have something in common. And that's why,
Speaker 4: you know, the book is structured in this way, Like,
Speaker 4: it's possible that there's lots of aliens out there that
Speaker 4: we have nothing in common with that you know, we
Speaker 4: have coffee with them and we're like, yeah, let's just
Speaker 4: that was fun, but we're not interested in chatting again.
Speaker 4: And the aliens I really want to meet are the
Speaker 4: ones that ask similar questions to us, that are curious
Speaker 4: about the universe the way.
Speaker 3: That we are. But there's no guarantee.
Speaker 4: Right, It's possible the universe is teeming with aliens but
Speaker 4: we're the only curious ones.
Speaker 1: Or that the territory of our curiosity is so different
Speaker 1: that they don't overlap much. For example, let's imagine that
Speaker 1: we could do animal uplifts so that we could talk
Speaker 1: to squirrels and chat with him about it. It's not
Speaker 1: totally clear how much we'd have in common with them,
Speaker 1: or if we could do that with bacteria, we would
Speaker 1: really have very different worlds.
Speaker 4: I think, even with whales or with chimps, you know,
Speaker 4: And the challenge of like making those mental connections is
Speaker 4: underscored by the fact that we haven't like we've been
Speaker 4: on the planet with whales and dolphins and shimps for
Speaker 4: a long long time and we haven't figured out how
Speaker 4: to cross that brain to brain connection to make that
Speaker 4: interaction work.
Speaker 3: Which you know, a lot of people.
Speaker 4: Imagine that aliens show up and we're like dot the linguist,
Speaker 4: figure it out in ten minutes, and then we're at
Speaker 4: the chalkboard.
Speaker 3: But like, I think that really.
Speaker 4: Under sells the challenge of making that brain to brain connect.
Speaker 1: And by the way, one of the things that I've
Speaker 1: always been interested in some of podcast involved this issue
Speaker 1: is what if there are alien species that live on
Speaker 1: a totally different timescale than we do, where we are
Speaker 1: like the tree people to them or vice versa.
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's absolutely possible. They are all these
Speaker 4: things that we find intuitive and natural, right, and one
Speaker 4: of them is a sense of time. But the universe
Speaker 4: operates on incredibly vast time scales, Like there are things
Speaker 4: that happened over millions and billions of years that we
Speaker 4: have a hard time processing. Like think about, you know,
Speaker 4: understanding glaciers. People thought it was ridiculous to imagine that
Speaker 4: like ice moves slowly over the surface of the Earth
Speaker 4: Earth and scrapes out valleys. Because it was such a
Speaker 4: long timescale process, it was just hard for us to
Speaker 4: grow or to think about plate tectonics in the same way.
Speaker 4: But the universe has deep time, and if you look
Speaker 4: at like the formation of our Solar system, we tend
Speaker 4: to think of the Solar System as this like steady
Speaker 4: thing that rolls around the Sun in a natural way.
Speaker 4: But if you look back into history, like it's quite chaotic.
Speaker 4: We think maybe there was another planet that got kicked
Speaker 4: out when Jupiter, you know, entered the inner Solar System
Speaker 4: and then got pulled back out by Saturn. It's crazy
Speaker 4: chaotic if you think about it on a much faster timescale.
Speaker 4: And on the other end, there's lots of things that
Speaker 4: are important in the universe that happened much much faster
Speaker 4: time scales than we exist.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Quantum mechanics is like blindingly fast. I do experiments with
Speaker 4: a large hadron collider. We study particles that exist for
Speaker 4: like ten to negative twenty three seconds, So this is
Speaker 4: incredible range of time for physical processes. And what we
Speaker 4: find intuitive are things that like take one second, ten seconds,
Speaker 4: may maybe one hundred years. So absolutely, I think that
Speaker 4: a lot of our physics is deeply influenced by the
Speaker 4: timescale of our lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a question when when we look back at
Speaker 1: the ancient Romans and think about them doing math, they
Speaker 1: were using Roman numerals, and that just makes it really hard.
Speaker 2: It's sort of parochial and stupid for that.
Speaker 1: Anyway, when you think about where our own physics is going,
Speaker 1: let's call it a thousand years from now, when we
Speaker 1: look back at the laws and particles and forces that
Speaker 1: we talk about now, well, that seemed parochial and outdated,
Speaker 1: like Roman numerals.
Speaker 3: Almost certainly.
