October 29, 2025 • 53 mins
Today on the show, ALIENS! I'm joined by particle physicist Daniel Whiteson to discuss whether it would be possible to talk to aliens, the difficulties of alien communication, using real examples of animal communication and sensory differences right here on planet earth. Why do hermit crabs have a death cult? Do dogs think in smells? Are pigeons actually physics geniuses? All this and more as we use real earth biology to discuss how an alien encounter might go down.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys. Before I start a quick programming note, you'll
probably notice my audio quality is not as good as
it normally is. That is not because I decided to
record inside of a tin can. I don't exactly know
what happened. Some sort of computer grimlin I think switched
my audio inputs. So sorry about that, but I hope
(00:23):
you enjoy. Welcome to Creature, future production of iHeartRadio. I'm
your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
and evolutionary biology, and today on the show How to
Speak to Aliens, we talk about the way that biological
(00:45):
senses differ so vastly between humans, animals, and possibly aliens.
We use real life biology to talk about how an
alien encounter might actually go down and the infinitesimally small
chance that we ever I've been to intelligent life. Joining
me today is Prout of the show, particle physicist, host
of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, and author
(01:09):
of the new book Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson, Welcome,
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I am a particle physicist and I believe in science,
but I also irrationally believe we have more than an
infinitesimal chance to be visited by aliens?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
How big of the chance out of out of like
one in five.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
One in ten, I would say seventeen infinitesimals, not just
one infinitesimals.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Okay, all right, yeah, I mean that's a pretty decent chance.
I think. Yeah. I mean so in your new book,
you kind of talk about how you explore a lot
of philosophical questions about aliens, and then you involved both
like physics and also biology to talk about this how
(01:57):
it would be to try to essentially communicate with aliens essentially,
like you know, the whole thing and what was that
a rival when it turned out the aliens communicate with
coffee stains or something. But I find it a really
interesting topic because I think it makes us kind of
(02:19):
we get I think when we start to think about
like biology and human communication, we're so primed to think
about it in a very egocentric way because we're humans.
We have a human brain, we have human thoughts. It's
very hard to step outside of that. But when we're
forced to try to think about how it would go
down if we were actually talking to aliens, we have
(02:43):
to kind of step outside of that, and consider the
ways in which our experience is not objective reality but
filtered through all of our human meat.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, And nobody's more egotistical than physicists. Let me
tell you the personal experience. Because physicists tend to believe
that physics is sort of special among human sciences, like
biology that's awesome, but probably only of interest to things
on the Earth, and biology and alien planets probably vastly different.
(03:13):
But physics is supposed to be universal. Physics, Newton told us,
it doesn't just apply to apples. It also applies to
the heavens, which means it determines what happens on distant galaxies.
And they then take the next leap. And physicists mostly
assume that not only do our laws of physics apply
to denizens of distant galaxies, but those denizens would also
(03:35):
come up with the same laws, so that when the
aliens arrive, we can be like at the chalkboard, writing
e F equals MA within about ten minutes and use
physics to make a mental connection with the aliens. And
that would be wonderful if it were true. But I
feel like it's making the same mistake that physicists and
cosmologists have been making for centuries, which is putting us
(03:55):
at the center of the action, assuming that human physics
is the physics the way we assume that, like the
Earth is at the center of the universe because it
kind of looks like it and it's also quite flattering.
So while I'd love to sit down across the table
and exchange coffee scenes with aliens to understand quantum gravity,
I think it might be much more difficult. And so, Yeah,
(04:17):
in this book, I try to pick apart some of
the assumptions that underlie the feeling that physics could be
used to communicate with aliens and we might be part
of a galactic intellectual community all solving the same problems,
and wonder if aliens might be much more alien than
we expect, right.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
And I think part of that is that the way,
like the way we think is influenced by our biology.
We can't really escape that. We like to believe that
we can escape that, right that once we start to
get to these more and more complex intellectual exercises where
it's like, but these are like fundamental truths about the universe. Yeah,
(04:58):
so we don't have the sense being filtered through you
know our brains, which are a biological organ that is,
you know, it has its own biases and are also
just everything that our brains are connected to our sensory
experience so humans, and we don't even have to really
(05:19):
look to aliens right to see that. Our specific experience
of humans is very particular to us. Like so we
have extremely developed eyes. We see in color, we see
a lot of detail, so we focus a lot on
visual cues. Our sense of hearing is good at close range.
(05:40):
It's not great once you get too far away. But
our communication style is very like close range in terms
of like communicating with each.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Other, unless you're trying to talk to a teenager who
has AirPods, in which case nothing you say, we'll get're
going to get through exactly that. They have the parental
cancelation software.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Nice, it's like it the it matches the pitch of
your tone, encounters it exactly, so it cancels out any
parent voice.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
There's some AI in there that's learned exactly my voice
that it.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Can cancel it out exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah, but you're exactly right, you put your finger on it.
We look at the universe through a human lens, and
it's very unlikely that that lens is completely unbiased. You know,
if you're like looking inside some mystery box and you
only have a few ways to probe it, what are
the chances that you see the full information of what's
going on inside that box. And because we can only
probe the universe through our one lens, because we haven't
(06:35):
talked to aliens, and so far we haven't cracked the
language of dolphins or whales or anybody else, we don't
know how much of the lens is influenced what we
see and what we understand. And I think you're absolutely
right that our perceptions shape our sense of reality. Like
we have a we have a limited set of senses,
and we can dig into into them in a minute.
(06:57):
But we've also extended those senses, right, we have new
technological senses. We can see in the infrared and the
ultraviolet and detect gravitational waves due to technology. But that
doesn't change our experience of the universe, because what we
tend to do is translate those new signals into the
old into the old basis. You know, we take infrared
(07:19):
and we don't look at them in the infrared. We
translate them to the visuals. So we can see them.
We convert gravitational waves to sound so we can hear them.
And I think it's not just the senses that we have,
but like what it's like to be a human, the
experience of the sensorium, which is where the philosophy comes in,
that could be very different from humans to octopy to aliens,
(07:40):
and it could really change, like how you interpret what
you're seeing and the framework you build to explain it.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One of the examples that I really like is that
when we look at math, right, because math seems very objective, Like,
how can we be biased about math one plus one two?
That's just true.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Towered right in his biology one times one equals too.
Maybe you could be.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
An alien, but it's like if you look at your hands,
you have ten fingers, and it's generally understood that we
we think in base ten because we've got ten fingers,
and we can we use our fingers for counting because they,
I mean, they're called digits, and.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
That anybody, anybody's ever had a digital proctal exam knows
what it's called the digital exam.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
There's different kinds of digital. It turns out exactly really
high tech exams exactly yeah, exactly, so so we have
we we our mouth is in base ten, we think
in base ten. We think like and I don't. It's
(08:52):
really hard to wrap your head around if we had
perhaps tentacles, or a different number of fingers, or a
different way of counting, like instead of counting fingers, we
had a certain pattern of like speckles on our bodies
that we can change with chromatophores. Right, if we're an alien,
(09:14):
that our entire mathematical system might be different, not necessarily,
you know, contradictory to a base ten mathematical system. But
if you had, like say base five or base two,
and you're trying to do sort of like math problems,
(09:35):
then one plus one does not necessarily equal to anymore,
even though technically it still does. But the way of
thinking about it and communicating it is different because of
just a simple thing of like, how many of these
little weird flanges do you have?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, I don't know if you watched the show Alien Earth,
but there's a scene where they tap out a few
digits a pie and then the alien taps out the
next few digits and they're like, whoa mind blow? But
of course you know that's in base head, and so
it's it's a little silly, but I'd love the show anyway.
But you're exactly right. The bases are are a very
simple way that we could be doing math differently from aliens,
(10:12):
and even in human cultures. We don't all use base ten,
like the Mayans use base sixty. Right, our computers use
base two. But even beyond mine, you're the biologist, I
don't know about that. I can't sign on to that.
But even beyond that, like the question does one plus
one equals two? Does it have to equal to everywhere
in the universe? Sounds insane, right, But once you start
(10:35):
digging into it, you discover that these things you assume
have to be true everywhere. I actually rest on kind
of fuzzy philosophical principles, like let's think about what it
means for one plus one equals to make a concrete Like,
say you have two apples on the table, right, you know,
one apple plus one apple. That's two apples, obviously, but
those two apples are not the same. One is bigger,
(10:56):
one is smaller, one is darker, one is lighter. Why
have you decided to group them together into this thing
you call apples? Right?
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
An alien might be like, I don't know what you're
talking about. That's this apple plus of that apple? What
is this tube business? The concept of two assumes some groups,
some set where you've decided what goes in it and
what goes out of it. Or even if you don't
have apples, what about you know, I'm one person, you're
another person. I can argue I'm different from you. There's
like a boundary between me and you, or a boundary
(11:24):
between me and the universe. Where is that boundary exactly? Biologically?
You know? If I cut off my arm, is my
arm still part of me? These are fuzzy philosophical questions,
not hard and fast, and it's not hard to imagine
aliens that like exist in the atmosphere of stars and
their plasma tendrils merge all the time, and for them,
they might be like, why are you guys drawing these
(11:46):
weird dotted lines between yourselves? We're all just part of
the same flow, dude.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Right, And so you could have like saying like one
plus one equals two to an alien would be like
maybe to us saying like, you know, one plus red
equal Tuesday Tuesday exactly, like where it's like, what are
you what are you talking about? But yeah, there's a
lot of like things, like especially when it comes to physics,
where when we look into how we view just fundamental
(12:16):
concepts like time, it comes down to weird physiological quirks.
So our sense of time is often related to distance.
