The SF Universe of Sue Burke's "Semiosis"

Daniel and Jorge talk about what happens when plants can think. Is eating a banana now murder?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jorge, do you ever feel bad when you eat
the fruit? Uh? Not if it's delicious. Well, I'm not
going to get into it with you right now about
the banana controversy, but don't you ever think that you're
like eating part of a living organism? Yeah, but it's
a plant. Plants don't mind, do they. I don't know.
Have you asked the plant, have you talked to the plant?
If you talked to the plants parents, you know. I

(00:30):
think the day I talked to banana is the day
that I have gone bananas. I'm just saying, there's all
kinds of life out there, so it's good to be
open minded about what might or might not have feelings.

(00:55):
I am more hanmac Organ isn't the creator of PhD comics.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle, a physicist, and I'm an
advocate for the rights of bananas, but not any other fruit. Daniel,
like apples, eat them. No, bananas are the tip of
the spear, and once we win that battle, we will
extend those rights to other fruits. What are we gonna eat, Daniel?

(01:16):
Where are we going to get our protasis? We're gonna
learn to photosynthesize Eventually we'll just all become biological solar panels. Wow,
I'm so glad you're a physicist, because your biology is
a little off. That is not a biology part. I
just need some biologists and some engineers, and then I
can start a startup, you know, to make that real.
Then you need a business person and it's just and

(01:38):
some investors. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge
explain the university production of our Heart Radio in which
we explore all the amazing and crazy things about the universe.
We bring you to the forefront of scientific knowledge and
scientific inquiry and scientific ignorance to show you what scientists
do know and what scientists are scratching their heads about.

(01:58):
To show you all the mystery and wonder of the
universe and explain it to you in a way that
hopefully makes you chuckle. Yea, all the stuff that's making
scientists confused and curious, but also all the things that
make scientists cratch their chins and go hmmmm, I wonder.
And one thing we love to do is think about
the way the universe works as we see it, and
wonder if there are other ways the universe could work?

(02:18):
Are there other kinds of planets out there. Could life
be different on those planets, could be dramatically weirdly different.
And because there are people out there who actually do
this for a living, and not just because they have
tenure and they can do whatever they want? Was that
a dig? I felt like that was a dig? What
do you mean? I did wait till I had ten
ure to propose my photosynthesis biostarter to the NSF or

(02:43):
to you. To you, I just proposed it to you
right now to go fund me for that one. That's
my new Kickstarter. No, but there are people out there
whose job it is to be creative and to push
the boundaries. And it's not just scientists thinking about how
the universe is and how the universe might be. It's
also artists and writers, and specifically science fiction authors. So

(03:05):
today on the program, we'll be talking about another science
wicking novel that is out there that is has some
pretty interesting ideas, and it's another episode in our series
of interviews with science fiction authors where we talked to
them about their book, their ideas, and how they came
up with it. And I'm especially fascinated with how they
built their science fiction universe. A lot of these science

(03:25):
fiction novels are fun because the game is to figure
out what are the rules in that universe, how do
they work? What are the laws of physics, and what
are the fascinating consequences. And that's the same game we're
playing in this universe. So it's fun to sometimes shift
field and work in another universe. I mean, we're playing
a game with God or whoever made this universe, Daniel
to see who's parter. I don't know who's set up

(03:45):
the puzzle, but it is a fascinating puzzle, and I
feel like we're in a huge detective mystery. We're trying
to figure out what the rules are. We'd be given
a few clues, and that's what science is all about.
That's why it's so much fun, because occasionally you do
learn something fascinating, to have a fly flash of insight
and the universe reveals something deep to you. Most physicists
just are like criticy, Right, we don't drink as much tea,

(04:09):
but essentially, yes, we are trying to solve a big murder. Yeah.
So today we're talking with a pretty interesting author who
wrote a book that sort of takes a look at
intelligent life in a totally new way. Yeah, A lot
of listeners right in and wonder what could alien life
be like on another planet? Could you have other weird
forms of intelligence that it's hard to imagine? And so

(04:29):
this one particular writer took on that question very specifically
and wondered about different surprising forms of alien intelligence. I
like the tagline of her book, it's sentience takes many forms, tantalizing.
But you know, I always wondered what intelligence life looks like,
because you know, I'm still waiting to We never met
any waiting to me except for our listeners, right, and

(04:52):
the smartest people on the point, we've never met them technically,
I mean, I've only met you, Daniel, and well we
met some of them on the live stream, right, that's right. Yeah, yeah,
that's right. So today on the podcast, we'll be talking
about sci fi universe of Sue Bergs. Semiosis. All right, Daniel,
this is a new word for me, semiosis. Break it

(05:14):
down for me. What does semiosis means. That's the title
of her books. It's the title of her book, and
it reveals something about her background. She's a bit of
a linguist. In her day job, she does translations, so
she's fairly well known in that community for doing translations
of like old Spanish texts, like she won an award
for a translation of a Spanish text from the sixteen

(05:34):
hundreds that was the first analysis of stock markets ever written.
And so she's like a real technical grasp of Spanish
and English and understanding of linguistics. And I think that
motivates the title of the book, semiosis, which is a
bit of a technical word in linguistics and reflects like
how to communicate through signs, like you take a you know,
how to interpret sign language or how to use you know,

