How might aliens perceive the Universe?

Daniel and Kelly talk about how aliens might experience the Universe and how it might shape their science, a topic from Daniel's new book "Do Aliens Speak Physics?"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
One of the most famous questions in the history of
philosophy is a simple one. What is it like to
be a bat? It's not a famous question because anyone
cares particularly about bats, but because they wonder how our
senses shape our experience. If you had dramatically different ways
of perceiving the universe, would your mind form a very
different mental picture to blind animals even have a mental picture?

(00:31):
Or is our reliance on vision showing our bias already
in the phrase mental picture? I wonder about bats, but
not as much as I wonder about aliens. What is
it like to be an alien? Do they have some
version of our set of senses? Is their experience as
alien to us as bats might be, or is it

(00:51):
much more alien? I'm curious about this, not just because
it's a fun thought experiment, but because I wonder about
how it shapes alien science. If they have a very
different mental picture or sonogram or concept of the universe,
how does that affect how they study it, what questions
they ask, and maybe most crucially, how they express their

(01:13):
answers their understanding. This is one slice of a larger
question that I dig into in my new book, Do
Aliens speak physics, where I imagine what it might be
like to chat with visiting aliens about how the universe
works and whether we'll have much science in common. If
you're a listener to this podcast, I think there's a
lot about this book you would enjoy, So please support

(01:36):
me and the book and the project and order a copy.
Thanks very much to all of you who already have.
Consider today's episode a little taste test of do Aliens
Speak Physics? So welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Alien Universe.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
I'm Kelly Waiter Smith. I what do I do?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
I don't remember how to start a podcast right, I.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Don't remember who I am without this podcast. Hello, I'm
Kelly Waidner Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm
excited because today is sort of like the intersection of
physics and biology.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm not a
biologist or a philosopher.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
No, no, no, we are both so out of practice.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by training. But I've
been waiting for this day because I can't wait to
talk to you about.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Aliens and Daniel wrote the best book about aliens, and
we're going to start talking about that today. And my
question for you, Daniel, based on the topic that we're
discussing today, is if you could perceive one thing that
humans currently cannot perceive, what would it be.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh, my gosh, I absolutely know the answer to that question.
Oh wait, no, can I get too?

Speaker 2 (03:04):
No?

Speaker 3 (03:05):
No, yeah, sure, it's our ritrary why not?

Speaker 1 (03:08):
My first answer was spatial curvature. Oh, you know, I
think the universe is mysterious, partly because we can see
a lot of it and we have to infer it.
But if we could directly see the actual curvature of space,
look at a black hole and see how space is
bent around it, I think we could learn a lot
about general relativity and about the nature of space. And

(03:28):
I think we wouldn't even have to have learned it.
It could be intuitive, you know, it could just be
something that we naturally understand. And so, yeah, I would
love if we could somehow directly see or experience the
curvature of space itself. Is that a weird thing to say?

Speaker 3 (03:44):
No, No, it's a much more selfish answer than mine,
or sorry, let selfless selfless answer than mine. You you
would like to be able to contribute to our understanding
of the universe. I want to see pretty flowers better.
So so I doway your answer way better than mine,
and go ahead. I'll give you the second one. What
is the second thing that you wish you could perceive?

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Oh? I wish I could see quantum effects. I wish
I could see things in superposition. You know, like if
a photon is approaching your eye and has a chance
to hit your left eyeball or your right eyeball, you
can only see it in one eyeball. You can only
experience like a tiny little flash of light. You can't
experience both probabilities because we're big, classical things. But if
we were like somehow weirdly small and quantum, then we

(04:25):
could interact with it without collapsing its wave function and
somehow experience things in superposition that would be really weird
and awesome. And maybe then again we would have some
cool intuition for the way the universe worked, and we
wouldn't struggle so much to understand quantum mechanics. I just
also really hunger to know, like what other kinds of
experiences are? You know? One thing is like how we

(04:48):
interact with the universe. The other part of it is
like how we actually experience it. You know, these qualitia
that are generated in our minds. You know, when your
eyeballs see a certain wavelength of photon and then your
brain tells you read right. The red is not part
of the photon. It's part of your experience. And I
just think it would be incredible if your brain could
generate new kinds of experiences, Like if we could somehow

(05:11):
see space time or see superposition. What would that be Like?
This is a part of me that wants to sit
on the rooftop smoke banana peels and just wonder.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
I feel like if you could see superpositions, wouldn't the
world be kind of overwhelming because you'd be seeing, like,
you know, all of these sort of probabilities happening. And
I think that would be too much for me. I'd
be overwhelmed.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, the world is already overwhelming. I mean, think about
all the things that your body is interacting with and sensing.
Mostly your brain is filtering it out to put together
this story for you about your life and your experience
and the environment around you. It's highly highly filtered already.
So if we could see quantum effects or space time curvature.
That would just be like another part of the story.

(05:52):
I don't know how your brain would sort it all out,
but your brain already has to filter through the chaos
to tell you what the world around you is.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Like, yeah, but I'm that Daniel, So that's okay. But
you know what I want to see that I think
would not be overwhelming and I would absolutely love to see.
So like, bumblebees can see a greater wavelength of light
than we can, and there's a bunch of things on
flowers that are meant to attract bumble bees that we
can't see. I would love to see flowers in all

(06:19):
of their intended glory, you know, like those other colors
are meant to signal to bees who are their pollinators,
that like I'm beautiful, I'm amazing, come over here, and
I'm missing it, and I wish I could see those things.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
I think that would be amazing.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
I totally agree that there's a lot to the universe
where missing, and it feels frustrating that we can't interact
with that. But I'm curious why you put those particular
emotions and experiences on the bee and the flower, Like
do you think the bee has to think it's beautiful?
Does the bee choose pretty flowers? Couldn't there just be
something much more basic and simple about the bees decisions,