So when we when we look at a timeline, for instance, right,
we have a sense of going forwards in times or
backwards in time. Right, it's this very a lot of
(12:39):
words that we use to describe time are shared with distance, right,
Like we have kind of this time is viewed as
a linear progression but also kind of almost like like
a line that you're walking on. Right. Uh, you look
at illustrations of the evolution of man. He's like lined
up in a line from from little fish thing to
(13:03):
like upright, businessman. Here's the progress through time represented in
this line, measured by distance. And we've actually found that
when we do experiments where you have people in a
study setting where they are measuring lengths both geometrically and temporally,
(13:26):
they easily get confused. So like if you have a
line on a screen, it's like either a short line
or a long line, and then you have people say
short or long. But you also have another condition, which
is the length of time that it's on the screen,
either a shorter amount of time or a longer amount
of time. Interesting, and then when you start to mix
(13:47):
the signals, like you're trying to do both tasks at once,
and you get contradictory things like a long line that's
on screen for a short period of time or vice versa,
people make more mistakes. And the fun thing is pigeons
make the same mistakes.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
So we've done this both the human beings into pigeons,
and we've found pigeons also mess this up. So other
animals also, like primates, will make similar mistakes. So a
lot of animals will have this connection between distance and time.
And is that because objectively speaking, somehow pigeons understand the
(14:27):
physics of the universe and that time is something like distance,
or is it because being able to use time and
distance together helps them triangulate food sources that they use
by that they're able to find using an internal biological clock,
(14:47):
as well as signals from the sun that they triangulate
with an understanding of distance to be able to understand that, hey,
I can go to this place.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
At this time and get food, which is another thing
that has been confirmed by research. I had to list
it right in with a question once about like how
does this pigeon know always how to find me? Because
I come at a very specific time to give out
some peanuts and this pigeon always knows how to find
me and when to come. And it's because of this,
(15:18):
this sort of ability to triangulate this internal clock as
well as distance, position of the sun, and then it
is a huge motivator to be able to triangulate food.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So did you interview that pigeon. We couldn't get our
schedules to the line up for some reason, wouldn't sign
the release for him.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But it's a really interesting idea that this are the
whole way we view time right like generally speaking, where
we kind of view it almost like this like track
that you're running along, you're going forward in time. We
fantasize about being able to travel backwards in time again
like a distance related thing. And this could be an
(16:03):
artifact of the just simple need to be able to
use time in order to locate food sources, because we're
animals and we need to eat and we need to
find things, and we know that sometimes like in order
to locate a certain food or do a certain survival thing,
we need to be able to triangulate both distance and
(16:24):
time to be in a certain location at a certain time.
And we link those concepts very closely. So then when
it comes to physics and we start to you know,
get into some really weird things, that is really hard.
I mean even understanding this about like you know, being
human and maybe viewing time in this biased way, I
(16:47):
still can't wrap my head around a lot of physics
concepts because when you start talking about weird things with time,
it's really hard for me to kind of get off
of this like mental track of like I'm like walking
down this road called time and that is where I am,
and that's how I travel through time, and that's what
it is. And then when physics starts introducing these other
(17:09):
concepts relating to times, it's like very hard to get
out of that sort of like rigid way of viewing it.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah, and we experienced time over a certain set of scales, right,
Like we can think about time in terms of a second,
a year, maybe a decade. Really long time scales are
hard for us to grock. You know, theories like the
tectonic plates and glaciers initially were dismissed because they require
things to happen over such long time periods. They seemed absurd,
(17:41):
and we know that there's lots of physics that happens
over millions or billions of years, Like the Solar system,
if you look at it over a few years, seems
pretty steady. If you look at it over billions of years,
it's a chaotic mess, with planets moving in and out
and being tossed out. And probably there were other planets
in our Solar system which we've now a banded or
the universe looks very, very different on short time scales.
(18:04):
You know, you zoom in and you try to understand
the universe and like the microphysics and the interactions of particles,
and it looks vastly different from the way we do.
So if aliens, for example, live on really long time scales,
dark matter beings that take like a thousand years to
think a thought, or quantum mechanical beings that you know,
buzz here and there and pop in and out of
(18:26):
existence on microscopic time scales, it could be very hard
to communicate with them about these concepts of the universe,
because our notion of time really does determine how we
think about the universe and the kinds of physics that
we're just sort of capable of digesting, even though we
have you know, Einstein, who helped us understand the connection
between space and time that apparently pigeons intuitively know, right,
(18:48):
I mean I heard of pigeon English, but maybe this
pigeon Einstein.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Also pigeon Einstein knows where to get all the best breadcrumbs.
Relatively yeah, yeah, relatively speaking, But it is really interesting.
I mean, there's even on Earth, like you don't even
necessarily have to find an alien. Like the flicker frame rate,
(19:12):
which is like our brain's processing ability of basically our
eye sort of refresh rate, to put it in very
simple terms, is different depending on what animal you are.
So if you've ever wondered, like I want to, like
like when you have an annoying fly and you're trying
to swat it and it seems to live in bullet
(19:33):
time like Neo and be able to like sense when
your hand is coming down no matter how fast you are,
it's because it is it has the ability to actually
experience things very slowly, and so it is like it's
these The ability for it to escape you is because
(19:55):
like to it like your hand is coming down just
sort of gradually and it's like easy, peasy, I can
get away from that real fast.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
And because we have selected four flies that survive our swaters, right,
every time you swatter fly, you're making the average fly faster.
Every time you kill a mosquito, you're selecting for more deadly,
more evasive mosquito. So thanks everybody.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, fly swater resistant bugs. They're going to
start to develop little helmets all because of us. But yeah,
before we move on to kind of talking more about
animals instead of well, people are animals, but you know,
cooler animals. One of the interesting things is that I
(20:40):
think when we look at like how we communicate, right,
and one of the ideas is that, well, like with
our human language, that basically shapes entirely how we think.
So we would never we could never pass think like
(21:01):
an alien because we have human language, which is a
specific thing, specific style of communication that completely shapes how
we think. Like we wouldn't think the way we do,
maybe we wouldn't even think at all if we didn't
have language. And there's actually been some research into that.
And it's not to say that language does not influence thought,
(21:23):
because it certainly does, but thinking and language right are
actually not completely dependent on each other, which is weird.
So ah, there were researchers at MIT and UC Berkeley
who used fMRIs to look at parts of the brain
(21:44):
that were active when people were doing tasks like anything
from reading to doing a saduco puzzle. I mean, for me,
they would find no brain activity because I'm really bad
at those. But in general, what they found is that
the language areas of the brain were not going off
all the time as they were thinking through these processes,
(22:06):
So it wasn't as we may have this experience of
like when you're sitting and you're kind of like thinking,
sometimes you have an internal narration where you hear you're
almost having a conversation with yourself in your head, where
you hear your own voice, you hear your own thoughts.
Not everyone actually has that, Like, not everyone experiences that.
(22:27):
There's variation in human thought, which we take for granted
we're all thinking the same, but there are people who
have a fantasia where they don't think in images, and
people who think almost entirely in images and don't have
a lot of that internal narration. So there's a lot
of variability even among people, even within the same language.
(22:48):
But generally speaking, we can think without language. People who
suffer a stroke, who actually have brain damage in the
region's responsible for producing an understanding language, and who can't
do either, can still sometimes do things like math problems,
(23:08):
play music so or even make future plans. So our
ability to think is not that it's completely independent from language.
These are parallel processes that influence each other but are
not completely integrated with one another. So we can think
(23:29):
without necessarily using our language center and as you probably
know listening to other people and politicians, you can also
use your language without thinking very much. People can talk
without necessarily being conscious or thinking about what they're saying.
That's not even just a joke like people can use.
There can be like sort of weird situations in which
(23:51):
someone is not actually conscious but is like talking and
not necessarily thinking, but is using language. So in this sense,
I think it's kind of maybe a little optimistic, because
even if we have a huge language barrier with another
alien and maybe they don't even have a language, they're
(24:18):
still potentially thinking, and we might share a lot of
a lot of ways in which we think. Of course
it's going to be different, but there's still there's still
thinking going on that maybe we're sharing. That might be
really hard to bridge that gap, but it still exist.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, I agree with you that language captures some of
what we're thinking, but it isn't the same thing, because
when you go from the ideas in your head to language,
you're making this arbitrary translation to like these from these
ideas to these symbols. And we've just like agreed on
these symbols and what they mean so that when you
hear them, they create in your mind the same ideas
(24:57):
that I was trying to convey. But in order for
that to work, you have to know what that mapping
is from the ideas to the symbols. So you can
invert it, right, you can back it out and say
when Katie says pigeon, I know what that means. I
have this idea of a pigeon. It's connected to this
word pigeon, which I either hear or I see. And
the issue with that is that the mapping is arbitrary. Right,
(25:19):
there's no symbol which can only be mapped to one idea,
and there's no mapping, which like, well, how you have
to choose this symbol for this idea, which means if
you see a bunch of symbols, you have no idea
what ideas they might map to. And this is evidenced
by like our attempts to you know, decode whale song
or dolphins, or even languages from extinct human civilizations. These
(25:44):
are like equivalent biological humans with ideas probably very similar
to our own, but we just don't know how to
crack their ancient languages because it's an arbitrary mapping between
the ideas and the symbols. And you know, we've done
it in some cases, like for the Egyptians, but that
only with a cheat sheet of the Rosetta Stone, plus
a lot of cultural context and clues and going down
(26:06):
the wrong path for like sometimes twenty years. So we
should be really skeptical that we'll ever have a chance
to decode alien languages. I mean, I'm a big fan
of Seti, for example, and I think they should do it.
And Jill Titar is fantastic and none of this is
news to her, but the idea that we could get
a message from space, understand, recognize that it's an alien message,
(26:28):
and then somehow decode it into concepts is almost fantastical
without an alien there to interact with and to interrogate
and like point it stuff and say donut, pigeon, apple
or whatever. So I think that task is going to
be really, really hard, and that's why some people are like, oh,
you should begin with math. But even math has symbols, right,
(26:48):
representing one and two or pi or whatever. There's always
a symbol there, and that's always arbitrary. And if you
look at what physicists have done already trying to communicate
with aliens, it's you know, it's earnest and it's well intentioned,
and it's a great effort, and I don't have a
better idea, but it's also kind of hopeless. You know.