(05:57):
signs like road signs to communicate meaning. And so it's
all about how intelligent creatures communicate to each other. Oh,
I guess it's related to semiotics. I think I've heard
that word before. It's not related to osmosis or mitosis
or meiosis or full on moses semiosis. I'm a big
fan of little osis miniosis. But that's pretty cool. I

(06:21):
didn't even know they had awards in the translation world. Yeah,
does that mean you haven't won any not yet? No,
apparently they don't give him for translating physics human language
from math to English. And I'm waiting for that. I
wonder what the awards are called? Is it the excuse me?
This was the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry. Pretty cool. Yeah,

(06:43):
it's pretty impressive. And so I had the great pleasure
to read her book Semiosis, which came out very recently.
It was also nominated for some awards in the science
fiction world. But it's her first science fiction novel. Pretty cool,
and so you got to talk to her, Daniel, which
is pretty cool. And so later on will play the interview,
but first we'll talk a little bit about the book
and the science in it and see how it holds

(07:05):
up to the reading of a physicist. So Daniel break
it down for us. What is the basic idea of
the book? Well, the book is really fun because it
starts out as humans are exploring the galaxy. They're leaving
Earth and trying to find other planets to live on,
and so you immediately are on a colony ship and
you're landing very rapidly on a new planet, and there's
this joy of exploration where you're like, what is this

(07:25):
new planet like? And they very rapidly discover that this
new planet has life on it, and it has life
that sort of seems similar to Earth at first, like
there are plant like structures and their animal like structures,
but they soon come to learn that these plant like
structures are pretty different from earthbound plants in one very
important way. Okay, so I guess I have a question already,

(07:47):
which is when they go down to these planets, do
they have to wear space suits? Where is it like
Star Trek where they can just automatically breathe the air
in those planets. They have been selective about the planets
they visit, and they have like the ability to scan
these things as far in advance so they can guess
what the atmosphere is like. So on this planet they
can walk around without space suits. I mean they're looking
to establish colonies, you know, permanent colonies. They don't want

(08:09):
to be living under bubbles or in space suits. So
they specifically went to planets that had non toxic atmospheres, right,
And so what's the real science behind that? Is that
likely that there are planets that we can where we
can breathe the air. It's fascinating. Actually, we're just on
the cusp of the ability to study exoplanet atmospheres. It's
an amazing field and we think that it's likely that

(08:29):
there are exoplanets and that they have atmospheres, and some
of them have water, vapor and carbon dioxide and stuff
like this. But it's very difficult to get significant amounts
of oxygen in those atmospheres without some form of life,
without microbes for like a billion years pumping out oxygen.
And so it's actually very scientifically accurate that if you
find a planet that has oxygen, it probably already has

(08:52):
microbes on it. Interesting, but I guess I always wonder, like,
what's the probability that will find a planet with an
atmosphere with the exact same composition, you know, of the
gases that humans need to breathe comfortably, Because isn't it
isn't it a very fine balance, Like like, at the
oxygen level in our atmosphere drop by a certain percentage,
we we would all die, Or if the dioxide level

(09:14):
went up by a certain bit, we would all die.
Isn't it really hard? It's not that though. It's not
that hard. I mean, you can most of the atmosphere
is nitrogen, and that's pretty much a nerve to us.
So you could replace that with a lot of different
kinds of stuff. But you're right, there are bounds if
the oxygen level dropped too far and then we couldn't
breathe the air. We can tolerate a range of oxygen,
but not a huge range. I mean, Earth has a

(09:34):
like twenty one percent oxygen, and if it dropped into
the teens you feel pretty sluggish, and if it dropped
into the single digits, well then you die. And if
the carbon dioxide level was too high, it would be
toxic for humans. But there are certainly are bounds there.
But we don't know very much about the distribution of
atmospheres on exoplanets. Were like at the very beginning of that,

(09:55):
So it's a fair question, But it's also totally not
implausible to find an exo planet with non toxic atmosphere.
What we don't know is if there are any exoplanets
out there with microbes producing oxygen for us to breathe.
That's a huge unanswered question because because oxygen doesn't happen
naturally in planets, you need something to to break out

(10:16):
break it out. Well, Oxygen is around in the universe,
but it's not nearly as abundant as hydrogen. It's there,
but without microbes it's all bound up like in carbon
dioxide and stuff, So what you need for breathing is
oxygen by itself. That's just o too. I see, I
guess there are maybe there are a lot of planets
out there, and so it's technically possible to find some
that I would have the same exact atmosphere is our Yeah. Yeah,

(10:39):
but the microbes are sort of sticking point there all right,
So not implausible. So that's good enough here, not implausible.
And so the plot is they go to a planet
and it has an interesting new kind of intelligent life, yes,
and that new intelligent life is not an animal. Now,
there are animals on this planet. They are like weird
birds and weird ground creatures and predators and all sorts

(10:59):
of stuff that seem that's smart though, But the most
intelligent creature on this planet is a plant. It's one plant. Well,
there are actually a variety of plants with varying intelligence,
but there's one specific kind of bamboo, a grove of bamboo,
like an extended grove of bamboo, which turns out to
be very intelligent. So it's like a complex organism. So