(06:54):
like smell good or something.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Yeah, I totally over anthropomorphs five or whatever. Yeah, No,
I don't think it was cute though. Yeah, I don't
think the flower is thinking anything. I think the flower
is just like when I have more of this color,
I get more insects walking on my face and like,
and the insects are like, oh, there's this very bright
stimulus over there, and I should go over to that
stimulus because my brain is telling me to approach the stimulus.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, I don't think it's bumblebee.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
As being like I love you flower, but uh but
I still wish I could see more colors.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, it'd be interesting to go to an art gallery
with the bumblebee be like, which ones.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Do you like? Yeah, that's all right.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
You know, if I could just like switch between the
different visual systems of the different organisms that I study,
that would be like such a great way to know
how to you know, like did I design the experiment
correctly or you know, or the animals seeing something I
don't see.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
I think that would be pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
It would be amazing to get to switch, like, let
me see the universe from a dog's point of view. Okay,
now from a bath's point of view. Okay, now I'm
a dolphin, because it would help shake us out of
the box that we're in. You know, I feel like
we experience the universe a certain way, and from that
we assume the universe is a certain way. But there's
so much out there that we're missing, and we would
be so much better informed and probably more clever about

(08:06):
figuring out how things work if we had more than
one angle on it.

Speaker 4 (08:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yep, we could somehow triangulate the universe.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yes, side note that maybe should get cut out. So
you said, and now I'm a dolphin. My daughter came
home and she was like, you know, my friend and
I we were talking about animals and how we're both furries.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
And I was like, and how you're both what darling?
And she's like furries and I was.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Like, and you're imagining this conversation you're gonna have with her.
You're like, well, okay, let's talk about that.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
And then Zach was in the room and he goes, Kelly, no,
and I was like, and instead, I said, what does
that mean to you? And she said it means me
like pretending to be animals for a little while. And
I was like, that's different than.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
It means for adults.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
But anyway, I didn't say that, and I just said, well,
that's a lot of fun. Be careful who you say
that too. I love you, And that was the end.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Well, there's something wonderful about children's imagination and how they're
able to imagine being other creatures. And something I wonder
about is how creatures on Earth experience the universe, but
also creatures out there in the universe, because of course
all the creatures on Earth share this environment we all
evolved in. And when I think about how the universe
works and how aliens might be figuring it out, one

(09:22):
of the first questions you have to ask is like, well,
what part of the universe are they seeing? What is
it like to be an alien? If Kelly could put
on her alien goggles? You know, how many of those
different goggles are there? Anyway? Are they vastly difference from
the ones that we wear? And how much would that
change our understanding of the universe.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
I am dying to know, and I'm dying to know
what our listeners think, and so we asked our listeners
how do aliens perceive the universe?

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Thanks very much to everybody who jumped in with crazy speculation,
lots of fun. If you would like to join the crew,
write to us two questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org.
Here's what everyone had to say.

Speaker 4 (10:02):
Aliens could sense fields, magnetic fields or other fields that
could so differently, so in ultra volt and all what
kind of thing. There's probably no limit to what other
creatures could use.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
It's kind of hard to speculate and imagine a sense
that we don't have. Maybe a magnetic sense. Maybe they
have a magnetic planet as well, and they can sense
magnetic north if.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
They are very advanced, maybe they also have quantum sense.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
I think the sense of sight, observation, recordation, and analysis.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
Well, life on Earth has such a variety of senses.
It's hard to think of anything that's not already been invented.
Maybe the ability to detect X rays or some other
form of light.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
What alien life does exist up there?

Speaker 5 (10:54):
Would see the university with either the vibrations radiation, and
that's about it.

Speaker 6 (11:01):
If I were an alien and could choose a sense.
I would like quantum entanglement sense, an instantaneous perception of
distant correlated particles. This would allow for faster than lifestyle coordination,
seamless real time exploration, navigation, and teamwork.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
It gotta be vision. Whether aliens and humans we actually
do sense gravity, but maybe they can sense mass, velocity,
momentum of what's around them, maybe they can sense brain waves.

Speaker 6 (11:27):
Right, just because physics is going to be the same,
there's no reason to think they would evolve a completely
different way of sensing the world around them.

Speaker 5 (11:35):
What would be visible light to them would be determined
by the composition of their local star and their planet's atmosphere,
so they might see a completely different spectrum than we do,
and their brain would interpret colors for something that we
can't even imagine.

Speaker 4 (11:54):
Well, we have animals that currently use son art to
navigate their world, bats and dolphins, but neither of those
species has made it into space.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
All right, Well, it looks like some of our listeners
are imagining that aliens have that sort of quantum sense
that you were talking about, that they could perceive things
at that level. That's a very good imagination in my
opinion that had not occurred to me.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
I was like, more colors.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
I love the answer that comments that bats and dolphins
haven't made it out into space and so maybe sonar
isn't like the kind of sense that takes you across
the universe. And my response to that is like, are
you sure, dude? Maybe all those UFO videos are like
the Secret Dolphin Air Force.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
WHOA, Yeah, we're gonna get trippy on today's episode.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
No, I'm just trying to cash in on all the
UFO cryptozoology nonsense.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
There's a lot of it these days. You have a
lot of opportunities. Okay, so it's time to jump in.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
At the beginning of the episode, we talked about a
couple things that we can't perceive that you would like
to perceive. So how much of the universe do we
perceive as humans?