Speaker 4: I mean the progress in science, despite what a lot
Speaker 4: of people say online, it is exponential. We are learning
Speaker 4: so much about the universe, so much more every ten
Speaker 4: years than we knew in the last hundred years, despite
Speaker 4: some you know, long standing open questions, and so I
Speaker 4: think it's hard to imagine what our science will be
Speaker 4: like in a thousand years. It's hard to imagine, you know,
Speaker 4: think about like taking Newton and bringing him to today
Speaker 4: and talking to him about the university would be his
Speaker 4: mind would be blown, right, The kind of things that
Speaker 4: we're imagining.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't even know how to think about like smartphones.
Speaker 2: Wait, you melt it down beach.
Speaker 1: Sand and you have you know, one hundred billion e
Speaker 1: caculations in a second, and so exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's so many things that would be hard for
Speaker 4: him to grow. But you know, the human brain is
Speaker 4: capable of that. It's incredible how if you evolve in
Speaker 4: that time period, you find those things natural and then
Speaker 4: you build upon them. And so that's the incredible thing
Speaker 4: about human science is that the next generation begins where
Speaker 4: we left off, finds it natural, and develops a fluency
Speaker 4: in it, and then is able to leap frog forward.
Speaker 4: And so it's it's so difficult to imagine what human
Speaker 4: science would be like in a thousand years, and not
Speaker 4: just the things we know, but I think also the
Speaker 4: process of science itself, because this is something that has changed,
Speaker 4: you know, people think about science. The typical cartoon pop
Speaker 4: size story is, you know, the Greeks were thinking about
Speaker 4: the universe but not doing experiments until fifteen hundred's when
Speaker 4: Galileo and Francis Bacon came up with the idea of
Speaker 4: experiments and boom, modern science took off. And now we
Speaker 4: sort of figured out how to figure things out. But
Speaker 4: the true story is much more nuanced than that. You know,
Speaker 4: the Greeks did experiments. They measured the curvature of the
Speaker 4: Earth using shadows and rods. Right, that's an experiment. And
Speaker 4: you know, the development of the process of science was
Speaker 4: much more gradual than people like to describe, and it's ongoing.
Speaker 3: We have new ways of doing.
Speaker 4: Science now that Galleo never imagined, you know, like in
Speaker 4: biology there's in vivo and vitro and now there's in silico. Right,
Speaker 4: we have this computational simulation element to science. So I
Speaker 4: think that in a thousand years, probably our science will
Speaker 4: be unrecognizable and scientists in a thousand years will look
Speaker 4: back and be like, man, they were so basic and
Speaker 4: primitive in the way they were asking questions and finding answers.
Speaker 4: So that makes me think that probably alien science, the
Speaker 4: very process of science itself, could be very different from
Speaker 4: what we do. You know, I don't think it's even
Speaker 4: inevitable that they have the same process. They could be
Speaker 4: down some other paths, some other technique for figuring out
Speaker 4: the nature of the universe we can't even imagine.
Speaker 3: So even on that level, we could learn a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what that means is that for our descendants
Speaker 1: a thousand years from now, they are essentially aliens to
Speaker 1: us as we are to them.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we are our own aliens. I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course it turns out that science is changing
Speaker 1: so rapidly right now just because of AI. I mean,
Speaker 1: all of us have these massive data sets that we've
Speaker 1: always put armies of grad students on and plugged through
Speaker 1: one little thing at like, things are changing so rapidly
Speaker 1: now in terms of the in Silico being able to
Speaker 1: do things for us that the whole process is. It
Speaker 1: makes me wonder a lot whether there's going to end
Speaker 1: up being a massive retirement of scientists just because a
Speaker 1: lot of the things that are worth doing a three
Speaker 1: or five year project on can be done in three
Speaker 1: or five milliseconds now.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I think that that just expands the kind
Speaker 4: of science that we can do. You know, science, in
Speaker 4: the end is a human thing. It comes from our curiosity,
Speaker 4: is questions we are asking. The AI is not curious
Speaker 4: about the universe. It just does what we're telling it
Speaker 4: to do. And you know, I see in biology exactly
Speaker 4: that kind of transformation. My wife is a biochemist, and
Speaker 4: you know, things that took people a PhD to do
Speaker 4: then in a few years become a thing on the
Speaker 4: lab bench. You press a button, it's done. And that
Speaker 4: doesn't mean biology is over. It means they have expanded it.
Speaker 4: They can now think about bigger questions they couldn't even
Speaker 4: imagine before. And so AI similarly, is helping us develop
Speaker 4: science more rapidly and do things more effectively that we
Speaker 4: couldn't do before. And I think it's allowing us to
Speaker 4: ask new questions and find new answers. So I'm not
Speaker 4: worried about the fate of human scientists. I think that
Speaker 4: as long as we're curious and we're wondering about the
Speaker 4: nature of the universe, and we value cultural institutions, that's
Speaker 4: the dangerous part. That will still be developing answers, and
Speaker 4: we'll still be in charge of asking the questions.