(11:20):
it's not is it one organism is like one bamboo
or like a a bunch of different bamboos that talk
to each other. Well, it's both. There are different groves
of bamboo. Each one is its own individual, and so
it's not like one bamboo plant, one shoot is its
own individual. It's like a whole grove communicate. They have
like tangled roots, the way aspen do here on earth.
You can think of them as one individual. But then

(11:41):
you know, one grove over here has one name, and
then another grove on another hillside might have another one,
and so and so there's same. Like yes, they actually
have a consciousness like they think. They think they plan.
They communicate. They talk to each other using pollen for example.
They can, you know, send those signals to the groves
or they are ascensioned. They talk to each other. They

(12:03):
send little pollen messages to each other. They have points
of view, they have personalities. Parts of the book take
place from the point of view of this bamboo growth.
It's the first person narrator for part of the book.
They speak English. They do learn to communicate with humans.
How do they write or speak to us? You know,
it's it develops slowly. First, the plant on one of

(12:25):
its stems learns to control the coloring of the stem,
and so we can form words on the stem of
the plant so that people can like look at it
like a screen. What And it develops all these new
abilities to like hear what people are saying or to
smell them. You can control its development in this amazing way.
Has a real grasp of like the biochemistry of what's
going on inside it, so we can do its own

(12:47):
biological engineering. Like genetically, it can change itself. I don't
know if it's genetically didn't get down to that level
of detail, but it has a lot of control over
how it wants to grow and what capabilities it wants
to produce. And it's highly intelligent. And it's fascinating because
the relationship between the plants and the animals on this
planet is sort of inverted. Like the plants are kind

(13:07):
of in charge and they train the animals. They were
like produce a fruit the animals want. If the animals
do what the plants need them to do, like disperse
their seeds or protect them from from aggression from other
plants and stuff, they grow these fruits pretty quickly. Yeah,
and so when they when the humans land on this planet,
they unbeknownst to them land right in the middle of

(13:29):
a great war between two plants, and they end up
eating the fruits from one plant and eating the fruits
from another plant, and that this one produces poisonous fruits
and this one doesn't. And so they slowly figure out
that there's something complicated going on here, and they learn
to interact with the plane. It's like landing in the
middle of a flame war on Twitter or something like
what's going on? I don't I don't understand. Yeah, and
the plants on the planet are bewildered. You know, when

(13:52):
these humans show up, the plants wonder like where are
their plants? You know, you can't just have the animals
wandering around with that without plants. It's like you kids
out in the street without their parents or something, because
on that planet, the plants are in charge. Well it
sounds pretty interesting, but but I guess, and my question
is what happens in the book, Like the humans land
and then what happens they just the whole book is
used sort of an exploration of this organism or is

(14:14):
there is there some drama going on? No, there's some drama.
Turns out that this planet, while it has a good atmosphere,
is a real challenging planet for humans to live on
because there's almost no iron available on the surface. You know,
we need iron for our blood, we need iron for
lots of things in our body, and also iron is
pretty important for our technology. But on this planet, the
way the tectonics happened and the way iron settled, or

(14:36):
the amount of iron that was available when the planet formed,
means that there's almost no iron available on the surface.
The only iron you get is from like the occasional meteorite,
and so it's a real challenge. And when the humans land,
they initially struggle, well they struggle for lots of reasons,
this is just one of them. And what they learned
to do is learn how to survive on this planet
essentially by forming a relationship with these intelligent plants. You know.

(15:00):
First humans show up and they want to be in charge,
and they want to establish their own colony and be independent.
But eventually they learned that if they want to survive,
they have to build a relationship with these plants. They
have to learn to work together, all right. So it's
it's more sort of like a colonization novel. Yeah, yeah,
except that the you know, the colonized waves. Yeah. In
this case, though, the natives win because by the end

(15:22):
of the novel, the humans essentially give up and put
the plants in charge. Really at the end, they think
the plans are more intelligent than them. Yeah, the plants
are better at making decisions that long term planning. They
have a better grasp of the details that those humans
also elect the carrot as president. I feel like you're
inviting me to compare politicians to fruits here, but I'm
gonna avoid being political and just say that they all

(15:43):
seem in bananas to me. All right, Well, let's get
into the science a little bit more and whether or
not it's plausible for me physics point of view to
have a planet like this or a plant that's intelligent
from a biology point of view, and then we'll get
into the interview with super But first let's take a
quick break. All right, we're talking about the sci fi

(16:12):
universe of superb novel semios Is, and in it, plants
are intelligent. So is that, Daniel, Is that even plausible?
I guess, you know, like I wonder, like, if you
look at a neuron, you wouldn't think a neuron is intelligent.
But if you get a whole bunch of them, a
few billion, then you get a human brain. So is
it is this kind of what's going on here with

(16:33):
the plants, Like if you get enough simple plants, you
might get some sort of complex consciousness out of it. Yeah.
And it's a really hard question because we don't really
understand the rise of intelligence or what's critical about it,
or consciousness or all this stuff. So of course I
turned to my local expert. My wife is biologist, and
I asked her, Hey, do you think plants could ever
be intelligent? I didn't tell her the context or anything.