Speaker 1 (13:02):
Yeah, it's a great question. It's important to start with
our perception because I think that a lot of people
have the impression that we mostly understand what's around us. Yeah,
there are mysteries about how it works, but there aren't
like things hiding from us that the things you see
in the universe. Your mental model of the universe is
what's out there that are your senses give you some

(13:22):
sort of like direct revelation of reality. Right, your legs
are out there in front of you, your desk is
over here, your dog is sitting over there. That you
understand what's around you in the universe. And it's not
that I'm saying that your senses are lying to you,
that your dog is a hologram or something.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Could be that too, though I'm not gonna.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Rule that out right, I haven't met your dog. Who knows, right,
Let's keep an open mind. Maybe your dog is an alien.
But the point is that there is a lot more
going on in the universe that we don't see. So like, yes,
your senses tell you a lot about the universe, but
there's a lot more out there that they're not telling you.
And the most immediate is just in the form of light.

(14:01):
Like your eyes reveal a lot about the universe, but
they only capture a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. Right,
All those flowers out there are beautiful in ways that
Kelly will never experience. Remember that the wave vision works

(14:21):
is photons hit your eyeball and if they have the
right frequency, they flip some protein switch which sends a
message up your optic nerve, and so your brain can
then interpret that. But the electromagnetic spectrum is really really wide,
from radio to infrared and then a little slice of
the visible and then uv X ray and gamma rays
at the very top end. And the universe looks different

(14:43):
in each one, Kelly was saying earlier, Like you like
to put on a bat's goggles or a dog's goggles. Right,
different animals see a different subset. Mostly it's all concentrated
near the visible range. But the universe looks different in
each wavelength. It's not just like, Okay, your dog sees
the same stuff, it's a little dimmer, or it's in
black and white, or an ant sees it in fractal

(15:04):
patterns or something crazy. Right, the universe really does look
very different in each wavelength, because different stuff in the
universe is either opaque or transparent depending on the wavelength
of light you're using.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, and evolution has sort of tinkered with what we're
allowed to perceive and has focused in on the information
that's most helpful for particular kinds of organisms. And this
sort of left the rest of the stuff out so
that your brain doesn't get overwhelmed, or at least that's
my sense. Was that your sense by when you were
doing this research.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah, exactly what senses you have don't just depend on
what information is out there. Senses are expensive, right, You've
got to grow an eyeball, you've got to maintain it,
you got to give it blood. It costs energy and resources.
So you're only going to develop it if it's useful,
and you're only going to do the work necessary to
make it sensitive to the UV if that's useful. It's
got to have a survival benefit, right, Like wings would

(15:55):
be awesome. We don't have wings why because it cost
a lot to make wings and to make the rest
of your body light enough to fly. So that's why, like,
not every single critter out there has wings. So it's
got to be useful in your context for your.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Survival, and there needs to be an evolutionary path to
get there. Maybe we don't really have an evolutionary path
to get to wings at this point, but anyway, Yes,
no wings, which is another bummer.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
I'm definitely never going to be light enough to have
wings that were Yeah, no, that's not in my future either,
No me either. But you know, we have conquered this
a little bit with technology.

Speaker 4 (16:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
We have eyeballs which only see in a certain wavelength,
but we have telescopes which can see in other wavelengths,
Like the James Webspace telescope is an infrared telescope because
astronomers recognize that the universe looks very different in the
infrared than it does in the visible You know, for example,
in the infrared, glass is opaque. Glass, which light can

(16:49):
fly through in the visible spectrum, is opaque in the infrared.
So if you like to try to look out a
window in the infrared, infrared light does not pass through glass,
and so if you take a picture of the universe
in the you see different stuff out there in the universe,
Like infrared light can pass through different stuff than visible lights.
So if you want to see through gas and dust,
you look through an infrared telescope, you get a different

(17:11):
picture of the universe. We also have X ray telescopes, so.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
You look through an infrared telescope, and then you need
some sort of technology to translate that into something our
brains can perceive.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Right.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
So one of the things that frustrates me about thinking
about wavelengths I can't see is that I can't even
really imagine what other colors would look like, because I, yeah,
I just I wouldn't even know where to start. Yeah,
And so how well do we understand what we see
in the infrared since it needs to be translated into
something we can see.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, I think this is something people don't widely understand.
When you get one of those beautiful images of the
James Web space telescope, it's showing it to you in
the visible If you put your eyeball where the telescope was,
you would not see the same thing, right, you would
see whatever visible light is going through the universe at
that moment. But the picture from the James Web is
of the infrared, and your eyeballs would totally ignore that.

(18:00):
And so if there was, for example, no visible light there,
you would just see black. You wouldn't see anything. And
so if they wanted to be as accurate as possible,
and they took the image from James Web and they
made a picture on your screen which emitted photons of
the same wavelength that were absorbed, you wouldn't see it either.
It would just look black. So in order for you
to see it, you're right, they shift those wavelengths up
into the visible. So again, that's not how the universe looks.

(18:23):
And so I think what you're suggesting is to really
experience it, you'd need an eyeball which could receive the
original photons, and then your brain would have to have
some kind of new response, some sort of like deepest
darkest red, or some new colors out there. Yeah, exactly,
And so you can't really experience what the universe looks
like in infrared. You need to shift it into the
visible and sort of mentally keep track of the fact ooh,

(18:44):
this is actually infrared light, and I'm seeing it translated.
And that's important because if we have to translate it
back into the visible, it means that we're translating it
back into something we find intuitive. It tells you something
about how we experience, interpret, and understand the universe. Were
always translating everything we experience back into our intuition, which

(19:05):
is partially determined by our native senses. And so the
bigger project of like trying to unravel the mystery of
the universe is a project of transforming the weird universe
that's out there that doesn't always align with our experience
of it into something we can intuitively understand into something
we can imagine seeing directly with our senses, but that's