Speaker 1: Excellent, now, Okay, so let's get back to alien scientists.
Speaker 1: So one of the things we see in biology alow
Speaker 1: is what's called convergion to evolution, where for example, birds
Speaker 1: and insects both figured out flight even though totally different pathways.
Speaker 1: Do you expect convergences in science with us since alien civilization,
Speaker 1: where we stumble on the.
Speaker 2: Same thing, even if by different pathways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, possibly.
Speaker 4: And the way we can try to answer that question
Speaker 4: is to look back into the history of our science
Speaker 4: and ask, like, are the developments that were inevitable or not?
Speaker 4: And and surprisingly what you find when you look back
Speaker 4: in the history of science is so much of it,
Speaker 4: so many crucial pieces, the moments when we gained understanding.
Speaker 4: We're due to chance, we're due to accidents. You know,
Speaker 4: like the discovery of radiation and atomic decay was because
Speaker 4: a guy put some uranium on a photography plate and
Speaker 4: the rain spoiled his planned experiments. We just like left
Speaker 4: it over the weekend and he came back on Monday.
Speaker 4: He developed it and discovered radiation accidentally, right because it.
Speaker 3: Was rainy in Paris.
Speaker 4: And the frustrating thing about that is that it could
Speaker 4: have happened one hundred years earlier. All the technology was there,
Speaker 4: just nobody had that lucky accident, So we could be
Speaker 4: one hundred years deeper into our understanding of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 4: Imagine if quantum mechanics had been developed one hundred years earlier,
Speaker 4: so that like when Einstein is a kid, he's now
Speaker 4: immersed in quantum mechanics. When he's developing his theory of relativity,
Speaker 4: he already has a quantum brain. Does he still come
Speaker 4: up with a classical theory of relativity, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: strongly in confrontation with quantum mechanics, or does he just
Speaker 4: come up with quantum gravity in.
Speaker 3: One fell swoop? You know.
Speaker 4: So it suggests that there's lots of paths through science,
Speaker 4: that it's there's lots of happy accidents that determine the
Speaker 4: way that science happens.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, on Earth we no longer have parallel cultures developing
Speaker 4: science the way we did, you know a few thousand
Speaker 4: year years ago before we had globe spanning civilizations. But
Speaker 4: at what point, At one point, the Mayans, the Chinese,
Speaker 4: the Greeks were all sort of independently investigating.
Speaker 3: How the universe works.
Speaker 4: And it would be so fascinating if today we could
Speaker 4: see where those cultures ended up, if they hadn't been intermingled.
Speaker 4: We would know something about the inevitability of math and
Speaker 4: astronomy and science and physics. What an amazing experiment that
Speaker 4: would have been.
Speaker 1: Oh, is there enough data historically to ask these questions
Speaker 1: about which things did they converge on and which went
Speaker 1: off fund different.
Speaker 3: Paths there is.
Speaker 4: We dig into it in the book a little bit
Speaker 4: and we see that lots of these cultures started with Okay,
Speaker 4: there are patterns in the sky. Let's try to explain
Speaker 4: those patterns. They seem to be important. Let's use math
Speaker 4: to explain those patterns. But there is divergence there. Like
Speaker 4: the Greeks very geometrical to them. Answers were like, where
Speaker 4: are things? Build me a map? In my mind, the
Speaker 4: Chinese were more arithmetic or algebraic. They're like wanted patterns
Speaker 4: in on the table, you know, the things they could
Speaker 4: write down. They weren't building so much a geometric image.
Speaker 4: And you can see actually in the ancient literature some
Speaker 4: Chinese scholars like trying to take a geometric approach and
Speaker 4: finding it wasn't really working, and then just like retreating
Speaker 4: and being like, let's go back to our equations. And
Speaker 4: so there are divergences there. Of course, later we understood
Speaker 4: there's a fundamental connection between geometry and algebra, of course,
Speaker 4: but there definitely were a lot of similarities in the
Speaker 4: initial path. But we don't know there isn't enough data
Speaker 4: to know like would they have ended up in the
Speaker 4: same place or not?
Speaker 2: What do you think?
Speaker 1: What's your intuition about physics? Does it have to look
Speaker 1: like equations? Or if you were a dark matter creature,
Speaker 1: would physics be expressed.
Speaker 2: Some other way?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is a really fun question. And it goes
Speaker 4: back to the earlier conversation we were having about the
Speaker 4: necessity of math. And I remember feeling when I was
Speaker 4: learning about quantum mechanics, like, wow, this is the source
Speaker 4: code of the universe. Man, This is not just a description.
Speaker 4: This is how the you verse decides whether an electrong
Speaker 4: go is left or right.