(16:54):
So she first said that's ridiculous, absolutely not. Why did
she say that, Well, this a whole history of studying
plants here on Earth where people try to understand like
do earth plants feel pain? Do they have responses? Do
they have any sort of nervous system at all? And
there were some labs about ten fifteen years ago they
claimed that they had evidence that plants could feel things

(17:16):
and respond, maybe even feel pain. And Uh, it's a
complicated question because plants do have sophisticated reactions to stimuli. Right.
There are plants that if you touch them, they will
close up or venus fly chapel, like you know, eat
an animal. They drive right like they seek out the
sun and the water, and if they if you cut them,
they actually have some sort of like emergency reaction to

(17:38):
being cut. Yeah, And so I called up another friend
of mine who was actually a neuroscientist. Here, like my
wife didn't have a satisfying as somebody else. Yeah, well,
you know, she's a microbiologist. So I called an actual
neuroscientist who works on displa like fruit flies and how
their minds work. And she said that, you know, plants
don't have a central nervous system the way we understand it,

(17:59):
but they do have these kind of mechanical reactions. You know,
they do respond to stimuli. And so it's really best
to think of plants sort of like on a continuum.
It's not easy to say, like there's a clear distinction
between how plants work and how animals work all the
way up to humans. It's sort of you can place
them on a continuum. An individual plant, I think, is
what you're saying. You can maybe think of him as

(18:21):
is intelligent, but not that intelligent. But I think maybe
what she's getting to in this novel is like, if
you get enough simple plants, maybe you could get consciousness
out of here. Yeah, and you also only need to
take another step, which is maybe these plants are not
just like Earth plants. They have nervous systems. There's no
reason why on another planet plant like organisms couldn't develop
something akin to a nervous system and even maybe a brain.

(18:44):
And in her novel she has sort of nervous systems
inside the plant roots. That's where their intelligence resides on
her planet, I see, But don't these plant organisms think
really slowly? Or do they think at the speed of
That's what I was wondering, because I feel like all
really intelligent life has brains, and I wonder if that's
because of you know, you want to bring all your

(19:04):
neurons close together so that you can have things happen quickly.
You don't have to wait for the delay as signals
transmit from like one side of the hill to the
other side of the hill. Right, that would be a
slow thought. There, that would be a slower thought. And
so in this case, it's sort of like a distributed intelligence.
Each plant is intelligent in its route, and then together
they form a personality. In the novel, though, the plants

(19:26):
are pretty responsive, so you know, sometimes it takes some
time to think, but you can have a conversation back
and forth with these plants really well. I guess if
you have enough of them, maybe you know, it's fast
that way because there's so many plants. Yeah, and you know,
we do the same thing with our computing, right we
have big clusters of computers to answer questions, and you
have part of it that's responsive to the user and

(19:47):
other parts of it that are off thinking about deep stuff,
you know, to provide information later on. And these computer
systems are very responsive of the hive mind, you know,
like if you have a question, just ask the Internet.
I not sure the Internet is intelligence, but but yeah,
there are examples of you know, starlings or insects that
act sort as one organism. And then I was amazed

(20:09):
that neuroscientist friend of mine pointed out that there are
other organisms here on Earth that have nerves and sort
of mental states, but no brain. There's this organism called
the hydra which has like a nerve net, so there's
no core brain. It's not like all the nerves are
clustered together. They're sort of distributed through the body, but
you know, it has a nervous system, it has mental states.

(20:31):
It's very simple, but there's an example of sort of
distributed brain that can actually have some intelligence. It doesn't
have a concentrated processing it's just it's just kind of
is as a like a human without a conscious brain. Yeah,
Or it's like if your brain was spread out through
your body instead of concentrated in your skull. That would
be a massive headache if you all right, Well, there's

(20:53):
I know, piece of signs here in this book about
low iron in the planet. Like it's a planet that
is very little iron, and I'm just wondering if that's possible,
because you know, are most planets sort of made of
rocky iron types of metals. Yeah, it's hard to assemble
a planet without some heavy metal at the core. I mean,
that's what really seeds the gravitational attraction is a creation

(21:17):
of stuff. Remember, solar systems start, you have a blobs
of gas and dust and rock, and the heavy stuff
starts to gather together. And that's why most of these
planets have a heavy core. Even things like Jupiter right
has some ice and rock at its core, and that's
sort of seeded the creation of those gas giants, and
so it's very unlikely to have a planet that doesn't

(21:37):
have some iron in it down below. But the question
is can the iron be available at the surface, And
that's a question of like how quickly did the planet cool?
How long did it stay hot? You know, if it
stayed hot for a while and there's time for these
things to sort of settle through the liquid core, then
it's possible that all the heavy stuff goes all the

(21:58):
way down and you only get sort of lighter elements
near the surface. Oh so it's possible to have an
iron rich planet which is not available for the plants
and animals up top on the surface. Yeah, all right,
so that's also not implausible. It's not implausible, and it's
sort of fascinating to imagine like a situation where the
only iron you can get comes from the sky and

(22:19):
you know, before humans were able to mine the earth
and pull out these heavy metals, that was also the case.
You know, there are examples of like Vikings that forged
swords from meteorites, you know, because that was the first
metal that was available, And that's pretty awesome, that's like,
and you can imagine how that inspired all sorts of mythology. Right, Well,
I guess my question is if these humans had star

(22:42):
traveling power and they could go around colonizing, can't they
just go and like grab a meteor from the nearest
meteor belt or something that has a lot of iron,
Or if they have that technology, can they drill down
until they get to some iron on the core that. Yeah,
they didn't pack for that. They didn't bring deep mining technology,
and you know, when they land their technology very pretty

(23:04):
rapidly degrades, and so they end up, you know, they
start out as a starfaring technological civilization, but then one generation,
two generations, five generations deep there at a much lower level.
They're at a farming subsistence to technology, and they have
to build up a local infrastructure basically from scratch. They
had some bad luck when they landed. Some of their
key technology was lost in a crash from some of

(23:26):
their shuttles, and so, but I think it's pretty typical
to imagine that if you land on a planet, you're
not going to be able to benefit from the heavy
industry of Earth for very long. You really have to
be able to build the stuff up locally. You don't
think that this, you know, like history would repeat itself
and they would have a bronze age and an iron
age and start mining things. You know. Yeah, but history

(23:47):
took a long time, right, that's thousands of years. And
now even if you know how to do this stuff,
it's not that easy. You know. What they should have
done is they should have brought Ryan North how to
Invent Everything book when he talks about how to create
all of humans realization in about a hundred would think
they would bring that on a colonizing ship to another planet,
you know, a little instruction center in the encyclopedia. But

(24:08):
it sounds like to me they forgot. Now they brought
a bunch of experts. The experts are always the first
ones to die in a sci fi movie, that's right.
They lost some of those, and they lost some of
their more specialized technology. All right, well, sounds really interesting.
And again, if anyone's interested the novels called Semiosis by
Sue Burke and so, Daniel, you had a chance to

(24:28):
talk to her an interview about her book. I did.
We had a lot of fun. All right. Well, here's
the interview of Daniel with sci fi author Suber. Could
you please introduce yourself for our audience. Hell, my name
is Sue Burke and I'm a writer. I'm the author
of the science fiction books Semiosis and Interference, along with
a bunch of other stuff and short stories. I was

(24:50):
a journalist for quite a bit of time, and I'm
also a translator from Spanish into English. Well that's amazing,
and I read from your website you're also a poet. Yes,
I write poetry as well. Wow, quite prolific. So let
me get started by sort of getting acquainted with how
you view the universe and science fiction universe by asking
you about sort of standard science fiction universes that exist

(25:12):
out there and your view on them. For example, Um,
what's your opinion about the Star Trek teleporter. Do you
think that when you step into a Star Trek helporter
it tears you apart and kills you reassembling you somewhere else,
or that it actually translates you, moves you from one
place to another. Actually, as an author, I think that

(25:32):
that was a workaround for all of the mechanics of
getting someone from hither toojn Um. It's what we're calling
the business handwaiting that will tell you that this is
this is just fine. Don't look at it too hard,
and that's how it works, and it just saves them
a whole lot of time and effort and boring things

(25:53):
that people wouldn't want to see. So there's realistically it
wouldn't work just because it would take too much in
formation to build someone rebuild someone. And where would you
get the parts anyway? I mean, because there's a lot
that goes into our body. And what if you went
to a place that didn't have I don't have a
lot of calcium, you would have phones, You need a

(26:14):
three D body printer with all the supplies exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
So then would you be willing to step into one,
say I somehow overcame all the technical obstacles and put
one together. Would you be willing to use a teleporter?
I would be willing to be the million person to
do that. That's fair. Um So then in other science
fiction universes, what technology that you see there would you

(26:36):
like to see become real? Well, let's see the Star
Trek communicators of course are now real, and that is
just super cool. Also from an author. That makes sometimes
plotting very difficult because if you could talk to anybody
at any time about anything and look things up at
all times that changes the human dynamics in ways that

(26:59):
are maybe two settle for us to understand because we
just lived through it. Perhaps. Yeah. So then let's turn
to your book and the main topic of it. Um. First, congratulations,
it's a wonderful book. I really enjoyed reading it. I
read a lot of science fiction. I'm frankly a little
picky about what I read and what I like, and uh,
and I found yours to be really wonderful, very creative,

(27:21):
very well executed. So congrats. And in my reading, sort
of the main intellectual concept, like the novel idea is
coming to a planet where plants or the equivalent of plants,
the sessile creatures, have a higher intelligence and have evolved
these complex relationships with each other and also with the
the equivalent of animals on the planet. Is that a

(27:43):
fair way to describe sort of the core nugget of
the idea. Yes, in fact, that was the exact idea
I wanted to explore. Awesome, So tell me where did
that idea come from? Did you start from having that
idea and then trying to tell a story in that
world or did you have sort of a story you
wanted to tell and this is the idea you need. Yea. Actually,
it all started when one of my house plants attacked

(28:04):
another house plant and killed it. Um. It just grew
around it and wrapped itself around the other plant till
it died. And then it happened to another plant, and
I started to get suspicious, and I began to do
some research, and I discovered the plants are very active,
even aggressive. We don't think of that because we don't

(28:26):
see the move usually, although if you think about carnivorous
plants there they can move fast. Um. But between themselves
it's it's pretty much a constant state of war. Except
when they decided it's better for them to cooperate, they
can do all sorts of things. And the more I
researched that, the more I realized that what if they
could think, because they don't seem to think the way