(19:25):
not something we physically can do.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
Okay, So we've talked about things that we can see. Next,
let's talk about some things that we can't perceive. And
let's do that after the break. All right, we're back

(19:56):
and we spent the last segments sort of patting ourselves
on the back for things that we could see. And
now we are going to, you know, be a little
bit bummed out by having Daniel tell us about all
the things that we can't perceive.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Right, So, we can see some wavelengths of light, we
can't see most of the wavelengths of light. But there's
other stuff out there that we can't see, no matter
what energy it has, and it's everywhere. So an example
are neutrinos. Right. Neutrinos are produced by the Sun. There's
lots and lots and lots of them. Every sentence we
say on this podcast, there's about a trillion neutrinos that

(20:27):
pass through your fingernails. Who like a trillion? It's a
huge number, right, And we are pretty far away from
the Sun, and so for there to be a trillion
neutrinos that passed with this tiny little area of all
of your fingernails, this far away from the Sun, not
trying to imagine how many neutrinos are coming out of
the surface of the Sun. So the entire Solar system
filled with neutrinos, like almost uncountably many neutrinos, but they

(20:52):
just pass right through us. We don't feel them, they
don't feel us. It's like another universe sort of on
top of ours that we hardly interact with at all.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
And all of them come from the Sun.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Not all of them come from the Sun. They are
also cosmic rays sources of neutrinos, their neutrinos from the
center of the galaxy. There are neutrinos from nobody knows
where that are super high energy, just like other kinds
of cosmic rays. Neutrino astronomy is a fascinating area with
just beginning. We have cool, awesome neutrino telescopes at the
South Pole that can see when neutrinos penetrate into the

(21:23):
ice and create a muon And they've instrumented the ice
in a cubic mile like literally they drill down a
mile and they drop these cameras and then they fill
it back with water again and freeze it into the ice.
So there's a cubic mile of ice that they have
as a Terenkov detector to see muons moving faster than
the speed of light in ice. It's really incredible, and

(21:46):
you see those muons that are created by cosmic neutrinos.
So anyway, neutrinos are out there. They're not rare, right,
they're weird, but they're everywhere, but we can't send them.
No part of our body interacts with them very well.
A neutrino only feels the weak interaction. It doesn't feel
the electromagnetic because it has no charge, doesn't feel a
strong force. So the only way for a neutrino to

(22:07):
interact with our bodies or with most kinds of matter
is the weak interaction, which is super duber weak. So
if you built like a wall made of lead, you'd
have to make it a light year thick a light
year wow thick before a neutrino would have a fifty
percent chance of interacting with some part of that lead.
So that's how little we can interact with neutrinos. And

(22:29):
that tells you that there's a lot going on in
the universe, literally trillions of things per second that you
cannot see, that are just sort of here, also in
parallel to us, that we don't interact with, that are
invisible and intangible.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
When you were talking about the Tankov detector, I think
you said that we're not actually detecting the neutrinos directly.
We're detecting the muons that get produced by the neutrinos.
So these we still can't see. We only know they're
there based on the things that they create.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Is that right?

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Exactly? Occasionally, once in a zillion times, and neutrino will
interact with a piece of ice and create a muon
which we can see, and the presence of the muon
tells us that a neutrino is there. But yeah, we
don't have like a neutrino track. We can't say here's
the path of the neutrino, because no neutrino ever interacts
more than once. Even to have an interact once with
normal matter is like astronomically unlikely, which is why you

(23:20):
need like gollillions of neutrinos to ever see any of them.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Wow, it's amazing we know anything about them at all.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah, and this is something we've discovered only in the
last few decades, and we have built neutrino eyeballs that
can see neutrinos right that like tap into this enormous
river of information that's happening right on top of us.
Neutrino's one of the most common particles in the universe.
Really everywhere we like live in a neutrino ocean, a

(23:47):
neutrino river, and we've built these incredible detectors that are
capable of very occasionally forcing a neutrino to reveal itself.
And with that you can look out into the universe
and you can see super cool stuff, like, for example,
you can see the Sun in the middle of the
night because to neutrinos, the Earth is transparent. It's like

(24:07):
just barely there.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
Man.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
So you have a neutrino detector, it doesn't matter if
the Sun is on the other side of the Earth
or not. There's no day or night in neutrino light
because the Earth is like a pane of glass to neutrinos.
And so you can keep your neutrino detector running during
the night. And they've taken a picture through the Earth
of the Sun in neutrinos. It's super awesome. You should

(24:30):
google it.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
Okay, so they took a picture of the Sun through
the Earth, but we don't have detectors. So were they
looking for muon things in the Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
They were looking for upward going muons, muons from neutrinos
that have passed through the Earth. And you can tell
even at night that there's a bright source of neutrinos
on the other side of the Earth. You can tell
where the Sun is using only neutrinos, which is pretty cool.
That is wild, But the sense that it gives you
is that, wow, there's a lot going on. You sit
in your room and you watch TV. You have no

(25:02):
idea that there's like gazillions of neutrinos flying in the
air between you and the TV, everywhere right flying right
through you. There's a lot going on in the universe
that we are not sensing.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
And I guess it doesn't surprise me that much that
we don't have sensors for neutrinos because they're mostly not
interacting with things. They're not hurting us, they're not really
doing anything that's important for our survival.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
They're just kind of there. Is that fair, that's true.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
I think a couple of things going on. One is
like would it be useful, right, And your point you're
making is like they don't really tell you much except
for like basically where is the sun? Right, which maybe
at night it'd be nice to know, like how far
are we from dawn? But yeah, that's pretty marginal. On
the other hand, like petrinos have a lot of energy.
There's an incredible amount of energy. If we could develop,
like neutrinosynthesis some way to capture that energy, you could