Speaker 3: When I'm reading about.
Speaker 4: How precise those equations are and the experiments that validate them.
Speaker 4: But then I read a book by archery Field that
Speaker 4: it's called Science Without Numbers. And in this book he
Speaker 4: tries to demonstrate that you don't need number lines.
Speaker 3: All you need.
Speaker 4: Are like comparisons, like things that are bigger and small.
Speaker 4: You need relationships. But he argues that this idea of numbers,
Speaker 4: this number line that we've created, it's useful, it's a
Speaker 4: nice way to hang things, but you don't actually need
Speaker 4: it to do science. And he goes through this incredible
Speaker 4: exercise of developing alternative theory of gravity with no numbers, right,
Speaker 4: So science without numbers, right. And he argues that this
Speaker 4: concept of a gravitational field or any field is an
Speaker 4: intermediate calculation that we find useful but doesn't have to
Speaker 4: reflect reality. And so his version of gravity has none
Speaker 4: of these numbers in it, and so it's not expressed
Speaker 4: that way you're saying, like with the same kinds of equations,
Speaker 4: And so that's fascinating, and it's it's ugly, like, it's
Speaker 4: not pretty, it's not a nice way. Nobody is going
Speaker 4: to use it to do science. But it makes the
Speaker 4: point that our math, while it's very handy, it's very effective,
Speaker 4: it's very useful, might not be necessary.
Speaker 3: It's parts of it could just be convenience.
Speaker 4: So it's fascinating to think about how aliens might do science.
Speaker 4: And you know, even our way of expressing science in
Speaker 4: equations and symbols.
Speaker 3: Is fairly new.
Speaker 4: You know, when when Newton is writing Principia, he's not
Speaker 4: writing equations, he's expressing things linguistically. You know, he writes
Speaker 4: the force is related to He is using English, not
Speaker 4: the same sort of symbols. So you know the way
Speaker 4: that we do science. We imagine it's fundamental, it's universal,
Speaker 4: but it's really a snapshot of our current culture and
Speaker 4: kind of a narrow window of time.
Speaker 1: So how would we recognize alien science if we saw
Speaker 1: it and what we're doing now, of course, it's pointing
Speaker 1: radio telescopes all over and trying to guess what they
Speaker 1: might be communicating if there was someone out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 4: And let me preference by saying I love the SETI projects,
Speaker 4: and I want us to be listening for messages from space,
Speaker 4: and I think we should support it more.
Speaker 3: I do think philosophically.
Speaker 4: It might be hopeless. I think that if aliens send
Speaker 4: us a message, we have almost no chance of recognizing
Speaker 4: that it's a message, and even in the fantastically lucky
Speaker 4: scenario when we do that of decoding it, because any
Speaker 4: message we get is going to be translated from their
Speaker 4: ideas into some kind of code, some kind of symbols,
Speaker 4: a pattern, sequences, something even like an engraving on a
Speaker 4: pioneer plaque that they send us. Right, there's an arbitrary
Speaker 4: step there where you translate ideas into symbols. It happens
Speaker 4: in every single language the only way to communicate via
Speaker 4: brains right through this symbolic step. And those symbols, as
Speaker 4: much as you try to make them universal, will always
Speaker 4: reflect your culture. So we get an alien message. We
Speaker 4: could try to decode it, but we have no idea
Speaker 4: what their symbols mean, or what it reflects about their culture,
Speaker 4: or what things they find natural. And the worst part
Speaker 4: is how do we know if we got it right?
Speaker 4: You know, the Rosetta stone is a great example, because
Speaker 4: at least we have a cheat sheet, we know what
Speaker 4: we're supposed to be translating into, though it still took
Speaker 4: us twenty years to crack hi hieroglyphics with that cheat sheet. Now, aliens,
Speaker 4: like we have no cultural in common. We have no clues,
Speaker 4: we have no context, we have no idea what we're
Speaker 4: translating it into. I think it's a fantasy to imagine
Speaker 4: that we could ever translate an alien message. And you know,
Speaker 4: we have funny messages from space like the Wow signal. Right,
Speaker 4: this bizarre never repeated signal from space, very brief.
Speaker 3: What does it mean? We have no idea, is it anything?
Speaker 3: Is it just some.
Speaker 4: Weirdlip There are some now theories about how it could
Speaker 4: maybe be possible astrophysically.