(28:47):
that we do, But if they could, then what And
that was the idea I wanted and I want needed
to do that in science fiction because obviously it's counter reality.
And then what would be the way played to explore that?
So I would need a planet where they could do that,
because if they started doing it to your on Earth, well,
that wouldn't work for technical reasons. So okay, well set

(29:08):
up a planet and then we'll put some humans there,
and then what could happen? And how could I make
those events show what the plants could do and how
they would react to things, and build a story around that.
Some of our listeners I told them I'd be interviewing you,
and they asked me to ask you how that might

(29:28):
change people's relationship with their plants, like in terms of
ethical questions, like what is it like to eat the
fruit of an intelligent plant? Is it all right if
they are giving you consent but otherwise not? How did
that sort of change that relationship that was built into
the story because plants do sometimes want fruit. They definitely

(29:49):
wanted to eat because they may get edible. In fact,
they make it very attractive to you, and they do
that because that's one of the ways that that they
spread their seeds. They have many other ways. True, But
is that a want in the sense that there is
an advantage to them they have evolved to do that absolutely,
or are you attributing you know, an intention a desire
to the actual organism. We don't know if it's an

(30:10):
intention or not. But we know that is the purpose
of the fruit is to be attractive to us so
that we eat it and we move their seeds. Some plants,
plants and tomatoes, for example, their seeds can actually go
right through our digestion unless we cook the tomato. It
comes out at the other end and ready to go nicely. Yes, um.

(30:31):
And that happens with other things. And wheat grows a
whole lot of seeds because they know some of them
will be eaten, but not all of them will be
eaten because there's just too many. That's why they may
make so many. And that's true other grades to One
of the interesting things is that human beings discovered this
and we start growing wheat fields. And there's a kind
of a grain called why. Why just started moving into

(30:54):
those fields because it looked like a really good way
to live because you've got lots of care and they
need to know all of them, and then planted more seeds,
and so I volunteered to become domesticated because that was
a good way to work. Um. And you can see
now oak trees, for example, they just do not cooperate
at all. Whole another subject. But yeah, oak trees just

(31:15):
don't behave well. Apple trees, on the other hand, apple
trees clearly thought it was a good idea. They were
quite willing to do that. Think about marijuana and how
we can breed that into the little things that basically
do nothing but grow flowers since that, and they're very
willing to do that too, because it works for them,
because they keep getting replanted. So some plants want to

(31:36):
do it, some plants don't. They have all sorts of
other ways to do that, and some of it is
actually very abusive to animals. So it seems to me
like this concept of plants having intention and intelligence, that
you see it sort of as a natural extension of
the sort of continuum of plant relationships to animals now,
not something totally distinct, which is sort of like an

(31:56):
exaggeration or an extension of what's happening in our universe.
Oh yeah, we grew up with each other and we
depend on each other, and if you could put that
where we would all have to think about that, both
them and us. Then, as you say, it does cause
ethical questions, which I tried to explore in the novel,
but it also makes it more clue that that's what

(32:17):
we're doing here. We don't think about it enough. I
think if you talk to ecologists, and especially farming ecologists,
there's we're doing some things that are very scary and wrong,
and they're going to come back to get us. But
that relationship exists here. We just don't think about it
very hard. I mean, have you thought about your tomato

(32:37):
is talking to you when it turns red? Well? It is,
But we're just so used to that that we don't
realize that we are in communication. And some people talk
to their tomatoes, are right. People talk to their plans
and I don't know if they listen. But I do
that too well. I talked to my children and I
don't know if they listen. How do I do it? Anyway? Well,

(32:58):
let let me ask you this. Do you imagine in
that the universe that you described could exist, that those
kinds of plants could exist here in our universe, and
you imagine that there could be an alien planet out
there in which plants do develop intelligence. Do you think
they would need to be a different set of laws
of physics or that there's some scientific principle that that
needs to be sort of handwaves. No, they could do
that now, And in fact, there's some debate out where

(33:20):
whether they do that here. One of the things is
that beyond tomatoes turning red and for showing that that
it's right, how much do they really need to talk
to us about. We know they communicate with each other
a lot, but they might not have that much to
say to us. So well, they do communicate here with
each other. Um, we haven't deciphered that, but we know,

(33:43):
for example, whales communicate with each other and we're not
sure what they're saying either. Just because we can't break
that code, it could very easily happen somewhere in the
university right now the way I wrote about it, give
us another million years for the plants to to keep
making changes and prep we could enter into a more
direct relationship. And so the plants in your novel, do

(34:05):
they have like a central nervous system? What is this
sort of implementation the strata on which this intelligence is built. Yeah,
they have a central nervous system which helps them to
communicate with us more like recommunicate with each other. There
is a um a neurobotanist named Mancuso, and he says

(34:25):
that the way the plants work because they don't have
a central nervous system, but they work if you can
imagine a flock of startlings and how they all can
fly sort of in the same direction. Um and in
giant flocks, the way they do that is they all
just look out at the birds that are closest to
them and follow them and then in an aggregate it

(34:48):
looks like they're one giant thing. And he says that
it works with plants that same way, as that each
cell looks what's going on with the cells around it,
just to that and in that way, plants can do
things that look very complex, and they are very complex,
but they can do it without a central nervous system.