(25:50):
continue to get energy at night, right, Plants wouldn't be
limited to growing only during the day if they could
develop some sort of neutrinosynthesis. But the other obstacles like,
well is that technically possible? And the problem there is
neutrinos hardly interact and there's no way we know to
have any sort of reasonable interaction rate. And so yeah,
you could have materials which could absorb energy from neutrinos,

(26:11):
but it would be a tiny little dribble because we're
just not very good at it, and nothing we know
is capable of interacting with neutrinos.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Okay, so we can't see neutrinos. That's a bummer. What
else can we not see that's apparently maybe everywhere.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, neutrinos turn out to actually just be a clue
that there's a lot in the universe that we can see.
And famously on this podcast, we talked about dark matter. Right,
most of the mass of the universe is not the
kind of matter we have any interaction with, Like even
the weak interaction that we use to detect neutrinos is
not something dark matter is capable of. And most of

(26:46):
the matter in the universe, eighty percent of the mass
in the universe is dark matter. So we could interact
with a little slice of a little slice of the universe.
Most of the stuff that's out there that's shaped the
structure of galaxies, right, that is the reason why there's
stuff here and not out there that's holding the galaxy together.
We have a lot of gravitational evidence for we have

(27:09):
no other way to interact with it, not even the
weak interaction. And dark matter again is like neutrinos in
that it's everywhere. There's dark matter in the room with
me right now. I can't see it, I can't interact
with it, but it's here. It's not like dark matter
is some weird blob like a new galaxy. Nobody understood.
It fills the universe. We're moving through an ocean of

(27:31):
dark matter. This is again another part of the universe.
It's sort of like not like a parallel reality, because
it's part of ours, but it's a part of reality
that we cannot access. It's like being deaf or something. Right,
Think about what a deaf person is like. There's lots
of noise going on around them. They can't sense it.
And I don't know what it's like to be deaf,
but I imagine if you've been deaf since birth, you

(27:53):
might not even be able to conceive of what it's
like to hear. Apply that in extrapoli to dark matter, Like,
there's a lot going on around us, neutrinos and dark matter,
all this kind of stuff that we do not know
how to sense. We don't know what's going on, which
is totally clueless, and we can't even really imagine what
it would be like to know that it's there.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
I feel like that's a very humbling fact. Yeah, how
does it make you feel, Daniel, I'm putting out my
psychiatrist's head.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
Well, it makes me feel a combination of ignorant, right, like, wow,
the things that we think my sense of what the
universe is is deeply misinformed. Right, it's a little slice
of it. But also excited. Right, anytime we're ignorant about
the universe, that's an opportunity to learn to pull back
the veil of reality and say, oh, wow, the universe
actually is this other way and not the way that

(28:41):
we imagined. And so I would love to meet aliens
who have different senses who could like somehow detect dark
matter directly through I don't know what means, or they
figured out a way to make neutrino interactions higher probabilities
so they can like directly see neutrinos and have some
cool way to do it. I think it would be
incredible to meet aliens and to understand how they see
the universe and how that affects their ability to unravel

(29:04):
the mysteries of it. Right.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
So, if we make the assumption that natural selection shapes
organisms throughout the Solar system, which may or may not
be the case, I guess, but it seems like a
reasonable assumption. What survival benefit could you imagine for organisms
that can see dark matter or neutrinos or is it
only beneficial to see them once you get to the
stage where you're like trying to understand physics.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Well, if you could see dark matter, then you'd be
like the most awesome physicist. And physicists have a huge
evolutionary advantage because being a cool physicist makes everybody want
to have your babies. And so, I don't know, it
just seems kind of obvious.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Kelly, Okay, right.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
No joking aside, it's a good point. I don't know
that it is relevant, right, unless you're being made of
dark matter, Right, you're some kind of alien directly made
of dark matter, then obviously you'd want to sense dark matter.
But otherwise, yeah, dark matter is mostly irrelevant to our life.
And that's one reason why I took a long time
to discuss.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
It's not like it's affecting our life all the time
in ways that's just a mystery. You know, it doesn't
cause weather, It doesn't you know, change the growing season.
It doesn't like attract leopards to us or protect us
from hyenas or something. It is mostly irrelevant. We live
in a little corner of the sort of perceptoverse and
we see most of the useful stuff in that slice

(30:22):
of the universe, But it's not all of the universe.
So yeah, it's not until you want to extrapolate outside
of the part of the universe you directly sense that
you need to think about these other parts of the universe.
But you know, aliens may have grown up in a
different part of the percepto verse, they may interact with
it differently, they may have different needs. You know, I

(30:42):
think the question you're asking is also like, how likely
is it that aliens grow up in an environment where
they need other senses than the ones that we have.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
Right, or in particular where they need senses that pick
up on neutrinos in dark matter.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
But yes, and that's a great question. But to answer that,
I think we again need to look at the experience
here on Earth, because even here on Earth we see
a very broad variety of the kind of senses. There
are animals out there that have senses that we don't have, right,
and so even though we all share in this common
environment on Earth, there is I think a broader sense

(31:14):
of animal sensation than most people understand.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah, absolutely, so let's dive into those animal senses because
this is the you know, like biology part that I'm
super excited about although everything we've said so far about
physics has been fascinating, but biology, let's get.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Into it for people who want to understand aliens. Of course,
it feels a little boring to like turn around and say, like,
let's talk about animals on Earth. But you know, the
argument is that if there are things that evolved many
times on Earth, then that's a clue, right, It's a
clue that maybe this is something that's very common, it's
easy to evolve, and therefore more likely to evolve out