Speaker 2: Tell the listeners more about the Wow signal what it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Wow signal is a signal that came I
Speaker 4: think it was in nineteen seventy seven in a radio
Speaker 4: array and you know, they just were listening to the
Speaker 4: sky and all of a sudden the signal came through,
Speaker 4: which is basically exactly what you would expect, you know,
Speaker 4: a signal from a civilization. It looks like it has
Speaker 4: like a nice smooth shape. It rises and then it falls,
Speaker 4: and it's called the Wow signal because the guy who
Speaker 4: was monitoring it. This is back in the day when
Speaker 4: you don't have like fancy screens. It's like the thing
Speaker 4: it prints out on a printer. That's the way this
Speaker 4: telescope operates. He saw this thing and he wrote on
Speaker 4: it wow, oh my gosh, because it was his like
Speaker 4: literal reaction to seeing the signal, and that enthusiasm remains.
Speaker 4: But that's basically all we have. We have no idea
Speaker 4: what it was, who it was from, if it was
Speaker 4: from anybody, what it might mean. Is it an intergalactic ping,
Speaker 4: you know? Is it an attempt to probear firewall and
Speaker 4: then send.
Speaker 3: Us a virus?
Speaker 4: Is it who knows right, or is it just some
Speaker 4: weird burp from a quasar somewhere. And so that's the
Speaker 4: challenge of decoding these things is that we have none
Speaker 4: of the cultural clues. And so in the book, that's
Speaker 4: why I argue that the only way this could ever
Speaker 4: work is that the aliens arrive, because if they're here,
Speaker 4: and then we can do stuff like we can point
Speaker 4: to an apple and say apple, and we can pose
Speaker 4: you two apples and say two apples, and we can
Speaker 4: start because we have a physical context in common when
Speaker 4: they're here, we can use that as a way to
Speaker 4: attach meanings to symbols and then build on those symbols.
Speaker 2: So let me ask you this.
Speaker 1: Let's imagine some aliens arrived, and that means that they've
Speaker 1: got technology that's better than we do because they've crossed
Speaker 1: the galaxy, they've gotten here. What is the first question
Speaker 1: you would ask them after we figured out the language part,
Speaker 1: what would you ask about their technology or their worldview?
Speaker 4: H Well, first of all, I don't want to be
Speaker 4: on that visiting party because I'm a wive and I
Speaker 4: don't want to risk being eaten for lunch. But you know,
Speaker 4: if the linguists have figured it out and made some
Speaker 4: contact and we're sitting down with the aliens, and yeah,
Speaker 4: I have questions, you know. I want to know how
Speaker 4: did the universe begin? What were its first moments? I
Speaker 4: want to know what is the universe made of. These
Speaker 4: are the questions that drive my personal scientific careers, and
Speaker 4: I desperately want to know the answer to it because
Speaker 4: I feel like they're so meaningful philosophically, Like if you
Speaker 4: knew the way the universe began and if a factual account,
Speaker 4: then that would tell you a lot about the context
Speaker 4: of our lives and its meaning and maybe how we
Speaker 4: should live it. Or if you knew what the fundamental
Speaker 4: description of the nature of matter and space and energy were,
Speaker 4: that would tell you something about what this is, this crazy, bizarre, beautiful,
Speaker 4: bonkers experience that we're all sharing what it really means.
Speaker 4: So I want those answers. And if aliens are out
Speaker 4: there and they have those answers and they're listening right now,
Speaker 4: please come talk to us. Tell us those answers, because
Speaker 4: we'll figure it out eventually, but it might take us
Speaker 4: a thousand years, a million years, and boy, I'm not
Speaker 4: going to be alive that long, so I just kind
Speaker 4: of want to cheat sheet. So those are the questions
Speaker 4: I would ask the aliens if they show up.
Speaker 1: Oh great, I certainly hope some aliens are listening to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos.
Speaker 2: So here's a question.
Speaker 1: If aliens explained quantum mechanics to you in a way
Speaker 1: that suddenly made it feel trivial, they just had a
Speaker 1: doubly different framework, would you feel relieved or would you
Speaker 1: feel disappointed that we just wasted a sentry on it?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Relieved? Absolutely.
Speaker 4: I mean that's the best case scenario, right, to have
Speaker 4: the aliens explained to us and for it to make sense,
Speaker 4: because my nightmare scenario is the opposite. Aliens come, they
Speaker 4: understand quantum mechanics, they try to explain it to us,
Speaker 4: and we're.
Speaker 3: Just like, huh, I don't get it.
Speaker 4: You know, neurologically, how do we know that we're even
Speaker 4: capable of representing these ideas in our minds? It boggles
Speaker 4: my mind that you know, these brains which developed me
Speaker 4: able to like stay warm and dry and fed a
Speaker 4: million years ago, can think about like eleven dimensional space
Speaker 4: and you know, crazy transformations.
Speaker 3: Why are we capable of all of this? I don't
Speaker 3: understand it.