(35:10):
And so then the plants in your novel, do they
have a nervous system for communication but it's distributed to
the plant or is there some sort of like hub,
like a brain like thing in the plants that you
that you described, Yeah, their brains around their roots, which
might not be what we know that their roots do
a whole lot of things here too, And I want
to point out the plants have personalities. They make different

(35:32):
decisions because they have to make decisions when they decide
to put out their leaves and spring is a life
or death decision. If they get that wrong and then
the weather gets screwed up, they can wipe out a
whole growing season and that would be fatal. And different trees,
even of the same species, even growing next to each other, well,
sometimes decide to do things differently. One tree will pick

(35:54):
one day, in the next tree next to it will
pick the next day. Why did they do that? How
do they do that? Well, they make a whole bunch
of choices inside of themselves. Do you think some trees
like are procrastinators and they just don't get around to it?
Um procrastinators. Some seem to be very cautious. They've been
described as cautious by botanists. Some trees are willing to

(36:15):
take a lot more risks um, And this is true
of other plants as well. It's hard for us to
notice because they move so slow, and unless you're you're like,
like watching them like a scientist every hour, you can't
see what they're doing because we have other things to
worry about. But different plants make different decisions that are
very important, and we can kind of guess that that

(36:36):
some of this there's natural variation between them because they
have to adjust to changing conditions. All the time, so
they try all sorts of different things, and different individuals
will be doing things in a different way. They certainly
have their own individual personalities. That's right. We're having a
lot of fun talking to Suberg. But let's take a

(36:57):
quick break and we'll be right back with more. All right,
we're back with my interview with Sue Berke, science fiction
author of Semiosis. So let me ask you about the

(37:17):
sort of spot that you put these folks in. Because
you created this wonderful universe. You introduced the humans to
these intelligent plants, and then you gave them some hard
problems to solve. And one of the challenges in your
universe is that the planet they land on has a
very low iron content. How much of course iron is
something we need to survive. Tell me about how you
made that choice and whether you did some sort of

(37:38):
like science consulting to talk to folks. Now, I started
because okay, I'm going to put them on another planet.
Well what do we know about other planets? And I
began to do research into that and in books and
scient just put things out. One of the things I
learned is that when plants planets are formed, um, they're
all pretty much seemed to be the iron nickel sort

(37:58):
of core that we have, but on our planet iron
quite a bit of it a state on the surface.
It's very easy to find iron here. It's easy to
find iron on Mars. But if a planet was formed
in just a few little things went differently, there wouldn't
be iron on the surface. And when I read that,

(38:19):
that told that that inspired an understanding of a conflict
that was going to happen because plants need iron. We
think that animals and the iron, and we do, but
plants also need iron for some of the chemicals to
do photosynthesis, So plants need iron, animals have iron. Plants
already eat animals when it's when they need to. If

(38:40):
they can't get enough nitrogen and their localized environment, they'll
doing carnivorous and start to eat us. So if they
need iron and we have iron, and if they can sink,
they'll start to think of ways to get the iron
out of us, which is a whole until fruits. Yes,
we become food for them, which is a whole series
of other ethical concerns that appear in the novel. Very quickly, right,

(39:05):
I thought that was really fun and uh and fascinating,
and it's interesting to imagine how a culture would survive
with a very small amount of iron. You know that
basically be harvesting meteorites and recycling as much as they could.
So I was also really interested in how you got
these sentient beings to work together, because not only did
they need to work together and to communicate, but you

(39:27):
had them actually come to a common understanding, like to
actually understand each other to develop relationships and friendships. Do
you think that's necessary? Um, that's basically how society works,
how a civilization works among humans. Were so close to
what we do that we don't always see it, but
we work out of human connections, interconnections with different people.

(39:49):
We have large organizations that allow us to work under it.
So we understand how we have agreements built into how
we relate to each other. We are naturally social beings,
human beings, just as as other primates are. But here's
the thing. Plants are social beings to we know trees
like to be around other trees like itself, and that

(40:12):
they communicate as as we've noticed, they send messages through
their roots. They send messages through the air with chemicals
and a tree that is among other trees, like it
will be healthier and live longer than a tree that
is alone. And that is also true of human beings.
If you put a human being in solitary confinement, they
suffer terribly physically and mentally. So that you have two

(40:35):
groups of social beings that come together and they're going
to behaves as social beings and set up social constructs,
and all of the hobbs and in other sorts of
political philosophers and their thoughts about how we do that
remain true. The fact that it's two different species and
such different species puts in some some problems but also

(40:56):
some solutions. And in your book you try to use
beauty sort of appreciation, you know, joy, to sort of
connect our experience with theirs, like if we could enjoy
the same music, then we had something in common. And
as I'm sure you know, some of the probes that
we've sent out into interstellar space have had samples of
human music on them. Do you think that that will

(41:17):
be well received? You think of their aliens out there
that received that probe, or here are broadcasts that they're like,
you know, thump along too our music and be like, hey,
those are folks we can understand they might they might
not again. This is a theme that is explored by
many writers and in fruitfully and would be a lot
of fun? Is it is a lot of fun? How
much do we recognize? How much do we have in common?

(41:40):
If a rock was alive and they could be, the
problem is they would be so slow. They could make
music that we could never hear because even over generations,
we don't live long enough. If they're too fast, would
be here them. So the question you ask is is maybe,
And the fun is when would we and when would

(42:00):
be not? And why? Or if we hear something and
we know it's music, even if it sounds horrible to
us and we can't stand it. It's black, it's fingernails
on a blackboard, but we know they're making music. Would
that be enough they're trying that we have in common? Well,
I hope that one day we get answers to those questions.

(42:20):
There are questions that I'm very curious about as well.
So I was just glad in your book that to
see those humans get to meet aliens and connect with
them on this deep level, work together and and uh
and experience each other's joy. That was wonderful. Um great,
So thanks very much, well, thank you. It was a
pleasure for me to take care safe. As you can see,
no question is too nerdy for me. All right, pretty

(42:43):
interesting conversation there about plants and intelligence and my favorite procrastination. Yeah,
I did that one for you. I asked her if
she thought plans procrastinate, and you know, you can hear
in her voice that she really thinks that plants here
on earth are part of a sort of tenuum of
communication and therefore some effectively some kind of intelligence. You know,

(43:05):
tomatoes talk to you by changing color, and plants communicate
to you by what tomatoes talk to me. Tomatoes tell
you when they're ripe, right by changing color. Oh I see, yeah,
I see. They're training me kind of what you're saying exactly,
just the way the plants in her novel train their
animals to do something or not do something. Apple trees,
you know, induce you to eat their fruit by making

(43:28):
them tasty and all sorts of stuff. And that's a
question about whether you could like attribute any intention to
the apple tree or if it's essentially a dumb biological machine.
But she's definitely right that they communicate, right, and at
the end, aren't we all dumb biological machine. That's a
deep question about the universe I certainly don't have the
answer to. But she's very pro plant I guess she's

(43:48):
really into nature and plants. Yeah, I'm not sure where
she would come down on, you know, whether bananas have rights.
I didn't feel like it was respectful to ask her
that question. I just assume that bananas are in charge.
Then why are you eating them and they're not eating you?
Maybe I'm um, well, I'm just doing their biddings. This
is part of the long game for bananas. But I

(44:10):
was also impressed she really thought about the science of
her book. She was not trying to create something and
a completely alien, made up universe. She was just imagining
how life could be different on another planet. You know,
she looked at the way things work here and she
just tweaked it a little bit. She's like, let's exaggerate
this element of it or play out this thing here
on Earth, which she didn't think was widely enough appreciated.

(44:30):
All right, well, pretty cool. Well, I guess it kind
of makes you think about, um, what intelligence could be
like in other planets, right, because it doesn't necessarily have
to be like we have it here on Earth, you know,
like we talked about Last Time, and a lot of
Star Trek episodes and movies like Star Wars. They imagine
life pretty similar to us with like you know, four limbs,

(44:51):
five fingers. But really, I mean life out there could
take on any form. It could be like Sentien clouds
or blobs of silicone. Right, that's right. And as much
as I say I'd like to talk to aliens, there's
a good chance that aliens out there have an intelligence.
If they are out there and they are intelligence, that
their intelligence would be very difficult for us to understand.
You know. A key element in her book is that

(45:12):
these humans and these plans find a commonality. They find
a way to talk to each other. They have things
in common, They appreciate things, they both want to survive.
They appreciate beauty or something. And so it's a question of, like,
will those aliens be able to understand that we are intelligent?
Can they see intelligence in us or they whether they
think about intelligence the same way we do, they might

(45:34):
see it as something totally different, that's right. And you know,
we famously sent out signals into space and like on
one of the Voyager probes. For example, we put some music,
and I always wonder, like aliens get that, Are they
even gonna understand that it's music? And if they do,
is it gonna make them like us less or more? They?
You know, is that the kind of thing that we're
have in common with aliens? Did you sound like static

(45:57):
to them? You know, an annoying sound. Yeah, it could
sound like the annoying music their kids listen to. And
then they're like, lets skip that planet entirely. Obviously we
should be sending out tomatoes and bananas just in case.
We really have no idea what the forms of intelligence are.
And so even a book like this where it seems
pretty weird to imagine intelligent plants, that's really not very

(46:20):
far from what's happening on Earth compared to what could
really be out there. Who knows, right? Who knows? And
also this book reminded me of one of my favorite comics,
Jack Handy, one of his deep thoughts, which is, if
trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting
them down? We might if they screamed all the time
for no good reason. That's a classic for sure. Do

(46:42):
you think maybe she had a little bit of that
in her motivation, you know, for us to think a
little bit differently about plants and not be so cavalier
about cutting them down or eating them. Yeah, I think
she's definitely pro plant, But I think also her goal
is just to make us think about our intelligence and
the context of our lives, and to remember that thing
is out there in the universe could really be very

(47:02):
different from the way they are here on Earth, and
they probably are, and let's hope they are, because it
would be pretty disappointing if we met aliens and they
were just like humans and they had only figured out
what we have figured out, and so we basically learned
nothing from them, and they're like, we thought you guys
had the answers to everything. What have you been doing
all these years? Come on, I'm going to write the
most boring, disappointing science fiction novel ever. In our version

(47:23):
of The Hitchhiker Chalacter Galaxy, the answer is thirty seven.
What's your answer? All right? Well, we hope you enjoyed
this episode, and we hope you check out Superberg's sci
fi novels Semiosis. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think
you'd like it as well, thanks for joining us, see
you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel

(47:50):
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
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