(31:49):
there in the rest of the galaxy. And if there's
something that took a long time to evolve or evolve
just once, you know, like human intelligence, then we think
maybe that's something that's more rare, or maybe that's less
likely to have evolved in the rest of the universe.
Of course, this is all an equals one examples, and
so you have to be very careful about extrapolading. But
I think it's the best that we can do.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
If I could just push back for a second, like
if something evolves once instead of evolving multiple times, Instead
of that meaning that it's not important to me, that
could mean that it's supremely important. Like it popped up
once and then nothing ever lost it because you can't
survive if you lose it, or something like that in
a world where it's important, and so I could see
many times it evolving or it only evolving once in

(32:32):
everything keeping it either one of those arguing that it's
important personally.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
Yeah, I see what you're saying. It depends also on
how long it takes to evolve, right, Because we're asking
not just is it important, but is it common that
if it takes a long time to evolve, that suggests
that it sort of like requires a certain set of circumstances.
Even if it does give you a huge benefit, it
might be a difficult thing. It might be like one
in a gazillion chances for the molecules to align for evolution.

(32:58):
To put this together, Yeah, yep, and a fascinate the
example of the sort of timeline there is hearing, Right,
we think of like hearing is obviously important and so
many critters on Earth can hear. But it turns out
that hearing only evolved like about half a billion years ago. Right,
there was billions of years of life on Earth without

(33:18):
basically ears.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
What was there not?

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Was there less to hear, like, was it just bacteria
moving around quietly tiptoeing their way.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Through the earth.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Nobody really knows, of course, and this is like you know,
digging through the fossil record and speculating, and so we
know very very little. But the evolutionary biologists I've talked
to suggested that that coincides with the explosion of large,
multicellular life. So life went from single to multicellular many
times actually in the evolution of life on Earth, which

(33:48):
is in itself super fascinating and we should dig into
another episode. But around five hundred or six hundred million
years ago, life got big and noisy, and like Auric
Kerschbaum the zoology said, you know that no ecosystem can
exist for long with that's someone trying to take a
bite out of someone else. And so his speculation is
that things got big and noisy, and animals wanted to

(34:09):
eat each other, and so then it was an advantage
to be able to hear somebody sneaking up on you
and like, is my lunch moving around in the bushes,
And so basically, as soon as life got big and noisy,
hearing evolved. And so that's suggestive, right that it's not
too complicated. As soon as it was useful, boom, hearing evolved.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
So it sounds like it evolved quickly once it became possible.
Do we know how many times hearing evolved.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
It's something people are working on. Still. There's a bunch
of fascinating includes because there are different pieces of hearing
that all have to come together. Like, on one hand,
there are lots of different kinds of ears, right like
our ears and dogs ears and insect ears. They all
look really different, and it might give you the sense
like hmm, maybe they all work really differently and they
all evolved independently. But if you dig into it, underneath it,

(34:56):
there's only really two sort of fundamental mechanisms for or
interacting with sound, even if your ears are very different shapes.
And there's the vertebrate and the invertebrate. So vertebrates basically
vertebrates like us have these systems of hairs like we
have in our ears that respond to frequencies based on
the length and the thickness of the hair. Essentially the
string tension of the hair sort of like an equalizer

(35:18):
in your stereo. Right, the hair is like shake when
the right frequency comes along and unless you like basically
decomposed sound into frequencies super amazing biological technology. That's one mechanism.
But invertebrates, insects, et cetera, have a completely different mechanism.
They have like a drum stretched surface or that vibrates
in response to different sounds. And so there are these

(35:39):
two different mechanisms, and that suggests like, okay, maybe there
were two times that hearing evolved. But then my friend
Matt Georgiani sent me a paper suggesting that, like, underneath
it all, there's a biochemical pipeline there that might be
actually in common and so it could be that there's
one core development which gave us the need to be

(36:00):
sensitive to sound, and the rest of it is just
sort of like frosting on the cake. But you know,
this is all very fresh research. We don't really know
the answer. It's super fascinating to me that to dig
into the history of this and wonder, like how many
different ways of hearing evolved and then died out right,
maybe those things were outcompeted.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
It's amazing it is, and it involves chemistry.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
So I guess if chemistry helps us understand biology, we
ought to give it a shot. But on that note,
so we've talked about hearing and how hearing differs in
the animal kingdom. Let's go ahead and take a break,
and when we come back, we'll talk about some other
senses that earthlings have. All Right, So I've already complained

(36:58):
that like birds and insects can see a greater range
of wavelengths than I can, or at least can see
some wavelengths that I can't. What other things can animals
on this planet that I share with them? What can
they do that I can't, or what can they do better?

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Well, on the topic of things that birds can see
that you can't, have you heard the story of the
ultraviolet tits.

Speaker 3 (37:22):
When I was interviewing for grad school in an animal
behavior lab, I had not heard about great tits before,
which at Paris Major, this is a bird species, and
I had a deer in the headlights look when the
professor whose lab I was interviewing and asked me about
great tits. But anyway, I recovered eventually I thought that

(37:42):
must be a species of some sorts and I got
into that person's lab. So anyway, okay, go ahead, tell
me about the ultra violet tits.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
The ultraviolet tits are a species of bird that look
just sort of generic. They're one of these LBJs as
the birders call them, you know, little brown jobs. But
when they discovered is that those these birds don't look
very spectacular in the visible. In the ultraviolet, they are
absolutely fabulous. And they discover this using vasoline, and so
they put vasiline on some of these birds. Because vasoline

(38:12):
is opaque to ultraviolet. You can see through it in
the visible, but it blocks the ultraviolet. And so birds
that used to be like sexually very popular when you
put vasiline on them, no longer were the ladies interested.
And then if you take pictures of them in the ultraviolet,
you can see all these colors and patterns. They are
just not visible to us without ultra violet eyes. So, yes, Kelly,