Speaker 1: It's only because of the umvelt hacking in the sense
Speaker 1: that we're figuring out ways to squeeze that concept into
Speaker 1: a concept we can understand. But that probably does have
Speaker 1: its limitations.
Speaker 4: They must have limitations, right, It's certainly not true that
Speaker 4: we can understand anything in the universe. I mean, my
Speaker 4: dog is smart but definitely doesn't understand quantum mechanics as
Speaker 4: well as I do. And there must be some limitations.
Speaker 4: But you know, we have these developments now, as you
Speaker 4: say earlier, we can extend our understanding using AI. And
Speaker 4: you know, in my field in particle physics, we're doing
Speaker 4: this all the time. There's lots of things that require
Speaker 4: AI in order for them to work. We're not yet
Speaker 4: at the point where we require AI to understand things.
Speaker 4: But you know, one scenarios the aliens come, they try
Speaker 4: to explain it to us. We're like, huh, but they
Speaker 4: but the AI is like, I got this, and you
Speaker 4: know what if the AI can figure it out but
Speaker 4: they can't explain it to us, and then the aliens
Speaker 4: just like talk to the AI and leave us out.
Speaker 3: Of the party.
Speaker 4: To me, that's the most frustrating potential scenario that the
Speaker 4: answers are out there, the aliens want to share them,
Speaker 4: and we just can't get it. We just cannot do
Speaker 4: the umbilt hacking enough to like translate it into intuitive
Speaker 4: concepts in our mind, get that satisfaction that I'm personally
Speaker 4: looking for.
Speaker 1: Right, The best THEAI can do is tell us that
Speaker 1: the answer is forty two, but it can't explain it
Speaker 1: better than that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Douglas Adams is ahead of his time
Speaker 3: as all these.
Speaker 1: Okay, couple a few rapid fire questions. What is the
Speaker 1: most ridiculous but possible alien invention that you would love
Speaker 1: to see?
Speaker 4: Self driving toothbrushes? You know, why don't we have to
Speaker 4: hold these things? They should just drive themselves around our mouths?
Speaker 2: Excellent?
Speaker 1: If you had a guess, what is one thing that
Speaker 1: humans might teach aliens that would blow their minds? Oh?
Speaker 4: Wow, I would love if some cute little bit of
Speaker 4: human mathematics that we developed just for fun turned out
Speaker 4: to solve one of their physics problems, like maybe they've
Speaker 4: been missing it and this is just like the chocolate
Speaker 4: that they're peanut butter needed. You know, that would be
Speaker 4: fantastic because, as you say, if the aliens show up
Speaker 4: they're probably more advanced than we would than we would be,
Speaker 4: so it would be wonderful if we could contribute one
Speaker 4: little thing. I think maybe that's the most likely.
Speaker 2: That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We hand them at Penrose Tile and they're like, my god,
Speaker 1: yes it yeah, okay, good good. If you were invited
Speaker 1: to sit in in an alien classroom physics lecture, what
Speaker 1: would you expect to see around you? Probably not whiteboards?
Speaker 1: Would they smell their equations? Would they feel dark matter?
Speaker 4: I would be most interested in what those kids are asking,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe even more than the answers, because what
Speaker 4: aliens find intuitive and what their kids find weird, I
Speaker 4: think would tell us a lot about how they sense
Speaker 4: the universe and whether our questions are meaningful, whether our
Speaker 4: questions are just part of our humanity, or where our
Speaker 4: questions reflects something deep about the universe.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with physicists Daniel Whitson, and I
Speaker 1: hope you felt your mind get stretched way beyond the
Speaker 1: boundaries of Earth. Thinking about alien science, of course, goes
Speaker 1: beyond aliens. It's a way of holding a mirror to
Speaker 1: our own assumptions and asking whether the universe is stranger
Speaker 1: than we yet perceive, or even stranger than we can perceive.
Speaker 1: So I find myself looping back to one central idea.
Speaker 1: When we ask whether aliens would build the same kind
Speaker 1: of science, we're also asking how human is our science?
Speaker 1: Are our particles and forces, our laws and equations, discoveries
Speaker 1: of something universal, or inventions that reflect the peculiarities of
Speaker 1: our senses and the accidents of our history.
Speaker 2: I'm given a little.
Speaker 1: Bit of hope by thinking about invergent evolution here on Earth.
Speaker 1: Wings evolved in insects and birds and bats because flight
Speaker 1: was simply too useful a trick not to stumble on
Speaker 1: again and again. But the details are different in every lineage.