There's a guy who literally drew, literally scraped out canals
(27:10):
in the desert, filled them with kerosene, and lit them
on fire from and wrote mathematical equations in the Sahara,
hoping the Martians would read them and be like, oh,
there's intelligent life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
They're probably like, my god, they're burning their own planet.
It's very unintelligent life on Earth. Well, we're going to
take a quick break. When we get back, I will
talk about some of the unique ways that animals sense
the world that shapes their intelligence and their social lives
as a way to kind of perhaps conceptualize how this
(27:41):
might work for aliens. So we've mostly talked about the
human sensory experience, but the animal senses. I talk a
lot about like our similarities with animals on the show,
but also I highlight very different like in terms of
(28:02):
a lot of fundamental things in their There a lot
of times it comes down to their sensory experience. So like,
for instance, your dog, who we relate really well with dogs.
We've co evolved to the point where we communicate really well.
I'm sure we don't speak the exact same language, but
(28:22):
it's actually really remarkable how well we communicate with dogs
and vice versa.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
You can tell when a dog is happy or sad.
What you can you feel, you emotionally feel their experience. Ye,
it's amazing that happens.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Exactly even though they don't smile in the way that
we do. They don't laugh, but we can. You know,
we have learned how to understand their body language, their
gestures and to the point where you know, we were like, yeah,
we get when a dog is happy, when a dog
is upset, But dogs also have this huge experience that
(28:56):
is just beyond us, which is their sense of smell,
which is incredible. Uh. And so often you'll take your
dog to a park and it's just like smelling everything,
and you're like, this is super boring. I don't you
want to run around, I don't want to play fetch,
And all the dog wants to do is smell some
gross little patch of unidentified liquid on the ground. And
(29:17):
it's you know, to the owner, it's like, I don't
understand why you don't want to play, why you don't
want to exercise, You're just doing all this boring smelling.
But to the dog, it's like going to an art
gallery of just like so many interesting smells. It's like, uh,
or scrolling through Facebook, right, because it's like I'm smelling
the pee of another dog. This is a female, she's
(29:39):
reproductively active. But also this is from two days ago,
so tough luck for me. And so yeah, so it's
so they get all this information, and to us, it's
just this kind of like locked world because we don't
have that experience of smells and it really influences dog's
(29:59):
social ba behavior. That's why they're so obsessed with smelling everything.
They are probably seeing us staring at our TVs with
like kind of some moving lights and stuff to that.
To them, it's like, I guess that's okay, but I
don't know why they're so fascinated by that. That seems
really boring because like for a dog, their eyesight is
not really as powerful as their sense of smell, where
(30:22):
they just have such an incredible minute ability to smell.
For them, going to a park smelling all the smells
is probably as fun as reading a book or watching
a TV show exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
And there's two components of that. There's the biological senses, right,
like their nose is complicated, it's got these different receptors,
et cetera, et cetera. But then there's like what is
it like to be that dog? Like how does your
brain their brain interpret it? What are the quality of
as philosophers would say, of that senses and what is
it What kind of mental model of the universe are
they building if it's built on sense? Right, as you say,
(30:55):
we're so visually cute that we were trying to imagine
a dog's world, I immediately art with like a mental
map of the room, but like, I don't even know
if that's like dogs put that in a sort of
space and time in their heads the same way we do.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, they could have, like they could think and smells,
which is very weird for us because our sense of
smell is not great. It's good enough to be able
to smell something good sometimes. I mean, I guess the
closest we could get is sometimes you have like a
smell dependent memory, like maybe peppermint makes you think of winter,
maybe pumpkin spice makes you think of fall, right, like,
(31:31):
so we do have some ability to map smells to emotions,
to thoughts and feelings. But you know, if our smell
is like, you know, a hundred times more powerful in
the way that like dogs have this extremely powerful smell,
I think like we might think more in smells and odors.
So you're thinking, and you're having a memory of a
smell or maybe several smells, and that's kind of basically
(31:54):
a whole thought to you.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There's some dog podcast where the host is like smelling
is not thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They'd have to do some kind of dog podcasts that's
in smellovision court to be fun for dogs. There's definite
impacts of the way that animals sense the world on
their social structures. So like, for instance, with bats, they
use echolocation, particularly insectivorous bats, because they need to hunt
(32:23):
down the insects, little fly insects usually, and so using echolocation,
they send out a sound that bounces off their environment,
comes back to them, gets captured those giant amazing ears.
That works a bit like SETI because it's just these
huge panels that take in all these sounds, and then
that's how they can like sort of be able to
(32:44):
find the movement of little moth or a mosquito. And
bats generally speaking are quite social actually, particularly smaller species
like insectiv wares. They live in these huge colonies. But
you'll notice they don't necessarily hunt in massive groups, and
they don't, which is actually because of a limitation of
(33:08):
their echolocation. When they're roosting, they're all together, they're having
a nice time, a lot of socializing and grooming. When
they're out hunting, they are usually in smaller groups, maybe
a handful of them, but certainly not a huge group
of them. All feeding like you actually see sometimes swifts,
which is a type of bird, and huge groups like
(33:31):
going around feeding all going bananas, having mosquitoes, and even
like spie little spiders that are floating in the air.
You don't see this with bats as much. They usually
try to fan out, and that's because there's interference if
there's too many bats in one area. Using echolocation, they
(33:51):
up to a certain point they actually get some benefit
from other bats echo locating near them. Interesting, they yeah,
so it's like because the feedback from the other bats
is letting them know the location of some insects, and
so up until a certain point, like a certain number
of bats, like they actually see a benefit they hunt
(34:13):
more efficiently. And then after that point, when it gets
too crowded and the bat density gets to be too much,
it falls off where they there's too much interference and
they don't hunt as well. So their entire system of
ecco location completely changes their little bat society, like it's
(34:36):
it limits how many of them can be cooperating and
hunting together at once. Whereas like you think of humans,
we have both verbal communication and visual communication. We're able
to plan, so we could get into we could get
together in a massive group and hunt together, like go
after some big prey and be hunting together and remain
(34:56):
relatively silent because we don't have to keep going like hey,
to be a to see where the the masdon we're
hunting is. So we you know, not that we did
too much of that, but you know, like when we're
when we're trying to hunt animals, we can be in
relatively large groups and work together. We can also plan,
we can communicate, so then that shapes human society. A
(35:18):
really weird example of communication is one of the strangest mammals,
which is the naked mole rat, which is one of
the only use social mammals in the world. There's uh there.
You've probably seen them. They're little weird looking, very weird looking,
(35:39):
a little scrotle. They're there. They have they're almost completely hairless.
They have a few sensory hairs, but they're pink and wrinkling,
kind of ugly or cute depending on your perspective. But
they live in these vast underground tunnels. Uh. And they're
use social, which means that they have defined roles, and
(36:02):
they have reproductive roles. So there is a reproductive queen
and all of the other females don't reproduce. And it's
actually really interesting how they do this because unlike ants
or termites, insects that are used social often have like
these like weird genetic shenanigans, happily diploid where you found
(36:26):
this high relatedness between the queen's offspring and the worker
ants to the point where you see some benefit of
not necessarily everyone reproducing, and then also a lot of
pheromone communication. With naked morats, you don't have that sort
of weird genetic shenanigans. So the enforcement of the sexual
(36:49):
hierarchy where the queen is the only one reproducing is
really interesting. They have really bad eye sight. They mostly
communicate through touch, smell, and sound and sense. The smell
is really good, and they do a lot of weird
kind of poop related communications. So the number one thing
(37:11):
is they have public toilets which everyone goes in and
does their business in, and they'll go in and they'll
roll around in the public toilet and get everyone sent
on them. And that's because you're basically this is your
identification card, your membership to the colony, where it's like
I'm part of this colony. Because I smell like everyone's poop,
(37:34):
and so when they smell each other, it's like, great,
I know that you're part of this colony. We have
no problems with each other because you smell like everyone's crap,
and so do I. And we love it because otherwise,
like sometimes these these big naked molerat colonies can like
intersect with each other, right, you have a different colony,
(37:54):
and then their tunnels intersect, and they might run into
a stranger, and how do they know it's a stranger
if they're they're blind and they all look like weird
little pink, wrinkly things. The smell like if it smells
like some other colonies communal toilet and I'm like, hey,
you're not you don't belong here, And then there's a conflict.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
And so the different communal toilets smell different, like the
Ohio naked mole rats smell different from the California naked
mule rats, and they can tell.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, the Seven eleven toilets smell different from the
Harvey's toilets.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
We all believe that, I believe.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
But also even weirder is a way that the queen
enforces the hierarchy through poop. So one of the questions
is like, how we know that the presence of the
queen suppresses reproductive hormones in the females. So they have
this gonadotropin hormone that is suppressed, and it only develops
(38:57):
when the queen is removed from the colony or and
individuals removed from the colony. So there's all these females
and they can't reproduce because they are their hormones aren't
allowing them to reproduce, which seems to be enforced by
some kind of weird combination of social enforcement, potentially bullying
(39:18):
from the queen or her enforcers, but also potentially through
her poop. So naked roller routes regularly eat each other's poop.
This is a behavior that starts since their pups. Sometimes
they eat their own poop. It's not so uncommon for
rodents to do this because eating like they will digest,
(39:40):
they'll poop, and then if they re eat the poop,
they might be able to extract more nutrients from the poop.
Don't try this at home. We have a different digestive system.