(38:34):
you're missing out on the ultra violet tits because of
your limited eyeballs and mine, and I.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Am missing out on a lot of not safe for
work jokes.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
But I'm going to contain myself and let's move on
to the next the next sense.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
You know, there's some things that I think are very
well known, like bats and dolphins, for example, use echolocation
to understand what's out there in the universe. Dogs have
a much richer sense of smell in the universe, you know,
akin to like seeing other frequent these of light. Dogs
can pick up on so many tiny, microscopic amounts of things.
And you know what it's like to be a dog

(39:07):
to experience the universe primarily through smell and with poor vision.
Can't even imagine. Those are fairly well known, But I
think more fascinating are the things that are less familiar,
which are directly sensing fields, right, And one of the
listeners commented like, wouldn't it be amazing to be able
to sense fields directly? Magnetic fields, electric fields? And you know,
there's fascinating research about how birds migrate across the world

(39:30):
and whether they have some sort of internal compass that
interacts with magnetic fields. And we talked about it once
in the podcast before. There used to be a theory
that birds use these pairs of electrons that would flip spin,
and the spin flip of the electrons would change in
response to magnetic field that maybe they were sensing that
using some proteins in their eyes. But I think then

(39:51):
you commented that there's actually another theory or that's no
longer the number one theory of how birds sense magnetic fields.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
I see lots of smart things that might be a
smart thing, I said, but I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
I do remember.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
We were talking about humpback whales and whether or not
they sense magnetic fields, and the current understanding was if so,
we have no idea how they do it. Yeah, and
so I don't know where we are with birds right now, but.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
We do know that lots of fish can sense or
even generate electric fields directly. Right. They have these organs
in their body they can create like electric pulses, like
you're all familiar with electric eelds, right, They just generate
like a bolt of electricity. Well, in some cases it's
very useful to be able to sense electric fields left
by other organisms. Like our bodies all have electric fields

(40:36):
because our neurons work on electric currents. And so I'm
generating an electric field right now. And if I could
directly sense electric fields, I could like tell through a
wall whether somebody was at my door or stuff like that.
There's all sorts of ways you can interact with the universe,
and fish do this. It's not like a hypothetical. This
is something that's out there in the universe available for

(40:57):
bodies to interact with, and you don't have to go
to some alien planet to find an example of it,
like you just have to look underwater.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
Okay, So, as far as I know, electric fields like
this are only sensed by fish, and fish are aquatic.
Is there something about being an aquatic organism that makes
picking up on electric fields easier or more useful?

Speaker 1 (41:15):
I think it's actually more difficult because water is a conductor, So,
for example, electromagnetic signals propagate more easily through air. But
I think it depends also a lot on the frequency, right,
because obviously, like photons move through water and they're electromagnetic fields,
so it must depend a lot on the frequency. Yeah,

(41:35):
it's a good question.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
Oh apparently platypus and dolphins can also, but they are
aquatic organisms. And so anyway, so interesting, what a counterintuitive
world we live in, all right?

Speaker 1 (41:46):
And so all of this, of course is fascinating because
we're curious about the biology of life on Earth. But
you know, in my book do Aliens speak physics? The
number one question is how do aliens think about the universe?
What mysteries of physics have they Any are they tackling
the same questions, and so this question of perception is
important because we want to understand how aliens might see

(42:07):
the universe, which dictates the questions they ask and the
answers that they will accept. And so all of this
of course building up to the question of you know,
how do aliens see the universe?

Speaker 2 (42:19):
Right, the question that keeps Daniel up at night.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
All right, and so what are some options for how
aliens might perceive the universe different than we do?

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, So we talked about some of them already, which
I think are pretty unlikely, you know, seeing dark matter,
seeing neutrinos. To have an eyeball they could see neutrino,
you'd need like an eyeball the size of the Earth,
And it seems pretty unlikely to me that you're going
to generate that massive an organ for very little payoff.
So I think that would be very expensive. But you know,

(42:48):
there is another option out there that I'm kind of
surprised we don't have, and so aliens might develop it,
which essentially is telepathy. You know, we were talking about
how our bodies work on electric fields. Well, you're brain
is electromagnetic, right, there's currents in your brain, and the
way it operates is through electromagnetism, and electromagnetism can be

(43:08):
transmitted through the air and it can be received through
the air. Right, That's how radios work. So it's not
conceivable that in your brain you could develop basically an
antenna which can generate electromagnetic pulses not too far afield
from what fish and eels can do, and could receive
electromagnetic pulses. Right, And if you could do this, then

(43:29):
I could send you a message brain to brain without
going through sound or without like using some hand gesture,
basically telepathy. And so there's no reason why we shouldn't
be able to communicate brain to brain. I don't know
why we have it. It seems pretty awesome, or maybe
you'd be terrible.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah, So, first of all, when you said telepathy, I
thought maybe were we going to start talking about Bigfoot
or some other cryptid And I wasn't sure I was
on the right podcast. But when I was talking to
the Brain computer interface community, they were saying that they
are essentially trying to like take messa from our brains
and connect the messages so we can all sort of
like humanity as a whole could share all of our

(44:06):
thoughts together.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
I find that horrifying.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
I think that I get through my life much better
because most of my thoughts don't get shared, and only
the nice ones get shared.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
I think social media is taught us that knowing what
fifteen year olds think is usually a bad idea.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
But I wonder, so you know that these brain computer
interfaces I think would include a step where there's a
lot of processing of the electromagnetic information before it goes
from one brain to another. Do you think I mean, so,
there's so many signals that would need to get like
aggregated to give us a memory or a thought. Could
you really transmit that information from one brain to another

(44:43):
just with like the mess of electromagnetic information that comes
out of our brain because that information is also like
Kelly is breathing right now, Kelly's moving her hands. It
seems like it would be very muddled. It would be
hard to know exactly what's going on with the message.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
Well, the same question could be applied to how we
speak to each other, right, Like Daniel, how could you
possibly convey what it's like to smell a rose just
by pushing sound waves? Through the air at Kellty like
that seems impossible, But you know there's a process there.
I think about it, I decide how to capture it.
I represent it somehow, I push it. You interpret it.

(45:17):
Maybe it comes across wrong. It's not going to be
like here's Daniel's entire brain experience. It's like I'm sending
you a message. You could start with pings, you know,
morse code, something very simple. It doesn't have to be
like full direct access to my brain. It's just a
way for me to communicate with you without going through sounds.
So like astronauts, right, could just like talk to each
other without needing radios, essentially basically biological radios. And it's

(45:42):
not impossible. I don't know why we don't have it.
It seems like as we evolve it could have been useful,
but I guess not. I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But
it also doesn't seem to me to be impossible to
imagine that aliens could have this kind of biological apparatus.
Maybe they find it useful to stay closer together or
to communicate in situations where voice or smell or site

(46:03):
is not helpful.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Yeah, well, and maybe this is the future of podcasting.
We can just really think our conversations hard at the extraordinaries,
and they'll be like they can communicate with us, like, oh, Kelly,
that didn't make sense.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Try again, Oh sorry.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Sorry braincasting. Well you can't unsubscribe.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Oh no.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
And so that's just an example, and that's you know,
just out of our imagination. But I think there's lots
of situations out there evolutionarily that could create some need
for something we can't yet possibly imagine. So I think
there's lots of possible senses out there, and some of
them that could be available if aliens have a very
different environment than ours, Like in our environment, where we're

(46:44):
pretty big and we're pretty slow, we're not sensitive to
things like relativity, so we didn't need to be able
to see directly the curvature of space and time. And
we're not sensitive to quantum mechanics, which is why it
took us so long to discover quantum mechanics. But now
imagine super tiny aliens like microscopic aliens, and I don't

(47:04):
know how you evolve if you're super duper tiny, what
the biochemical infrastructure for life would look like in that scenario.
But if you were small enough to be able to
interact with photons in a quantum way into sense superposition,
so you could like taste electrons and like see quantum objects.
Then that would be a very different kind of sensation

(47:24):
of the universe. It would give you a very different
window into how the universe works. And so then you
just have to imagine like very different environments different from ours.
You know, vast aliens who are made of dark matter
and are as big as solar systems. Why not aliens
whose life works on very very long time scales instead

(47:45):
of short like hours, you know, where the solar system
looks chaotic instead of you know, slow and stately the
way it does on our time scales. It's so hard
to imagine these things because we're in our little human box.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
When you said earlier that you'd like to be able
to perceive objects in superposition, would you give up any
of your current senses to be able to see that?

Speaker 2 (48:06):
If so, which one?

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Oh my gosh, I cannot imagine giving up taste or
smell or sight or sound. So yeah, no, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (48:17):
I can't.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
I have it all killy, because thought experiments are meant
to be tough.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
I guess.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
And you know, as interesting as it is to imagine
the biology of these things, would it evolve underwe situations?
Might it evolve?

Speaker 4 (48:33):
To me?

Speaker 1 (48:33):
The reason these questions are important is because it shapes
how we think about the universe. Like we were saying earlier,
you take a picture of the universe in the infrared,
you translated into the visible. When we detect gravitational waves
from the rest of the universe, typically they're translated into sound,
so we can listen to the gravitational waves. Of course,
sound doesn't propagate through space gliding. Black holes do not

(48:56):
chirp as they eat each other. But that's how we
can make sense of it, right. And the lesson there
is the kind of senses that we have determine the
model of the universe we build in our brain. They determine,
like what's intuitive for us, as we've been talking on
the podcast a lot recently, what kind of answers we accept.
You know, if you ask me a question about the

(49:17):
universe and I explain it to you in ways that
are intuitive, you're like, Okay, yeah, that makes sense. This
planet goes around that planet. I can imagine it and
it clicks together in my mind. Well, the kind of
explanations that you accept depend on the kind of ways
you experience the universe, because that determines the language of
your intuition. And so if you are a quantum alien
or a dark matter being, or you can see neutrinos,

(49:39):
or you can hear other people's thoughts in your mind,
you could have a very different way to experience the universe,
which affects the questions, but then also fundamentally, it can
affect the answers that you accept and the way you
think about the universe, and therefore the kind of theories
you build about the universe.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
So if you've listened to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe
for thirty seconds ever, you know that Daniel loves aliens,
and he did an incredible amount of work for do
Aliens speak physics? And he interviewed a ton of different specialists,
and of course the chapter where he talked to the
biologist is the best chapter in.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
A fantastic book.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Although I got to say that chapter and how hard
it has been to translate other languages, was also particularly
like fascinating and at a bunch of stuff I didn't know.
So anyway, I highly recommend do Aliens speak physics if
you want to hear more on Daniel's thoughts both scientific
and philosophical, for what it would be like if we
were to encounter aliens and how we might be able
to communicate with them.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
And there's lots of really fun drawings in there by
my friend Andy Warner. He did an incredible job of
imagining what these aliens might look like.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Super fun.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Thanks very much everybody for going on this tour of
potential ways aliens might sense the universe and how it
could shape the way that they understand it. This is
part of our journey to understand what we do know
about the universe and what we are missing out on.
Thanks very much, everybody.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
See you next time.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
We would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
We really would. We want to know what questions you
have about this Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
If you contact us, we will get back to you.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at questions at Danielandkelly.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on
all of those platforms.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
You can find us at D and Kuniverse.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Don't be shy, write to us,