Speaker 1: You've got feathers here, You've got membranes there. Maybe science
Speaker 1: works in the same way. Maybe any technological species will
Speaker 1: discover certain convergences like gravity or energy or chemistry, because
Speaker 1: those are necessary to survive and thrive. But the way
Speaker 1: they conceptualize those discoveries maybe as different as wings are
Speaker 1: between a moth and a falcon. And the other really
Speaker 1: important idea here is that of the umveldt. Just as
Speaker 1: my dog inhabits a fragrant cacophony of odors that I
Speaker 1: can't access. Alien intelligences might navigate dimensions of reality that
Speaker 1: are in visible to us. Their science could be sculpted
Speaker 1: by those senses and by questions that would never even
Speaker 1: occur to us.
Speaker 2: Where we wrestle with quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: Maybe they stroll through that in first grade, and then
Speaker 1: they had very different questions in the second grade, where
Speaker 1: we ask why does time only move forward? Perhaps their
Speaker 1: perception of time makes our question seem quaint or meaningless.
Speaker 1: One of the things I loved about the conversation today
Speaker 1: was the notion of counter factuals or what ifs. Many
Speaker 1: of you know that exploring what ifs is the thing
Speaker 1: I love to do most. And if you've read my
Speaker 1: book of fiction some sum you'll know that I wrote.
Speaker 2: Forty mutually exclusive.
Speaker 1: Versions about what we're doing here, and each was meant
Speaker 1: to stretch the imagination in a different direction. None of
Speaker 1: the stories of my book are meant to be true.
Speaker 1: The point is to expand the fence lines of what
Speaker 1: we can think about.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to read a very short story today
Speaker 2: from that.
Speaker 1: Book that pairs so nicely with today's conversation. This story
Speaker 1: is called Giantess. The Afterlife is all about softness. You
Speaker 1: find yourself in a great, padded compound. Everything appears designed
Speaker 1: for quietness and comfort. Your feet falls silently on a
Speaker 1: cushioned floor. The walls are pillowed, echoes are dampened by
Speaker 1: foam ceiling tiles. A hard surface is impossible to find,
Speaker 1: feathers pad everything. When you enter the Grand Hall, the
Speaker 1: first thing you notice is a sizeable and princely man.
Speaker 1: He looks just as you might expect a god to appear,
Speaker 1: except that he is noticeably skittish and strained with worry
Speaker 1: around the eyes. He will probably be explaining that he's
Speaker 1: greatly disturbed by the nuclear arms on Earth. He says
Speaker 1: that he often awakens in a cold sweat with the
Speaker 1: sounds of colossal blasts hammering in his ears. To be clear,
Speaker 1: he says to you, I am not your God. Instead,
Speaker 1: you and I are galactic neighbors. I am from a
Speaker 1: planet associated with the star you call Turzan four. We
Speaker 1: are all in the same mess.
Speaker 3: What mess you ask?
Speaker 1: Please don't talk so loudly, he softly admonishes, for a
Speaker 1: long time, we have been studying our neighbors, you Earthlings,
Speaker 1: and thirty seven other planets. Besides we have developed highly
Speaker 1: accurate systems of equations to predict the future growth and
Speaker 1: social directions of your planets.
Speaker 2: Here he fixes your eyes.
Speaker 1: It turns out that you Earthlings are among the least
Speaker 1: tranquil and content. Our predictions indicate that your weapons of
Speaker 1: war will grow increasingly loud. Your space exploration probe will
Speaker 1: produce thousands of noisy vessels that will thunder throughout the
Speaker 1: heavens with their deafening rocket propulsion. You Earthlings are like
Speaker 1: your explorer Cortes, standing atop a mountain peak and preparing
Speaker 1: to perturb every beach at all, the lapping fringes of
Speaker 1: the Pacific, where in a mess of expansionism you manage.
Speaker 1: That's not the mess, he hisses. Allow me to illustrate
Speaker 1: the larger picture. You and I, our planets, our galaxy.
Speaker 1: We're part of what you should think of as an
Speaker 1: immeasurable living mass. You might call it a giantess, but
Speaker 1: summarizing the concept in a word might give you the
Speaker 1: illusion that you can have a hint of a notion
Speaker 1: of her enormity. To give you a sense of scale,
Speaker 1: You are the size of an atom for her, your Earth,
Speaker 1: sprouting with its untold layers of furiously fecund species. Your
Speaker 1: Earth is tantamount to a single protein in the shadowy
Speaker 1: depths of a single one of her cells. Our milky
Speaker 1: way constitutes a single cell, but a small one. She
Speaker 1: consists of hundreds of billions of such cells.
Speaker 2: For millions of years, my people had no notion of her.