You don't want to do that, but for them, it works,
and something that researchers found is that when workers eat
the queen's poop, it seems like it has a hormone
in it that causes them to go and take care
(40:03):
of the queen's pups. So there is like a brainwashing
hormone in the queen's poop that is telling these workers like,
go and babysit my kids, which is you know, this
is a whole method of communication that is just completely
separate from any hopefully any human experience.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Wow. Yeah, it's hard to imagine what that's even like
what it means for them and whether you know, they
could even explain it to us if we like develop
some amazing AI connection with these communities, is there a
way to translate these ideas into something that makes sense
to us? And you know, this is something like again
on Earth, developing the same biome as us and yet
(40:48):
having such a vastly different experience. You can use that
to try to like extrapolate what it might be like
to be a creature on another planet and how different
that sensorium could be in their social ste structure and
how that's all connected. And that's going to definitely affect
like the things they wonder about and the explanations they
accept and the way they describe the universe around them,
(41:10):
And so I think that we're hopelessly inadequate in extrapolating
to other species on Earth, and therefore, like deeply, it's
deeply impossible for us to anticipate what it could be
like to be an alien and how they might foster
and build explanations about the universe.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like Close Encounters of the
Third Kind would be a very different movie if those
aliens communicated through coop rather than a light show.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
So the mash potatoes, they were kind of getting there
with the mashed potatoes.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
You know. Yeah, but I just all I know is
the Simpsons version of that where Homer really wants to
go learn to be a clown at a circus, so
he's shaping his mashed potatoes in the shape of a circus.
All right, Well, we're going to take a quick break,
and when we get back, we're going to talk about
a couple of examples showing how strange our behavior could
(42:10):
seem to aliens and vice versa, using incomprehensible behavior of
a couple of animals, and then we'll play the Mystery
Animal sound game. All right, So I feel like one
thing that could potentially happen in a human alien cultural
crossover is that we do not understand why the heck
(42:34):
we're doing certain things right, Like our behaviors might seem
completely counterintuitive, self destructive, and strange to aliens, particularly if
they don't understand how we communicate. And one example of
this when we look at our own planet is the
habit of hermit crabs crawling en mass into a plastic
(43:00):
bottle or a glass jar and then dying and then
you'll find, yeah, you'll it's very sad. You'll find these
like glass jars full of dead hermit crabs. So it's
it's very weird behavior. It's like, did these hermit crabs
join like a cult? Are they are they all kind
of coming in? Is this like a crab thunderdome? Or
(43:21):
they came in and did combat to the death. Is
this a crab graveyard where they're all kind of going
off to this area to die? Uh, It's it seems
very mysterious, like not knowing anything about how crabs communicate,
Like can you come up with a guess of why
these hermit crabs are all going inside like on mask
(43:41):
going inside these bottles to die.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
I don't know. It could be like a bug in
their system. Like hermit crabs don't. They exchange shells, and
they sometimes like give up a shell to move into
a bigger shell. So maybe they it seems like a
shell to them or something. That's my guess, that's it.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
That's You're exactly on the right track. So that's exactly right.
And one of the ways they communicate in terms of
the exchange of shells is that when a hermit crab dies,
it lets off a particular odor as it's decaying, which
attracts other hermit crabs to its location. Because like for
(44:19):
some for us, right when we smell decay, we're like,
oh no, gross, stay away. That could be diseased. There
could be something dangerous there. To the hermit crab, it's
saying free house. So like they'll smell a dead hermit
crab and go like, hey, I should check out to
see if this dead guy's house fits me. And it's
(44:43):
unfortunately what happens with something unnatural right, like hermit crabs
did not co evolve with sprite bottles, is the hermit
crab will see the opening of a sprite bottle crawl inside,
maybe thinking it's a home, maybe thinking it's an interesting
little cranny to go into, and it can get in
because of the friction of the sand. Then once it's in,
(45:05):
it's all slippery, it's slick. It can't get back out,
so it dies, and then it gives off the odor
that another hermit crab is going like, oh, hey, that's
the smell of a dead crab. I don't sense any
danger necessarily. That just means a free house to me.
So then it goes and crawls inside the bottle, and
then it finds this dead hermit crab and it's like, great,
(45:29):
I'm gonna check out this free house. And then it
finds it can't get out of the bottle. And this
happens over and over again until you get a bottle
full of dead hermit crabs. And it's all because they're
communicating there thinking, and their communication is through this, like
you know, these chemoreceptive organs, and then their interpretation of
(45:50):
it is when they smell, you know, a bunch of
dead hermit crabs, it's not oh, that's probably dangerous. I
should not go over there. It's a bunch of free houses.
That's great. I'll go over there and check out if
I can get a free house. So you have this
feedback loop for these poor little crabs who are kind
of helpless in the face of their biology in the
(46:11):
way they sense the world, and get stuck in this trap.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
It's like a bunch of millennials looking for an apartment.
They're like, oh, maybe somebody died in there, let's go
in if it's available, and then they die, and it
just leads to more and more.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly, there's it's got There's got to
be like some corror movie where it's like teenagers keep
going to the same haunted place, the same scary, scary house,
and then they live stream in and it makes even
more teenagers go over to see what exactly and other
(46:50):
So another example of this of the importance of chemical
communication and how it could result in really bizarre behaviors
that are really hard to interpret once before you stand
what they do. It's like ants will sometimes army ants
specifically will sometimes start marching in a circle, and is
it's like just this endless circle that they're marching in
(47:12):
until they die of exhaustion, which again just seems like
why are these ants doing this? Is this some kind
of weird ant cult. Do they have an ant religion
or they're sacrificing themselves to an ant god. Well, no,
as it turns out, they are army. Ants do not
have good eyesight, they're mostly blind, so they're completely dependent
(47:34):
on pheromone communication. And when they're on an ant trail,
it happens is another ant is basically, as it's making
a trail, it lays down a small amount of pheromones
that may or may not compel another ant to come
join it. But the stronger the signal, the more like
the ant is to follow it. And so this allows
the ants to have this communication style where it's like
(47:56):
voting with their little tiny ant feet and their pheromones.
So the more ants go down and trail, it's like, ah,
this is the right trail to go down, because there's
this like democracy of the ants marching down this trail,
laying down pheromones, it makes that signal really strong. When
that trail gets interrupted, and then the ants sometimes like
loop back on themselves. What can happen is essentially this
(48:21):
marching circle where they get confused, they lose the trail,
they start to follow the old pheromone trail in this loop,
and because they're all following it, and the more ants
that make the same mistake, the stronger the signal gets,
and the more ants join in, and then this even
stronger the signal gets and then you get this like
(48:43):
death spiral, and we would have no idea why they're
doing this very counterintuitive behavior without understanding this invisible thing, like,
you know, imagine a human being before we understood what
ant pheromones are. It just seems like the ants are
possessed by demons, right and doing a little circle.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, exactly, And it's hard to imagine doing that. But
then you know, like obviously humans are affected by trends,
and you know, all the teenagers in my life are
saying the same six to seven joke over and over again,
death marching to the end of humor, you know. Yeah,
And so you know, back to the context of aliens,
(49:24):
like it could be so foreign to us why they're
doing what they're doing and what it means to them,
and how to crack into that. It's going to be
a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Exactly. Aliens take one look at us, see how many
latle boo boos we have, and just assume that that
must be their offspring, right, Like, why else would they
propagate so many lat booboos? All right, so before we go,
we got to play a little game called Guests Who
Squawk of the Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I
play Mystery Animal sound and you, the guests, need the
listener guess who is making that sound. Last week's hint
(49:56):
was this ret row. All right, so Daniel, you got
any guesses as to who could be making that beautiful sound.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
M that sounds to me like a bird.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
It's not quite a bird. It's the bird of the woods,
also known as the road deer.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Or something.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
No, no, it's the it's the bird. It's the bird
of the ungulate world, which is the road deer. No,
it's it sounds I get bird because there's kind of
a screeching sound. But yeah, road deer. It's found all
over continental Europe and it barks when it's alarmed. I
feel like it's interesting because when we see deer, we
(50:44):
kind of imagine them as these beautiful, graceful, silent creatures
who do not make any kind of upsetting noise because
you look at Bambie and they're all so gentle and
but yeah, they can they can be quite noisy when
they're defending themselves, when they're alarmed, when they're defending their territory.
(51:07):
When this is just a fun little fact about roe deer.
When they mate, they chase each other round in rings,
which leaves behind sort of deer crop circles. So there's
these like they call them row rings. But if you
didn't know it was caused by deer, it'd be like,
are there aliens in the woods like creating these little circles?
Speaker 2 (51:27):
Oh and now I get the hint, got it all right?
That made me think of dogs and let me down
the wrong. Very tricky kid, you very tricky.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
I know, I know, I'm sneaky like that. All right,
onto this week's mystery animals sound. The hint is this.
It may sound like a cat call, but I assure
you this animal wants nothing to do with cats. All right, Danielle,
you got any guesses?
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I'm gonna have to go for bird again. That sounds
like a bird? Am I wrong? Twice?
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well? We will find out next week on Creature Feature.
If you think you know who is making that woo
woo sound, you can write to me at Creature Feature
Pod at gmail dot com. Daniel, thanks so much for
coming on the show today. Where can people find you
and where can people buy your book?
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, you can buy my book anywhere people sell books,
but also go to the website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com.
If you order it before the release date, you can
get a free set of alien stickers drawn by my
friend and co author Andy Warner, who's a gifted cartoonist,
So go check it out. I'm also the co host
of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe by iHeartRadio, which you
(52:40):
can find on all nice podcast platforms. And it's been
a pleasure to talk to you about aliens. Thank you
very much, Katie.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Maybe somedays aliens will read this book and be like, Nah, Daniel,
ye got it all wrong. We understand English.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
Come and tell me how wrong I got it. Aliens.
I want to hear it. I can't even guess birds
versus dear.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
All right, Well, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
If you have any questions about animals, you can write
to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com.
Thanks to the Space Coassics for their super awesome song
XO Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio
ap Apple podcasts, or Hey, guess what one of you
listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I
can't tell you what to do. Uh, but you know
(53:27):
if you always wear clean underwear just in case you
get abducted by aliens, you don't want to be embarrassed.
See you next Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
I gotta go change mind to wear hold on
Hey guys. Before I start a quick programming note, you'll
probably notice my audio quality is not as good as
it normally is. That is not because I decided to
record inside of a tin can. I don't exactly know
what happened. Some sort of computer grimlin I think switched
my audio inputs. So sorry about that, but I hope
(00:23):
you enjoy. Welcome to Creature, future production of iHeartRadio. I'm
your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
and evolutionary biology, and today on the show How to
Speak to Aliens, we talk about the way that biological
(00:45):
senses differ so vastly between humans, animals, and possibly aliens.
We use real life biology to talk about how an
alien encounter might actually go down and the infinitesimally small
chance that we ever I've been to intelligent life. Joining
me today is Prout of the show, particle physicist, host
of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, and author
(01:09):
of the new book Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson, Welcome,
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I am a particle physicist and I believe in science,
but I also irrationally believe we have more than an
infinitesimal chance to be visited by aliens?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
How big of the chance out of out of like
one in five.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
One in ten, I would say seventeen infinitesimals, not just
one infinitesimals.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Okay, all right, yeah, I mean that's a pretty decent chance.
I think. Yeah. I mean so in your new book,
you kind of talk about how you explore a lot
of philosophical questions about aliens, and then you involved both
like physics and also biology to talk about this how
(01:57):
it would be to try to essentially communicate with aliens essentially,
like you know, the whole thing and what was that
a rival when it turned out the aliens communicate with
coffee stains or something. But I find it a really
interesting topic because I think it makes us kind of
(02:19):
we get I think when we start to think about
like biology and human communication, we're so primed to think
about it in a very egocentric way because we're humans.
We have a human brain, we have human thoughts. It's
very hard to step outside of that. But when we're
forced to try to think about how it would go
down if we were actually talking to aliens, we have
(02:43):
to kind of step outside of that, and consider the
ways in which our experience is not objective reality but
filtered through all of our human meat.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, And nobody's more egotistical than physicists. Let me
tell you the personal experience. Because physicists tend to believe
that physics is sort of special among human sciences, like
biology that's awesome, but probably only of interest to things
on the Earth, and biology and alien planets probably vastly different.
(03:13):
But physics is supposed to be universal. Physics, Newton told us,
it doesn't just apply to apples. It also applies to
the heavens, which means it determines what happens on distant galaxies.
And they then take the next leap. And physicists mostly
assume that not only do our laws of physics apply
to denizens of distant galaxies, but those denizens would also
(03:35):
come up with the same laws, so that when the
aliens arrive, we can be like at the chalkboard, writing
e F equals MA within about ten minutes and use
physics to make a mental connection with the aliens. And
that would be wonderful if it were true. But I
feel like it's making the same mistake that physicists and
cosmologists have been making for centuries, which is putting us
(03:55):
at the center of the action, assuming that human physics
is the physics the way we assume that, like the
Earth is at the center of the universe because it
kind of looks like it and it's also quite flattering.
So while I'd love to sit down across the table
and exchange coffee scenes with aliens to understand quantum gravity,
I think it might be much more difficult. And so, Yeah,
(04:17):
in this book, I try to pick apart some of
the assumptions that underlie the feeling that physics could be
used to communicate with aliens and we might be part
of a galactic intellectual community all solving the same problems,
and wonder if aliens might be much more alien than
we expect, right.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
And I think part of that is that the way,
like the way we think is influenced by our biology.
We can't really escape that. We like to believe that
we can escape that, right that once we start to
get to these more and more complex intellectual exercises where
it's like, but these are like fundamental truths about the universe. Yeah,
(04:58):
so we don't have the sense being filtered through you
know our brains, which are a biological organ that is,
you know, it has its own biases and are also
just everything that our brains are connected to our sensory
experience so humans, and we don't even have to really
(05:19):
look to aliens right to see that. Our specific experience
of humans is very particular to us. Like so we
have extremely developed eyes. We see in color, we see
a lot of detail, so we focus a lot on
visual cues. Our sense of hearing is good at close range.
(05:40):
It's not great once you get too far away. But
our communication style is very like close range in terms
of like communicating with each.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Other, unless you're trying to talk to a teenager who
has AirPods, in which case nothing you say, we'll get're
going to get through exactly that. They have the parental
cancelation software.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Nice, it's like it the it matches the pitch of
your tone, encounters it exactly, so it cancels out any
parent voice.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
There's some AI in there that's learned exactly my voice
that it.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Can cancel it out exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah, but you're exactly right, you put your finger on it.
We look at the universe through a human lens, and
it's very unlikely that that lens is completely unbiased. You know,
if you're like looking inside some mystery box and you
only have a few ways to probe it, what are
the chances that you see the full information of what's
going on inside that box. And because we can only
probe the universe through our one lens, because we haven't
(06:35):
talked to aliens, and so far we haven't cracked the
language of dolphins or whales or anybody else, we don't
know how much of the lens is influenced what we
see and what we understand. And I think you're absolutely
right that our perceptions shape our sense of reality. Like
we have a we have a limited set of senses,
and we can dig into into them in a minute.
(06:57):
But we've also extended those senses, right, we have new
technological senses. We can see in the infrared and the
ultraviolet and detect gravitational waves due to technology. But that
doesn't change our experience of the universe, because what we
tend to do is translate those new signals into the
old into the old basis. You know, we take infrared
(07:19):
and we don't look at them in the infrared. We
translate them to the visuals. So we can see them.
We convert gravitational waves to sound so we can hear them.
And I think it's not just the senses that we have,
but like what it's like to be a human, the
experience of the sensorium, which is where the philosophy comes in,
that could be very different from humans to octopy to aliens,
(07:40):
and it could really change, like how you interpret what
you're seeing and the framework you build to explain it.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One of the examples that I really like is that
when we look at math, right, because math seems very objective, Like,
how can we be biased about math one plus one two?
That's just true.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Towered right in his biology one times one equals too.
Maybe you could be.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
An alien, but it's like if you look at your hands,
you have ten fingers, and it's generally understood that we
we think in base ten because we've got ten fingers,
and we can we use our fingers for counting because they,
I mean, they're called digits, and.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
That anybody, anybody's ever had a digital proctal exam knows
what it's called the digital exam.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
There's different kinds of digital. It turns out exactly really
high tech exams exactly yeah, exactly, so so we have
we we our mouth is in base ten, we think
in base ten. We think like and I don't. It's
(08:52):
really hard to wrap your head around if we had
perhaps tentacles, or a different number of fingers, or a
different way of counting, like instead of counting fingers, we
had a certain pattern of like speckles on our bodies
that we can change with chromatophores. Right, if we're an alien,
(09:14):
that our entire mathematical system might be different, not necessarily,
you know, contradictory to a base ten mathematical system. But
if you had, like say base five or base two,
and you're trying to do sort of like math problems,
(09:35):
then one plus one does not necessarily equal to anymore,
even though technically it still does. But the way of
thinking about it and communicating it is different because of
just a simple thing of like, how many of these
little weird flanges do you have?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, I don't know if you watched the show Alien Earth,
but there's a scene where they tap out a few
digits a pie and then the alien taps out the
next few digits and they're like, whoa mind blow? But
of course you know that's in base head, and so
it's it's a little silly, but I'd love the show anyway.
But you're exactly right. The bases are are a very
simple way that we could be doing math differently from aliens,
(10:12):
and even in human cultures. We don't all use base ten,
like the Mayans use base sixty. Right, our computers use
base two. But even beyond mine, you're the biologist, I
don't know about that. I can't sign on to that.
But even beyond that, like the question does one plus
one equals two? Does it have to equal to everywhere
in the universe? Sounds insane, right, But once you start
(10:35):
digging into it, you discover that these things you assume
have to be true everywhere. I actually rest on kind
of fuzzy philosophical principles, like let's think about what it
means for one plus one equals to make a concrete Like,
say you have two apples on the table, right, you know,
one apple plus one apple. That's two apples, obviously, but
those two apples are not the same. One is bigger,
(10:56):
one is smaller, one is darker, one is lighter. Why
have you decided to group them together into this thing
you call apples? Right?
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
An alien might be like, I don't know what you're
talking about. That's this apple plus of that apple? What
is this tube business? The concept of two assumes some groups,
some set where you've decided what goes in it and
what goes out of it. Or even if you don't
have apples, what about you know, I'm one person, you're
another person. I can argue I'm different from you. There's
like a boundary between me and you, or a boundary
(11:24):
between me and the universe. Where is that boundary exactly? Biologically?
You know? If I cut off my arm, is my
arm still part of me? These are fuzzy philosophical questions,
not hard and fast, and it's not hard to imagine
aliens that like exist in the atmosphere of stars and
their plasma tendrils merge all the time, and for them,
they might be like, why are you guys drawing these
(11:46):
weird dotted lines between yourselves? We're all just part of
the same flow, dude.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Right, And so you could have like saying like one
plus one equals two to an alien would be like
maybe to us saying like, you know, one plus red
equal Tuesday Tuesday exactly, like where it's like, what are
you what are you talking about? But yeah, there's a
lot of like things, like especially when it comes to physics,
where when we look into how we view just fundamental
(12:16):
concepts like time, it comes down to weird physiological quirks.
So our sense of time is often related to distance.
So when we when we look at a timeline, for instance, right,
we have a sense of going forwards in times or
backwards in time. Right, it's this very a lot of
(12:39):
words that we use to describe time are shared with distance, right,
Like we have kind of this time is viewed as
a linear progression but also kind of almost like like
a line that you're walking on. Right. Uh, you look
at illustrations of the evolution of man. He's like lined
up in a line from from little fish thing to
(13:03):
like upright, businessman. Here's the progress through time represented in
this line, measured by distance. And we've actually found that
when we do experiments where you have people in a
study setting where they are measuring lengths both geometrically and temporally,
(13:26):
they easily get confused. So like if you have a
line on a screen, it's like either a short line
or a long line, and then you have people say
short or long. But you also have another condition, which
is the length of time that it's on the screen,
either a shorter amount of time or a longer amount
of time. Interesting, and then when you start to mix
(13:47):
the signals, like you're trying to do both tasks at once,
and you get contradictory things like a long line that's
on screen for a short period of time or vice versa,
people make more mistakes. And the fun thing is pigeons
make the same mistakes.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
So we've done this both the human beings into pigeons,
and we've found pigeons also mess this up. So other
animals also, like primates, will make similar mistakes. So a
lot of animals will have this connection between distance and time.
And is that because objectively speaking, somehow pigeons understand the
(14:27):
physics of the universe and that time is something like distance,
or is it because being able to use time and
distance together helps them triangulate food sources that they use
by that they're able to find using an internal biological clock,
(14:47):
as well as signals from the sun that they triangulate
with an understanding of distance to be able to understand that, hey,
I can go to this place.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
At this time and get food, which is another thing
that has been confirmed by research. I had to list
it right in with a question once about like how
does this pigeon know always how to find me? Because
I come at a very specific time to give out
some peanuts and this pigeon always knows how to find
me and when to come. And it's because of this,
(15:18):
this sort of ability to triangulate this internal clock as
well as distance, position of the sun, and then it
is a huge motivator to be able to triangulate food.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So did you interview that pigeon. We couldn't get our
schedules to the line up for some reason, wouldn't sign
the release for him.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But it's a really interesting idea that this are the
whole way we view time right like generally speaking, where
we kind of view it almost like this like track
that you're running along, you're going forward in time. We
fantasize about being able to travel backwards in time again
like a distance related thing. And this could be an
(16:03):
artifact of the just simple need to be able to
use time in order to locate food sources, because we're
animals and we need to eat and we need to
find things, and we know that sometimes like in order
to locate a certain food or do a certain survival thing,
we need to be able to triangulate both distance and
(16:24):
time to be in a certain location at a certain time.
And we link those concepts very closely. So then when
it comes to physics and we start to you know,
get into some really weird things, that is really hard.
I mean even understanding this about like you know, being
human and maybe viewing time in this biased way, I
(16:47):
still can't wrap my head around a lot of physics
concepts because when you start talking about weird things with time,
it's really hard for me to kind of get off
of this like mental track of like I'm like walking
down this road called time and that is where I am,
and that's how I travel through time, and that's what
it is. And then when physics starts introducing these other
(17:09):
concepts relating to times, it's like very hard to get
out of that sort of like rigid way of viewing it.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah, and we experienced time over a certain set of scales, right,
Like we can think about time in terms of a second,
a year, maybe a decade. Really long time scales are
hard for us to grock. You know, theories like the
tectonic plates and glaciers initially were dismissed because they require
things to happen over such long time periods. They seemed absurd,
(17:41):
and we know that there's lots of physics that happens
over millions or billions of years, Like the Solar system,
if you look at it over a few years, seems
pretty steady. If you look at it over billions of years,
it's a chaotic mess, with planets moving in and out
and being tossed out. And probably there were other planets
in our Solar system which we've now a banded or
the universe looks very, very different on short time scales.
(18:04):
You know, you zoom in and you try to understand
the universe and like the microphysics and the interactions of particles,
and it looks vastly different from the way we do.
So if aliens, for example, live on really long time scales,
dark matter beings that take like a thousand years to
think a thought, or quantum mechanical beings that you know,
buzz here and there and pop in and out of
(18:26):
existence on microscopic time scales, it could be very hard
to communicate with them about these concepts of the universe,
because our notion of time really does determine how we
think about the universe and the kinds of physics that
we're just sort of capable of digesting, even though we
have you know, Einstein, who helped us understand the connection
between space and time that apparently pigeons intuitively know, right,
(18:48):
I mean I heard of pigeon English, but maybe this
pigeon Einstein.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Also pigeon Einstein knows where to get all the best breadcrumbs.
Relatively yeah, yeah, relatively speaking, But it is really interesting.
I mean, there's even on Earth, like you don't even
necessarily have to find an alien. Like the flicker frame rate,
(19:12):
which is like our brain's processing ability of basically our
eye sort of refresh rate, to put it in very
simple terms, is different depending on what animal you are.
So if you've ever wondered, like I want to, like
like when you have an annoying fly and you're trying
to swat it and it seems to live in bullet
(19:33):
time like Neo and be able to like sense when
your hand is coming down no matter how fast you are,
it's because it is it has the ability to actually
experience things very slowly, and so it is like it's
these The ability for it to escape you is because
(19:55):
like to it like your hand is coming down just
sort of gradually and it's like easy, peasy, I can
get away from that real fast.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
And because we have selected four flies that survive our swaters, right,
every time you swatter fly, you're making the average fly faster.
Every time you kill a mosquito, you're selecting for more deadly,
more evasive mosquito. So thanks everybody.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, fly swater resistant bugs. They're going to
start to develop little helmets all because of us. But yeah,
before we move on to kind of talking more about
animals instead of well, people are animals, but you know,
cooler animals. One of the interesting things is that I
(20:40):
think when we look at like how we communicate, right,
and one of the ideas is that, well, like with
our human language, that basically shapes entirely how we think.
So we would never we could never pass think like
(21:01):
an alien because we have human language, which is a
specific thing, specific style of communication that completely shapes how
we think. Like we wouldn't think the way we do,
maybe we wouldn't even think at all if we didn't
have language. And there's actually been some research into that.
And it's not to say that language does not influence thought,
(21:23):
because it certainly does, but thinking and language right are
actually not completely dependent on each other, which is weird.
So ah, there were researchers at MIT and UC Berkeley
who used fMRIs to look at parts of the brain
(21:44):
that were active when people were doing tasks like anything
from reading to doing a saduco puzzle. I mean, for me,
they would find no brain activity because I'm really bad
at those. But in general, what they found is that
the language areas of the brain were not going off
all the time as they were thinking through these processes,
(22:06):
So it wasn't as we may have this experience of
like when you're sitting and you're kind of like thinking,
sometimes you have an internal narration where you hear you're
almost having a conversation with yourself in your head, where
you hear your own voice, you hear your own thoughts.
Not everyone actually has that, Like, not everyone experiences that.
(22:27):
There's variation in human thought, which we take for granted
we're all thinking the same, but there are people who
have a fantasia where they don't think in images, and
people who think almost entirely in images and don't have
a lot of that internal narration. So there's a lot
of variability even among people, even within the same language.
(22:48):
But generally speaking, we can think without language. People who
suffer a stroke, who actually have brain damage in the
region's responsible for producing an understanding language, and who can't
do either, can still sometimes do things like math problems,
(23:08):
play music so or even make future plans. So our
ability to think is not that it's completely independent from language.
These are parallel processes that influence each other but are
not completely integrated with one another. So we can think
(23:29):
without necessarily using our language center and as you probably
know listening to other people and politicians, you can also
use your language without thinking very much. People can talk
without necessarily being conscious or thinking about what they're saying.
That's not even just a joke like people can use.
There can be like sort of weird situations in which
(23:51):
someone is not actually conscious but is like talking and
not necessarily thinking, but is using language. So in this sense,
I think it's kind of maybe a little optimistic, because
even if we have a huge language barrier with another
alien and maybe they don't even have a language, they're
(24:18):
still potentially thinking, and we might share a lot of
a lot of ways in which we think. Of course
it's going to be different, but there's still there's still
thinking going on that maybe we're sharing. That might be
really hard to bridge that gap, but it still exist.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, I agree with you that language captures some of
what we're thinking, but it isn't the same thing, because
when you go from the ideas in your head to language,
you're making this arbitrary translation to like these from these
ideas to these symbols. And we've just like agreed on
these symbols and what they mean so that when you
hear them, they create in your mind the same ideas
(24:57):
that I was trying to convey. But in order for
that to work, you have to know what that mapping
is from the ideas to the symbols. So you can
invert it, right, you can back it out and say
when Katie says pigeon, I know what that means. I
have this idea of a pigeon. It's connected to this
word pigeon, which I either hear or I see. And
the issue with that is that the mapping is arbitrary. Right,
(25:19):
there's no symbol which can only be mapped to one idea,
and there's no mapping, which like, well, how you have
to choose this symbol for this idea, which means if
you see a bunch of symbols, you have no idea
what ideas they might map to. And this is evidenced
by like our attempts to you know, decode whale song
or dolphins, or even languages from extinct human civilizations. These
(25:44):
are like equivalent biological humans with ideas probably very similar
to our own, but we just don't know how to
crack their ancient languages because it's an arbitrary mapping between
the ideas and the symbols. And you know, we've done
it in some cases, like for the Egyptians, but that
only with a cheat sheet of the Rosetta Stone, plus
a lot of cultural context and clues and going down
(26:06):
the wrong path for like sometimes twenty years. So we
should be really skeptical that we'll ever have a chance
to decode alien languages. I mean, I'm a big fan
of Seti, for example, and I think they should do it.
And Jill Titar is fantastic and none of this is
news to her, but the idea that we could get
a message from space, understand, recognize that it's an alien message,
(26:28):
and then somehow decode it into concepts is almost fantastical
without an alien there to interact with and to interrogate
and like point it stuff and say donut, pigeon, apple
or whatever. So I think that task is going to
be really, really hard, and that's why some people are like, oh,
you should begin with math. But even math has symbols, right,
(26:48):
representing one and two or pi or whatever. There's always
a symbol there, and that's always arbitrary. And if you
look at what physicists have done already trying to communicate
with aliens, it's you know, it's earnest and it's well intentioned,
and it's a great effort, and I don't have a
better idea, but it's also kind of hopeless. You know.
There's a guy who literally drew, literally scraped out canals
(27:10):
in the desert, filled them with kerosene, and lit them
on fire from and wrote mathematical equations in the Sahara,
hoping the Martians would read them and be like, oh,
there's intelligent life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
They're probably like, my god, they're burning their own planet.
It's very unintelligent life on Earth. Well, we're going to
take a quick break. When we get back, I will
talk about some of the unique ways that animals sense
the world that shapes their intelligence and their social lives
as a way to kind of perhaps conceptualize how this
(27:41):
might work for aliens. So we've mostly talked about the
human sensory experience, but the animal senses. I talk a
lot about like our similarities with animals on the show,
but also I highlight very different like in terms of
(28:02):
a lot of fundamental things in their There a lot
of times it comes down to their sensory experience. So like,
for instance, your dog, who we relate really well with dogs.
We've co evolved to the point where we communicate really well.
I'm sure we don't speak the exact same language, but
(28:22):
it's actually really remarkable how well we communicate with dogs
and vice versa.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
You can tell when a dog is happy or sad.
What you can you feel, you emotionally feel their experience. Ye,
it's amazing that happens.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Exactly even though they don't smile in the way that
we do. They don't laugh, but we can. You know,
we have learned how to understand their body language, their
gestures and to the point where you know, we were like, yeah,
we get when a dog is happy, when a dog
is upset, But dogs also have this huge experience that
(28:56):
is just beyond us, which is their sense of smell,
which is incredible. Uh. And so often you'll take your
dog to a park and it's just like smelling everything,
and you're like, this is super boring. I don't you
want to run around, I don't want to play fetch,
And all the dog wants to do is smell some
gross little patch of unidentified liquid on the ground. And
(29:17):
it's you know, to the owner, it's like, I don't
understand why you don't want to play, why you don't
want to exercise, You're just doing all this boring smelling.
But to the dog, it's like going to an art
gallery of just like so many interesting smells. It's like, uh,
or scrolling through Facebook, right, because it's like I'm smelling
the pee of another dog. This is a female, she's
(29:39):
reproductively active. But also this is from two days ago,
so tough luck for me. And so yeah, so it's
so they get all this information, and to us, it's
just this kind of like locked world because we don't
have that experience of smells and it really influences dog's
(29:59):
social ba behavior. That's why they're so obsessed with smelling everything.
They are probably seeing us staring at our TVs with
like kind of some moving lights and stuff to that.
To them, it's like, I guess that's okay, but I
don't know why they're so fascinated by that. That seems
really boring because like for a dog, their eyesight is
not really as powerful as their sense of smell, where
(30:22):
they just have such an incredible minute ability to smell.
For them, going to a park smelling all the smells
is probably as fun as reading a book or watching
a TV show exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
And there's two components of that. There's the biological senses, right,
like their nose is complicated, it's got these different receptors,
et cetera, et cetera. But then there's like what is
it like to be that dog? Like how does your
brain their brain interpret it? What are the quality of
as philosophers would say, of that senses and what is
it What kind of mental model of the universe are
they building if it's built on sense? Right, as you say,
(30:55):
we're so visually cute that we were trying to imagine
a dog's world, I immediately art with like a mental
map of the room, but like, I don't even know
if that's like dogs put that in a sort of
space and time in their heads the same way we do.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, they could have, like they could think and smells,
which is very weird for us because our sense of
smell is not great. It's good enough to be able
to smell something good sometimes. I mean, I guess the
closest we could get is sometimes you have like a
smell dependent memory, like maybe peppermint makes you think of winter,
maybe pumpkin spice makes you think of fall, right, like,
(31:31):
so we do have some ability to map smells to emotions,
to thoughts and feelings. But you know, if our smell
is like, you know, a hundred times more powerful in
the way that like dogs have this extremely powerful smell,
I think like we might think more in smells and odors.
So you're thinking, and you're having a memory of a
smell or maybe several smells, and that's kind of basically
(31:54):
a whole thought to you.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There's some dog podcast where the host is like smelling
is not thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They'd have to do some kind of dog podcasts that's
in smellovision court to be fun for dogs. There's definite
impacts of the way that animals sense the world on
their social structures. So like, for instance, with bats, they
use echolocation, particularly insectivorous bats, because they need to hunt
(32:23):
down the insects, little fly insects usually, and so using echolocation,
they send out a sound that bounces off their environment,
comes back to them, gets captured those giant amazing ears.
That works a bit like SETI because it's just these
huge panels that take in all these sounds, and then
that's how they can like sort of be able to
(32:44):
find the movement of little moth or a mosquito. And
bats generally speaking are quite social actually, particularly smaller species
like insectiv wares. They live in these huge colonies. But
you'll notice they don't necessarily hunt in massive groups, and
they don't, which is actually because of a limitation of
(33:08):
their echolocation. When they're roosting, they're all together, they're having
a nice time, a lot of socializing and grooming. When
they're out hunting, they are usually in smaller groups, maybe
a handful of them, but certainly not a huge group
of them. All feeding like you actually see sometimes swifts,
which is a type of bird, and huge groups like
(33:31):
going around feeding all going bananas, having mosquitoes, and even
like spie little spiders that are floating in the air.
You don't see this with bats as much. They usually
try to fan out, and that's because there's interference if
there's too many bats in one area. Using echolocation, they
(33:51):
up to a certain point they actually get some benefit
from other bats echo locating near them. Interesting, they yeah,
so it's like because the feedback from the other bats
is letting them know the location of some insects, and
so up until a certain point, like a certain number
of bats, like they actually see a benefit they hunt
(34:13):
more efficiently. And then after that point, when it gets
too crowded and the bat density gets to be too much,
it falls off where they there's too much interference and
they don't hunt as well. So their entire system of
ecco location completely changes their little bat society, like it's
(34:36):
it limits how many of them can be cooperating and
hunting together at once. Whereas like you think of humans,
we have both verbal communication and visual communication. We're able
to plan, so we could get into we could get
together in a massive group and hunt together, like go
after some big prey and be hunting together and remain
(34:56):
relatively silent because we don't have to keep going like hey,
to be a to see where the the masdon we're
hunting is. So we you know, not that we did
too much of that, but you know, like when we're
when we're trying to hunt animals, we can be in
relatively large groups and work together. We can also plan,
we can communicate, so then that shapes human society. A
(35:18):
really weird example of communication is one of the strangest mammals,
which is the naked mole rat, which is one of
the only use social mammals in the world. There's uh there.
You've probably seen them. They're little weird looking, very weird looking,
(35:39):
a little scrotle. They're there. They have they're almost completely hairless.
They have a few sensory hairs, but they're pink and wrinkling,
kind of ugly or cute depending on your perspective. But
they live in these vast underground tunnels. Uh. And they're
use social, which means that they have defined roles, and
(36:02):
they have reproductive roles. So there is a reproductive queen
and all of the other females don't reproduce. And it's
actually really interesting how they do this because unlike ants
or termites, insects that are used social often have like
these like weird genetic shenanigans, happily diploid where you found
(36:26):
this high relatedness between the queen's offspring and the worker
ants to the point where you see some benefit of
not necessarily everyone reproducing, and then also a lot of
pheromone communication. With naked morats, you don't have that sort
of weird genetic shenanigans. So the enforcement of the sexual
(36:49):
hierarchy where the queen is the only one reproducing is
really interesting. They have really bad eye sight. They mostly
communicate through touch, smell, and sound and sense. The smell
is really good, and they do a lot of weird
kind of poop related communications. So the number one thing
(37:11):
is they have public toilets which everyone goes in and
does their business in, and they'll go in and they'll
roll around in the public toilet and get everyone sent
on them. And that's because you're basically this is your
identification card, your membership to the colony, where it's like
I'm part of this colony. Because I smell like everyone's poop,
(37:34):
and so when they smell each other, it's like, great,
I know that you're part of this colony. We have
no problems with each other because you smell like everyone's crap,
and so do I. And we love it because otherwise,
like sometimes these these big naked molerat colonies can like
intersect with each other, right, you have a different colony,
(37:54):
and then their tunnels intersect, and they might run into
a stranger, and how do they know it's a stranger
if they're they're blind and they all look like weird
little pink, wrinkly things. The smell like if it smells
like some other colonies communal toilet and I'm like, hey,
you're not you don't belong here, And then there's a conflict.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
And so the different communal toilets smell different, like the
Ohio naked mole rats smell different from the California naked
mule rats, and they can tell.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, the Seven eleven toilets smell different from the
Harvey's toilets.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
We all believe that, I believe.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
But also even weirder is a way that the queen
enforces the hierarchy through poop. So one of the questions
is like, how we know that the presence of the
queen suppresses reproductive hormones in the females. So they have
this gonadotropin hormone that is suppressed, and it only develops
(38:57):
when the queen is removed from the colony or and
individuals removed from the colony. So there's all these females
and they can't reproduce because they are their hormones aren't
allowing them to reproduce, which seems to be enforced by
some kind of weird combination of social enforcement, potentially bullying
(39:18):
from the queen or her enforcers, but also potentially through
her poop. So naked roller routes regularly eat each other's poop.
This is a behavior that starts since their pups. Sometimes
they eat their own poop. It's not so uncommon for
rodents to do this because eating like they will digest,
(39:40):
they'll poop, and then if they re eat the poop,
they might be able to extract more nutrients from the poop.
Don't try this at home. We have a different digestive system.
You don't want to do that, but for them, it works,
and something that researchers found is that when workers eat
the queen's poop, it seems like it has a hormone
in it that causes them to go and take care
(40:03):
of the queen's pups. So there is like a brainwashing
hormone in the queen's poop that is telling these workers like,
go and babysit my kids, which is you know, this
is a whole method of communication that is just completely
separate from any hopefully any human experience.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Wow. Yeah, it's hard to imagine what that's even like
what it means for them and whether you know, they
could even explain it to us if we like develop
some amazing AI connection with these communities, is there a
way to translate these ideas into something that makes sense
to us? And you know, this is something like again
on Earth, developing the same biome as us and yet
(40:48):
having such a vastly different experience. You can use that
to try to like extrapolate what it might be like
to be a creature on another planet and how different
that sensorium could be in their social ste structure and
how that's all connected. And that's going to definitely affect
like the things they wonder about and the explanations they
accept and the way they describe the universe around them,
(41:10):
And so I think that we're hopelessly inadequate in extrapolating
to other species on Earth, and therefore, like deeply, it's
deeply impossible for us to anticipate what it could be
like to be an alien and how they might foster
and build explanations about the universe.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like Close Encounters of the
Third Kind would be a very different movie if those
aliens communicated through coop rather than a light show.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
So the mash potatoes, they were kind of getting there
with the mashed potatoes.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
You know. Yeah, but I just all I know is
the Simpsons version of that where Homer really wants to
go learn to be a clown at a circus, so
he's shaping his mashed potatoes in the shape of a circus.
All right, Well, we're going to take a quick break,
and when we get back, we're going to talk about
a couple of examples showing how strange our behavior could
(42:10):
seem to aliens and vice versa, using incomprehensible behavior of
a couple of animals, and then we'll play the Mystery
Animal sound game. All right, So I feel like one
thing that could potentially happen in a human alien cultural
crossover is that we do not understand why the heck
(42:34):
we're doing certain things right, Like our behaviors might seem
completely counterintuitive, self destructive, and strange to aliens, particularly if
they don't understand how we communicate. And one example of
this when we look at our own planet is the
habit of hermit crabs crawling en mass into a plastic
(43:00):
bottle or a glass jar and then dying and then
you'll find, yeah, you'll it's very sad. You'll find these
like glass jars full of dead hermit crabs. So it's
it's very weird behavior. It's like, did these hermit crabs
join like a cult? Are they are they all kind
of coming in? Is this like a crab thunderdome? Or
(43:21):
they came in and did combat to the death. Is
this a crab graveyard where they're all kind of going
off to this area to die? Uh, It's it seems
very mysterious, like not knowing anything about how crabs communicate,
Like can you come up with a guess of why
these hermit crabs are all going inside like on mask
(43:41):
going inside these bottles to die.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
I don't know. It could be like a bug in
their system. Like hermit crabs don't. They exchange shells, and
they sometimes like give up a shell to move into
a bigger shell. So maybe they it seems like a
shell to them or something. That's my guess, that's it.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
That's You're exactly on the right track. So that's exactly right.
And one of the ways they communicate in terms of
the exchange of shells is that when a hermit crab dies,
it lets off a particular odor as it's decaying, which
attracts other hermit crabs to its location. Because like for
(44:19):
some for us, right when we smell decay, we're like,
oh no, gross, stay away. That could be diseased. There
could be something dangerous there. To the hermit crab, it's
saying free house. So like they'll smell a dead hermit
crab and go like, hey, I should check out to
see if this dead guy's house fits me. And it's
(44:43):
unfortunately what happens with something unnatural right, like hermit crabs
did not co evolve with sprite bottles, is the hermit
crab will see the opening of a sprite bottle crawl inside,
maybe thinking it's a home, maybe thinking it's an interesting
little cranny to go into, and it can get in
because of the friction of the sand. Then once it's in,
(45:05):
it's all slippery, it's slick. It can't get back out,
so it dies, and then it gives off the odor
that another hermit crab is going like, oh, hey, that's
the smell of a dead crab. I don't sense any
danger necessarily. That just means a free house to me.
So then it goes and crawls inside the bottle, and
then it finds this dead hermit crab and it's like, great,
(45:29):
I'm gonna check out this free house. And then it
finds it can't get out of the bottle. And this
happens over and over again until you get a bottle
full of dead hermit crabs. And it's all because they're
communicating there thinking, and their communication is through this, like
you know, these chemoreceptive organs, and then their interpretation of
(45:50):
it is when they smell, you know, a bunch of
dead hermit crabs, it's not oh, that's probably dangerous. I
should not go over there. It's a bunch of free houses.
That's great. I'll go over there and check out if
I can get a free house. So you have this
feedback loop for these poor little crabs who are kind
of helpless in the face of their biology in the
(46:11):
way they sense the world, and get stuck in this trap.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
It's like a bunch of millennials looking for an apartment.
They're like, oh, maybe somebody died in there, let's go
in if it's available, and then they die, and it
just leads to more and more.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly, there's it's got There's got to
be like some corror movie where it's like teenagers keep
going to the same haunted place, the same scary, scary house,
and then they live stream in and it makes even
more teenagers go over to see what exactly and other
(46:50):
So another example of this of the importance of chemical
communication and how it could result in really bizarre behaviors
that are really hard to interpret once before you stand
what they do. It's like ants will sometimes army ants
specifically will sometimes start marching in a circle, and is
it's like just this endless circle that they're marching in
(47:12):
until they die of exhaustion, which again just seems like
why are these ants doing this? Is this some kind
of weird ant cult. Do they have an ant religion
or they're sacrificing themselves to an ant god. Well, no,
as it turns out, they are army. Ants do not
have good eyesight, they're mostly blind, so they're completely dependent
(47:34):
on pheromone communication. And when they're on an ant trail,
it happens is another ant is basically, as it's making
a trail, it lays down a small amount of pheromones
that may or may not compel another ant to come
join it. But the stronger the signal, the more like
the ant is to follow it. And so this allows
the ants to have this communication style where it's like
(47:56):
voting with their little tiny ant feet and their pheromones.
So the more ants go down and trail, it's like, ah,
this is the right trail to go down, because there's
this like democracy of the ants marching down this trail,
laying down pheromones, it makes that signal really strong. When
that trail gets interrupted, and then the ants sometimes like
loop back on themselves. What can happen is essentially this
(48:21):
marching circle where they get confused, they lose the trail,
they start to follow the old pheromone trail in this loop,
and because they're all following it, and the more ants
that make the same mistake, the stronger the signal gets,
and the more ants join in, and then this even
stronger the signal gets and then you get this like
(48:43):
death spiral, and we would have no idea why they're
doing this very counterintuitive behavior without understanding this invisible thing, like,
you know, imagine a human being before we understood what
ant pheromones are. It just seems like the ants are
possessed by demons, right and doing a little circle.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, exactly, And it's hard to imagine doing that. But
then you know, like obviously humans are affected by trends,
and you know, all the teenagers in my life are
saying the same six to seven joke over and over again,
death marching to the end of humor, you know. Yeah,
And so you know, back to the context of aliens,
(49:24):
like it could be so foreign to us why they're
doing what they're doing and what it means to them,
and how to crack into that. It's going to be
a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Exactly. Aliens take one look at us, see how many
latle boo boos we have, and just assume that that
must be their offspring, right, Like, why else would they
propagate so many lat booboos? All right, so before we go,
we got to play a little game called Guests Who
Squawk of the Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I
play Mystery Animal sound and you, the guests, need the
listener guess who is making that sound. Last week's hint
(49:56):
was this ret row. All right, so Daniel, you got
any guesses as to who could be making that beautiful sound.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
M that sounds to me like a bird.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
It's not quite a bird. It's the bird of the woods,
also known as the road deer.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Or something.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
No, no, it's the it's the bird. It's the bird
of the ungulate world, which is the road deer. No,
it's it sounds I get bird because there's kind of
a screeching sound. But yeah, road deer. It's found all
over continental Europe and it barks when it's alarmed. I
feel like it's interesting because when we see deer, we
(50:44):
kind of imagine them as these beautiful, graceful, silent creatures
who do not make any kind of upsetting noise because
you look at Bambie and they're all so gentle and
but yeah, they can they can be quite noisy when
they're defending themselves, when they're alarmed, when they're defending their territory.
(51:07):
When this is just a fun little fact about roe deer.
When they mate, they chase each other round in rings,
which leaves behind sort of deer crop circles. So there's
these like they call them row rings. But if you
didn't know it was caused by deer, it'd be like,
are there aliens in the woods like creating these little circles?
Speaker 2 (51:27):
Oh and now I get the hint, got it all right?
That made me think of dogs and let me down
the wrong. Very tricky kid, you very tricky.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
I know, I know, I'm sneaky like that. All right,
onto this week's mystery animals sound. The hint is this.
It may sound like a cat call, but I assure
you this animal wants nothing to do with cats. All right, Danielle,
you got any guesses?
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I'm gonna have to go for bird again. That sounds
like a bird? Am I wrong? Twice?
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well? We will find out next week on Creature Feature.
If you think you know who is making that woo
woo sound, you can write to me at Creature Feature
Pod at gmail dot com. Daniel, thanks so much for
coming on the show today. Where can people find you
and where can people buy your book?
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, you can buy my book anywhere people sell books,
but also go to the website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com.
If you order it before the release date, you can
get a free set of alien stickers drawn by my
friend and co author Andy Warner, who's a gifted cartoonist,
So go check it out. I'm also the co host
of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe by iHeartRadio, which you
(52:40):
can find on all nice podcast platforms. And it's been
a pleasure to talk to you about aliens. Thank you
very much, Katie.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Maybe somedays aliens will read this book and be like, Nah, Daniel,
ye got it all wrong. We understand English.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
Come and tell me how wrong I got it. Aliens.
I want to hear it. I can't even guess birds
versus dear.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
All right, Well, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
If you have any questions about animals, you can write
to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com.
Thanks to the Space Coassics for their super awesome song
XO Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio
ap Apple podcasts, or Hey, guess what one of you
listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I
can't tell you what to do. Uh, but you know
(53:27):
if you always wear clean underwear just in case you
get abducted by aliens, you don't want to be embarrassed.
See you next Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
I gotta go change mind to wear hold on
Creature Feature News
Host
Katie Goldin
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