Speaker 1: Just as a flatworm is unlikely to discover that the
Speaker 1: planet is round, a colony of bacteria will never know
Speaker 1: the walls of the flask. A single cell in your
Speaker 1: hand will not know it is contributing to a concerto
Speaker 1: on the piano. But with advancing philosophy and technology, we
Speaker 1: came to appreciate our situation. Then a few millennia ago,
Speaker 1: it was theorized that we might be able to communicate
Speaker 1: with her. It was proposed we might decipher her structure,
Speaker 1: deploy signals, influence her behavior in a manner that infintestimal
Speaker 1: mall molecules, hormones, alcohol, narcotics influenced a creature like you.
Speaker 1: So we organized and educated ourselves. Instead of fretting through
Speaker 1: the doomed, ignoble cycles of local politics, we dedicated our
Speaker 1: economy and sciences toward understanding the biochemistry.
Speaker 2: Of universal scales.
Speaker 1: We methodically mapped out the signaling cascades and stellar anatomy
Speaker 1: of her nervous system, and at last discovered how to
Speaker 1: transmit a signal to her consciousness. We sent a sharply
Speaker 1: defined sequence of electromagnetic pulses which interacted with local magnetospheres,
Speaker 1: which influenced asteroid orbits, which nudged planets closer and farther
Speaker 1: from stars, which dictated the fate of life forms, which
Speaker 1: changed the gases in the atmospheres, which bent the path
Speaker 1: of light signals, all in complex interacting caste gads we
Speaker 1: had worked out our calculations told us that it took
Speaker 1: a few hundred years for the transmission to arrive at
Speaker 1: her consciousness. At the time of the arrival, I was
Speaker 1: sad to be traveling away from the planet while everyone
Speaker 1: was so excited to see what would happen. His face
Speaker 1: twitches with painful trickles of reminiscence, But no one would
Speaker 1: have guessed what happened next. A great sheet of meteors
Speaker 1: rained down, incendiary hydrogen clouds crushed in, and those were
Speaker 1: followed by a multitude of black holes that mercilessly swallowed
Speaker 1: up the flying chunks and dust, and the last light
Speaker 1: of remembrance, no one survived. In all probability this was.
Speaker 3: Neutral to her.
Speaker 1: It might have been an immune system response, or she
Speaker 1: might have been scratching an itch, or sneezing or getting
Speaker 1: a biopsy. So we discovered that we can communicate with her,
Speaker 1: but we cannot communicate meaningfully. We are of insufficient size.
Speaker 1: What can we say to her? What question could we ask?
Speaker 1: How could she communicate an answer back to us? Perhaps
Speaker 1: that was her attempt to answer, What could you ask
Speaker 1: her to do that would have relevance to your life?
Speaker 2: And if she told you what was of importance to her?
Speaker 2: Could you understand her answer? Do you think it would
Speaker 2: have any meaning at all if you.
Speaker 1: Displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course,
Speaker 1: not meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded
Speaker 1: that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.
Speaker 1: And that is why we are now hunkered down silently
Speaker 1: on the surface of this noiseless planet, whispering through a
Speaker 1: slow orbit, trying not to draw attention to ourselves. Again,
Speaker 1: the point of my book Some was to expand the
Speaker 1: territory of our thinking and Daniel's interest in alien science
Speaker 1: serves the same purpose. It challenges us to wonder what
Speaker 1: else is possible, and in doing so, it makes us
Speaker 1: more aware of the narrowness of our own windows onto reality.
Speaker 1: So what we see is that speculating about aliens reveals
Speaker 1: something about ourselves. We live inside these internal models of
Speaker 1: the world constructed by our brains, and those models are
Speaker 1: necessarily limited. By imagining alien sciences, we stretch those models
Speaker 1: and remind ourselves that what we take to be universal
Speaker 1: might be something much smaller, a reflection of our own history,
Speaker 1: of our own sensory mechanisms, of our own imagination. So
Speaker 1: Daniel's journey is an excellent way loosen the grip of
Speaker 1: our assumptions, to stand outside our own thought patterns, and
Speaker 1: to ask how else might reality be described? So, as
Speaker 1: we finished this episode, I'll leave you with this. The
Speaker 1: next time you look into the night sky and wonder
Speaker 1: who else might be out there, try shifting the question.
Speaker 1: Don't just imagine what aliens look like or what gadgets
Speaker 1: they've invented. Ask yourself instead, what questions are they asking?
Speaker 1: What mysteries are obvious to them but invisible to us?
Speaker 1: And vice versa and what might our science look like
Speaker 1: if we hit of all their senses, their histories, they're
Speaker 1: ways of being in the world, because in the end,
Speaker 1: thinking about aliens is one of the most powerful ways
Speaker 1: to understand ourselves. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Join the
Speaker 1: weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode
Speaker 1: and to leave comments Until next time, I'm David Eaglemanton
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos.