Listener Questions #20

Daniel and Kelly answer questions from listeners about aliens, archaea and the speed of light.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quick note before today's episodes to let you know about
my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics, which is available
for pre order now and can be at your house
on November fourth. It's all about my favorite scenario, aliens
arriving on Earth and what it would be like to
try to talk to them about physics. Is that really possible?
We don't know, but the book is a fun exploration

(00:21):
of the potential challenges. If you've enjoyed my science outreach,
this is a nice way to support me. Check it
out at www dot alienspeakphysics dot com. Okay, on to
today's episode. I like to think about alien life, But

(00:45):
where are they all? If aliens are so rife.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
If you don't metabolize and reproduce, then science says you're dead.
Does a recently discovered critter turn this definition on its head?

Speaker 1 (00:57):
A curious listener wants to know what would the universe
be like if light were very slow?

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's
answers will make it right.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Hello. I'm Kelly Wader Smith. I study parasites and space,
and I'm excited that we're talking about aliens today. And
the reason I'm excited about that is because I'm really
excited about this book that's coming out called Do Aliens
Speak Physics?

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Oh my gosh, for a moment, I thought you were
going to tell me about another book about aliens, so
it's going to scoop mine. Oh no, my nightmare. Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do love
thinking about aliens because I worry that the way we
do science is somehow infected with our humanity and there's
somebody out there getting deeper at the truth of the.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Matter infected by our humanity. That is a like surprisingly
negative view from you.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
I think I was trying to speak biology, you know,
like you know, it's trying to use some sort of
parasitical language there.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
I think you're implying that we're all like pessimists and negative.
But you know I am. So that's that's fine with me.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Well, thank you for bringing up my book, which is
coming out in November. It's called Do Aliens Speak Physics?
And you can get it all fine booksellers and probably
several others. And you're right that it's a little bit
pessimistic because the book is in response to my concern
that we were sort of putting ourselves at the center
of the universal intellectual stage by saying, like, everything we've

(02:39):
discovered is true, it's real, you know, it's universal that
other scientists around the galaxy will find the same thing.
To me, that smacks a little bit of like the
Earth is the center of the solar system or the universe,
you know, or we are important somehow on a cosmic stage.
And so I just wanted to ask, like, well, is
that really true? Are there ways that our humanity has

(02:59):
affected in our science? And so that's what the book
is about, is what aliens do physics differently? And how
could we know?

Speaker 2 (03:06):
And at a future date we will have a whole
episode talking about that question and what you learned while
you were researching that problem. But today I wanted to
ask you what is your favorite part of writing a book?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Very part of writing a book. Oh, it's definitely not
coming up with the title. I don't know why, but
that's so frustrating. It's so hard to capture everything about
the book in a few words. You know, you have
to like meet the reader where they are, get them interested,
tell them a little bit about the book. Also, it
should be like clever in some way. So, boy, that

(03:38):
is really tough. And you and I have had lots
of conversations and titles. It's tricky. Yeah, it's tricky. I
think my favorite two parts of writing a book are
having the initial idea, Like it's always fun to come
up with a new idea for a project, you know,
as an academic, Like new projects are shiny and fun,
and current projects are like, ugh, man, I just to
get that thing.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Finished, got to get it up the door.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
But also the research, like I love digging in deep
and reading a bunch of papers, and I wonder sometimes
like why didn't I just do this before? But for
some reason, like having a reason to dig in and
to read up about it and to learn about it.
If that excuses like I'm writing a book about this,
or I'm doing research for a listener or something. It's
easier to do, it's more fun. It feels like you're

(04:21):
allowed to do it instead of you just goofing off
and reading philosophy papers.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
I absolutely agree with you, and that is also why
I love our Listener Questions segment so much, is that
we whenever a question comes across my inbox where I'm like, oh,
I want to know more about that than I'm like,
that immediately goes in the listener questions pile. And then
while I'm researching it, I don't feel like I'm slacking off.
I'm doing my quote unquote work and it's awesome.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
There you go. And so, is that also your favorite
part of writing a book? The deep research dive?

Speaker 2 (04:51):
The two things I hate the most. I always write
the title last because I hate it, I agree, And
then I hate the part where I'm supposed to promote
the book and ask people for favors, And that's my
least favorite part, but it's part of the job. But no,
my favorite is just getting to do the research and
learning about new stuff, which is why I so rarely
write books about things I already know about, because I'd

(05:11):
rather have an excuse to read about something new and
like going through space law textbooks. On the one hand,
there were days where I'm like, why do I enjoy.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
This so much?

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Do I enjoy this? I'm not sure, I'm on the fence.
Then at the end of the day I'd be like,
oh my gosh, I just learned about like the laws
governing and the cosmos and that's pretty cool, and also
how they are inadequate, and so yeah, it's a fun
research topic.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
I think it's also really fun to discover the things
that are interesting to you. And you've done a day
of reading and then you come to dinner with a
family and you're like excited to talk about some nerdy
detail you read about that was really cool, or some
new critter or some crazy idea you thought about and
had never considered before. It shows you, like which parts
of the universe inspire you and connect with you. And

(06:00):
that's what I love about science, that there's just so
much like that we just find cool. I mean, it's
an emotional response, right, And this is actually one of
the things I'm curious about aliens, Like do aliens have
the same emotional reaction to the mysteries of the universe?
Are they curious? Do they care? Right? Is that human
or is that universal? That's like a very basic question

(06:20):
we don't know the answer to, but for me, it's
one of my favorite things about being human.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, and what I want to know is
do they care about us? Yeah, which leads us nicely
into our first question from a listener, So let's go
ahead and hear that question.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Hi, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Fermi paradox.
Is it really a paradox? While I think the theory
is about the great filter, like if there's some big
thing that always prevents beings from reaching interstellar travel. I
think that's a really interesting thought experiment. But in general,

(06:55):
I've never really seen the Fermi paradox as a true paradox,
just do to how big the universe is and how
spread out everything is, like the odds of two kinds
of intelligent life. Somehow intercepting just feels too unlikely not
to mention the significant time delay. Like if alien friends
from thirty thousand light years away, which is, you know,

(07:18):
relatively our neighbors on the scale of the universe, if
they sent out a signal right now, or even one
hundred years ago or a thousand years ago, we're not
getting that signal for tens of thousands of years. Still,
Am I right to think that this isn't really a paradox?
Or am I misunderstanding something or not thinking about it correctly.

(07:38):
I'd be happy to be proved wrong here, So I'm
looking forward to your answer, thank you.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yay, all right, Daniel, So tell us about the Fermi paradox,
which in an earlier version of the book that I
read explains the Fermi paradox. So if anyone wants to
dive deeper, they should check out your book. I assume
it's still in there.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah, So the Fermi paradox quickly is essentially asking, hey,
the galaxy is filled with stars and planets. There are
hundreds of billions of stars, and we now know that
most of them have planets and many planets, and so
there are tens of billions at least of rocky planets

(08:16):
around stars, which are a lot of places for aliens
to form and to learn and to develop technology and
to send us messages or to come visit us. And
space is big, but the Milky Way is not that
big compared to its age. I mean, the Milky Way
is like one hundred thousand light years across, so it
would take a long time to traverse it. But you know,

(08:37):
a long time is a few million years, and the
Milky Way is billions and billions of years old. We
think more than ten billion years old, and we've been
here for several billion. Of course, humanity is younger than that.
But you can imagine scenarios where aliens have traversed the
galaxy and left relics or filled it with messages. It's

(08:57):
not that difficult to imagine. So the question is where
is everybody? Why haven't we been contacted by aliens or
visited by aliens? So this famously and probably apocryphally, is
something Fermi said at lunch at Los Almos about fifty
or sixty years ago, and people have been wondering about since.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
But he did at some point make an equation, right,
So it maybe started as a lunch conversation, but where
did the equation come from?

Speaker 1 (09:22):
So this is an equation by Drake. That's the Drake
equation that tries to calculate how many aliens should be
contacting us. And it's pretty simple as an equations go.
It's just a multiplication of a bunch of factors. But
there's actually a lot you can learn just from the
structure of the equation. So the equation is like the
number of stars times the fraction that have planets, times

(09:42):
the fraction that might have life, times the fraction that
might be civilized, times of fraction you know that develop
technology and I don't remember exactly the structure of the terms,
but the fact that they're multiplied together is important because
that emphasizes that to hear from aliens, all of those
factors have to be non zero. Like, it doesn't matter
if the universe is filled with life, if none of

(10:03):
it is technological, right, if there's life everywhere but it's
all just like sheets of algae or heaps of microbes,
then we're not hearing from anybody, we're not getting visited.
Or if they become intelligent, but none of them ever
developed technology, for example, So all of those things have
to work. All of those factors have to be non
zero for us to hear. And we know that the

(10:25):
number of planets is large, number of stars is large.
We don't know, for example, what is the fraction of
those planets that have life on them. We know there's
one hours, but it could be the only one, and
the denominator is large, So it could be that the
fraction of planets with life on them is like one
over a gazillion, in which case we're the only life
in the Milky Way. Or it could be fifty percent,

(10:47):
you know, or ten percent, so that the Milky Way
is filled with life. We just don't know so many
of these fractions.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
So Julie asks something about the Great Filter. What does
the Great filter mean?

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, the Great filters suggests that there might be life everywhere,
and there might even be intelligent and civilized life everywhere,
but it might not just last very long. That civilizations
might essentially burn themselves out. And there's a few ways
that this could happen. You know, civilizations might become technological
and then develop the means to kill themselves and end

(11:19):
up basically nuking each other. And that might be like
a trend that happens, not in the sense that it's
inevitable or that it has to happen necessarily. You could
never prove that, but it might be something that's fairly common.
Or it could be that civilizations pollute their atmospheres right
or cause global warming, or in some other way end
up killing themselves off. So that's the idea of the

(11:41):
Great Filter to explain the lack of contact or observation
of aliens by saying that life is very short lived,
and remember time is very very deep, and so even
if there have been a thousand civilizations in the Milky Way,
if each of them only lasted a few thousand years,
like the length of human civilization so far. Then in
space of billions of years, it's very unlikely that we

(12:03):
would hear from them now, or that we would happen
to be in life at the right moment to receive
messages from them.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Okay, that's kind of a bummer, which is right up
my alley. So what do you think the answer is?

Speaker 1 (12:17):
So now we have to depart from well founded science,
right and just speculate because we just don't know and
everything we're doing. I've heard a lot of you know,
semi scientific analyzes of these things, but in the end,
we're always extrapolating from one example, and you can learn
things from one example. You could say like life didn't
take very long to develop on Earth, so maybe it's

(12:38):
not unusual, whereas intelligence did take a long time to
develop on Earth, so maybe that is weird and rare.
Like you can do those analyzes, but in the end,
it's just one. You know. It's like if you roll
a die with a million sides on it and you
get a six, You're like, hmm, that's kind of a
weird number. But you'd like another roll, right, You'd like
more measurements before you decide if the die is fair
or not. So you know, everything we're we talk about

(13:00):
now is non scientific extrapolation and really just wish fulfillment.
But that doesn't mean we can't do it, you know.
And so my sense is that we're not great at
imagining the scope of possibilities. Right. We tend to do
perturbation theory basically, take our example and tweak it a
little bit. And you know, that's what people did for

(13:21):
a star trek, like you know, Klingons are humans with
weird foreheads or Vulcans are humans with weird ears. Right,
we tend to start from our example and then go
off in some direction. But aliens are not limited by that.
They don't have to start from humanity and then tweak it.
They can start from a completely different place. And because
we have only one example, it's very likely that we're
not considering the full landscape. And so the short answer is,

(13:45):
I expect aliens are going to be way more alien
than we can even imagine, in ways that would prevent
them from wanting to contact us, or from having what
we would recognize as civilization or technology, or to send
us messages that we don't even interpret or notice or
understand to be alien. So my favorite explanation for the

(14:07):
firmi paradox is in that direction that aliens are too alien.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Interesting. So Eric Kershenbaum wrote Zoologists Guide to the Galaxy
and great book. Great book, And you know, one of
the arguments there is that you might expect to find
organisms to have happened upon some of the same solutions
that we see here are on earth, because probably the
principles of natural selection act the same no matter where
you are, and there are similar pressures and a lot

(14:32):
of environmental pressures in a lot of different places. And
so why give me some examples then of what you're thinking,
and like why you expect things will be so different.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
So, first of all, I really like that book. I
recommend everyone he read it. I had a lot of
fun reading it, and I actually chatted with him on
the previous podcast about it, so folks can check that out.
But I think that that line of argument is a
little dangerous. You know, it's sort of like post factor rationalization.
It's like saying, like it's easy to convince yourself that
humans are a natural endpoint to evolution, like well boy,

(15:04):
bipedalism makes a lot of sense. Having two eyes makes
a lot of sense. It makes sense to have a
nose on your face, and you could get yourself towards
arguing like, yeah, aliens are going to look a lot
like humans because we make sense. But what we don't
know is how many other ways evolution could have gone
right and arrives at other solutions that those folks would
also say, gosh, it just makes sense to have a

(15:26):
hand sticking out of your forehead, you know, or to
have a transient aus or whatever. Fun you could rationalize
those things. It's sort of like counting coincidences, right, We're
not good at thinking about the breadth of possibilities. And specifically,
I think that our evolution a lot of the arguments
that he makes, you know, like critters will eat other critters,
precise predation is universal, depend on the environment that we've

(15:49):
evolved in, you know, and some of the sort of
fundamental economics of it, like imagine if instead of critters
walking across a surface of a planet or even swimming
in its ocean, and what if we were life forms
that existed in the atmosphere of a star, right, we
were like currents of plasma and the distinction between alien
bodies wasn't even that crisp, right. I think about where

(16:13):
you define the edge of your body. Is it at
your skin? No, because it's hair there. Okay, your hair's
But now you have like a weird fuzzy definition for
like where it's Kelly and where it's not Kelly. And
if you dig down and you're like really philosophical about it,
it's not well defined. Like there's a fuzzy edge between
Kelly and the universe. And we like to think of
ourselves as a thing, a one thing that's distinct from

(16:35):
the universe because it's important to us sort of like
culturally and mentally. But what if we weren't you know,
if we were like flowed between each other and we
like shared plasma or whatever, we would have a very
different sort of relationship with the idea of identity, and
that could change fundamentally what it's like to be a
critter in that kind of you know, evolutionary economics, that's

(16:57):
just one example, you know, or in that and if
we evolved in a very different kind of situation, like
a subsurface ocean. You know, we think that there might
be oceans even in our solar system, under thick layers
of ice, and so if you're some sort of like
weird critter that flips around a completely dark ocean, you
might evolve, and then you might have no interest in

(17:19):
the outer universe because you don't even know that it's there,
and maybe you don't develop thumbs or technology or do
anything interesting like that. And so there's lots of situations
where aliens are just weirder than I think zoologists mighte.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
I don't know why you need to, you know, hone
in on my people, but all right, I see your point,
and I think that your imagination is why I enjoyed
your science fiction so much.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Thank you. I think the lesson here is that there
are a lot of human patterns that we don't recognize
our human patterns, and the best thing about meeting aliens
will be discovering those things, will be understanding Oh my gosh,
we never even imagined that you didn't have to have X,
Y or Z for life, and would tell you what X,
Y and Z were if I knew now, But I
don't write, And so that's one of the reasons I

(18:07):
had so much fun writing that book. Is like thinking
about the edges of our knowledge and where we might
be making assumptions if we hadn't realized. And frankly, I
think biologists are way ahead of physicists in this regard.
You know, y'all have thought about like, hey, do we
need water for life? It might be possible to use ammonia.
Do we need carbon for our chemistry? No, you could
actually maybe use silicon. And that's been helpful because it's

(18:29):
changed the way we look for life and imagine where
it is. I think physicists are well behind because they
all just assume that aliens will do physics the way
that we do, and that's probably wrong.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
On behalf of my community. I thank you for the compliments.
All right, let's see what Julie thinks of your answer,
And thank you to Julie for giving me the opportunity
to talk about how great Daniel's book is. Hi, thanks
for answering my question.

Speaker 4 (18:55):
I really like what you said about how the Milky
Way isn't that big compared to its age, and there
would maybe be relics out there that in theory we'd
be able to detect. I was kind of just thinking
about how big the universe is without necessarily factoring in
how old it is too, so I think I'm overall
back on team Paradox. But the explanation for the paradox

(19:18):
could be many, many different things beyond just how far
apart everything is, like all of the many different factors
that you mentioned, and just how truly alien they could be.
I think it's so fun to think about this stuff.
So really enjoyed how you talked through it. Thanks again, Well,
love the show.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
All right, So next up we have a question from
our Discord channel, and if you want to join us
on Discord, and I really hope that you will, you
just go to our website at Danielandkelly dot org and
you can click the link to find our Discord group.
And today's question is from Pip Darcat on what.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Do you do the day Kelly when somebody has a
Discord handle that's not safe for podcasting?

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Ooh, I will ask our amazing audio engineer Matt Kesselman
to bleep it for me. No promises, I already have
a plan. Hey, they're extraordinaries. It turns out that listener
Pip Darcat from Discord wasn't able to get back to
us in time for putting the audio together for this episode.

(20:37):
So I'm gonna go ahead and read her question from
the discord. Hi, Daniel and Kelly, I want to know
more about suk an ARCHAOM. I was reading a feed
about how this organism is a missing link between life
and not life. Would you consider this for an episode, Kelly, Well,
Pip Darkat indeed, I would. Here's your answer. Hope you're

(21:00):
doing well?

Speaker 1 (21:03):
All right, So tell me about this question. And how
do we pronounce the name of this critter?

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Oh, come on, man, you know I don't know the
answer to that. You know that I am notoriously bad
at pronouncing all of these names. So I'm gonna say
it's su sukan archaeom.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Nice. That sounds plausible.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Because I said it fast. Yeah, that's why that was
the trick. And so let's see, I'll jump ahead to
why it's named that. So in Japanese mythology, there is
a deity who is small and the name is Sukana.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Sorry, the deity's full name is Sukana Bikona. My apologies
to all of Japanese culture. And so they took the
first part of that deities name. And because this critter
is exceedingly small, in fact, we haven't even seen it
with our eyes yet. We've only found its genome and
sequenced it so far. They put that name in front,

(21:59):
and then since it appears to be from the domain Arkaia,
they named it's kind of Arkao very cool, which rolls
off the tongue. Whether it's correct or not. I like it.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Ar KaiA is really fascinating. Tell us a little bit
about arkae. I think a lot of people don't even
know that it exists. What is Arkaia and why is
it so weird and different?

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah? So's it's incredible. And you know, I actually wonder
if you know more about this from dinner table conversations
with Katrina, so feel free to jump in.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
We do have the Tree of Life run in front
of our dining room table, so Arkia does come up sometimes.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Do you do you have like a painting of the
Tree of Life in your kitchen?

Speaker 1 (22:34):
We have a big poster of it.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, oh that's amazing. I need that. And you know
what I learned in this episode is that you won't
find viruses on that tree.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah that's true, which.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Kind of makes sense but also kind of yeah, makes
me think of some evolutionary questions. But anyway, okay, way
back in our evolutionary history, so very close to the
base of that tree, you ended up getting three different domains.
So you ended up with three splits, and so you
get ar KaiA, bacteria and ukryota. Ukryota have membrane bound organelles,

(23:05):
so we are eukaryotes. We have these membrane bound organelles.
We call them organadoes in a past episode, and I
thought that was cute, and I'll never forget.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
I think it's amazing that u caryotes basically have like
a little clump of ocean, right, Like, yeah, we think
life started in the ocean, and we came out of
the ocean, but we brought with us basically the ocean.
We're basically little walking bags of ocean. It's sort of incredible.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
It is amazing. Yeah, And so these three different domains
differ in things like what makes up their cellular wall,
how they structure their genes. For example, bacteria and Arcaea
tend to have circular chromosomes, and eukaryotes tend to have
linear chromosomes.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
So eukaryots are distinguished because they have a nucleus. How
do you tell the difference between prokaryots and arcaea.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, so prokaryote is a phrase that just refers to
organisms that don't have membrane bound organelles, as I understand it,
and I think that because we've created this distinction, people
often think that arka and bacteria are closely related because
they're both prokaryotes. But as I understand it, arka, bacteria,

(24:11):
and eukaryota are all pretty like similarly distant, Like arka
aren't that much closer to bacteria than they would be
to us?

Speaker 1 (24:18):
All right, I feel like you trying to understand the
difference between leptons and hadrons and masons and stuff. So
we have eukaryotes, which are on the side, then we
have prokaryotes, and within prokaryotes we have bacteria, and we
have arkaa. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (24:32):
I think? So I did not prepare that ahead of time.
I'm trying to pull this out of Kelly intro biobrain,
but I never had to teach intro bios so it
never solidified.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
So then why are arkaa thing? How are they different
from bacteria?

Speaker 2 (24:43):
So they're different in that they have like different kinds
of cell walls, they have a different way of initiating
protein synthesis. I think they differ in the way that
they translate and transcribe their chromosomes, so they differ in
the way that they sort of read and turn into proteins.
The information that's in there genetic sequences, and those are
the notes that I have written down.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
And so tell us about viruses. Why are they not
in the tree? Are they not alive? How do you
define life all this stuff?

Speaker 2 (25:14):
There's a number of different criteria depending on who you
talk to, Some of them will have different definitions than others.
But two important features that tend to pop up in
a lot of the definitions is that in order to
be alive, you need to be able to do some
of your own metabolism, some of your own metabolic processes.
So you need to be able to like convert stuff
into energy that you can use, and you need to
be able to replicate yourself. And so viruses they don't

(25:38):
have any metabolic machinery. They just inject themselves into a
cell and then they hijack the cell's machinery to create
more virus particles that then burst out of the cell
and go off and start that process again.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
And is there some like philosophical justification for this or
is this just an arbitrary dotted line the human draw
between a big continuum of biological activity.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
I think it might be. What do I think?

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Is this like planets and dwarf planets all over again?

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, So I was wondering that while I was working
on this outline, and that's what kind of made me
go to the Tree of life. And I think part
of why we can't really fit them on the Tree
of life is that they just sort of don't fit
anywhere on there neatly. And I wonder if because we
couldn't neatly fit them on there anywhere, we're like, all right, well,
you don't do these other things that are important, and

(26:25):
if you were doing those things, you'd have more genetic
information and we could use that to help fit you
into the tree of life because we could see, like,
you know, what the blueprints were and how that fit
onto the tree. But you don't have that. And so
I wonder if part of it is just like, well,
we don't know where to put them on the tree
of life, so we're just gonna say they're not alive.
And I've met a bunch of the people who come problem.
It's solved. But and I'm sure a lot of people

(26:46):
who come up with these definitions are going to be like,
that is a stupid answer. These are it's very important
to be able to, like, you know, make your own
energy and reproduce, and they don't do it, so they
they are not as good as us in some way.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
All right, Well, if you have strong opinions about the
definition of life and whether viruses are alive or not,
right to us with a strongly worded email. We would
love to hear from you.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, no, I would. I think it would be fun
to have a battle about the different definitions of life
and not a battle, a conversation, a genial conversation.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
And I love when these mysteries have the context, you know.
I think it's really cool. Then when we look at planets,
we also see other stuff that's almost a planet. It
helps us understand like where it sits in the bigger question.
And I love you know that there are other great
apes that are still around, Like I wish there were
more species of humans that survive to today because it
would tell us so much more about our evolution and
our context. And so I think it's really cool that

(27:34):
we have not just life and inert stuff. We have
this like weird stuff on the boundary that helps us
understand like what life means. So that's very cool.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
And so you might be wondering, why did we talk
about what arkaa are and then why are we talking
about if viruses are alive or not? And the answer
is that this there was a finding recently of a
new species of arkaa. Does Katrina pronounce it arkaa or
am i oka?

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Great, okay, because if Katrina does it, then I'm doing
it right. So anyway, so there was a new species
of Archaea that was discovered and it has a very
small genome and doesn't seem to do a lot of metabolizing.
And so there was this idea that went around the
popular press that maybe this is like a transition between
things that are alive and not alive, because there's this

(28:18):
critical feature of being alive that is missing from this species.
So more of the fuzzy context, more fuzzy context. So
let me tell you a little bit more about this discovery.
So they were looking in dino flagelets, which are these
single celled eukaryotes. You find a lot of them in
the ocean. They tend to have like these two flagellum
which are like long, stringy things that they sort of

(28:39):
move around to help them get from one place to another.
And one of the things that's interesting about them is
that they produce bioluminescence, which you can see in the
ocean and creedy. Oh my gosh. Once I jumped into
the ocean when the bioluminescing organisms were in there and
there was this like amazing blue light that just kind
of like, oh, it was one of the coolest experiences orthing.
This was in Maine and northern Maine. Yeah, I was

(29:02):
at a science conference. It's pretty sweet being a scientist sometimes.
So anyway, dinoflagelets they do that, but the scientists were
not interested in that. They were interested in the fact
that the dinoflagelet that they were looking at was thought
to have a symbiotic critter living inside of it, and
so they were trying to understand that symbiosis and how
this it was a cyanobacteria, might be benefiting the dinoflagelet

(29:25):
and will and so they essentially opened up the dinoflagellate,
sorry dude, and they sequenced the stuff that was inside
and when they sequenced the stuff that was inside, they
found an additional circular DNA sequence that they weren't expecting
to see, and they did a bunch of extra studies
to look at it and try to convince themselves that
they hadn't messed something up, because what was surprising about

(29:46):
it was that it was so stink and small. The
circular DNA was so small that it was about five
percent the length of a genome you'd find in something
like Ischeria coali or Ecoli, so like very common bacteria.
And again they thought it was a mistake, but they
kept sequencing it, and then they assembled it. And when
you assemble it, what you essentially do is you look

(30:06):
at the genetic sequences and say, okay, do these sequences
match up with anything we see anywhere else in the
tree of life where we know what it does. So
trying to get a handle on, like what might bese
sequences do based on what we know happens in other organisms.
It was about two hundred and thirty ish KILLO base pairs,
where kilo means like a thousand, right, Daniel, mm hmmm, yeah,

(30:27):
I always double check these things. So super tiny, and
so once they convinced themselves that they weren't messing up something.
They put it on the tree of life and they
were like, Okay, this appears to be arkaa. It looks
like it's a whole different phylum of Arka that we
haven't seen before. And then they went through and they
looked at what was in the genome and they're like, okay,
based on what we know about other organisms, what do

(30:49):
these genome components do?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
So let me back up and ask you a question.
Just make sure I understand, because my understanding is when
you sequence something, you don't just like pull the whole
dema out of the nucleus and read the whole thing.
You do this process. You basically like shred the cell,
chop up the DNA in a bunch of short bits.
You sequence all the short bits like shotgun sequencing, and
then you use computer programs to like sew it back together.

(31:13):
And this is like Craig Benter's big innovation decades ago
that made the human geno much faster. And so then
you have this mystery sometimes of like, well where do
these pieces all go together? And I think what you're
saying is that when they were putting the puzzle together,
they realized, oh, we're solving two different puzzles here. This
is not one big puzzle. It's like if you started
working on a jigsaw puzzle and you noticed, like, oh,

(31:34):
there's lots of weird blue pieces that don't fit into
the puzzle, but they do fit with themselves over here
in the corner. Is that what happened?

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah, that's an incredible explanation actually, And so they didn't
just find two critters. They actually found more than two
critters in there. And so they put multiple puzzles together,
and a lot of the other puzzles they were like, Okay,
we've seen these puzzles before. But then then when they
found Sukuna arcam, they were like, what the heck is this?
They didn't trust that it was anything I see. But

(32:02):
once they convinced themselves that it was real and they
hadn't like made some mistake through the part of the process,
they discovered that it appears to be a whole new
phylum of Archaea. And then they went through and there
are a bunch of public databases where people are like
they collect genetic information and then they put it online.
And when they started searching through that, they found a
lot of other sequences that were looked kind of like this,

(32:24):
and so they think that this is the first example
in the filum that's been described, but that there's probably
a bunch of other stuff out there that we've sort
of seen but not recognized yet.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
All right, And so what makes this one different from
other archaea? What makes it have its own thylum and
makes it, you know, whip through the popular press and
get an article in science.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
So what was particularly exciting was that when they tried
to figure out what the few genes that were there did,
most of them were associated with replicating the organism so
it could do its own reproduction. But there were very few,
if any genes associated with matisabolism, and so it looks
like it's somewhere between alive and not alive. So I mentioned,

(33:06):
you know, the definition of being alive, you've got to
be able to do your own metabolism and your own reproduction.
This doesn't seem to be doing its own metabolism, so
it's probably a parasite of some sort, but it can
do its own reproduction.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
So it can't do its own metabolism because even a
parasite like you know, something inside of you that's drinking
your blood, it's still metabolizing the blood and like feeding
its own internal chemistry. So what does it mean to
not be able to do your own metabolism? Does it
mean that like you're just stealing directly the chemical products
that store the energy.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
I think, so I don't actually understand how you could
not metabolic I mean, I guess in the same way
viruses don't metabolize things. They just hijack machinery. I suspect
that's what's happening here.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
I see, Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, And so most of the paper is like scientific details,
but at the very end the authors say something to
the effect of, like, maybe this is like an intermediate step,
and like this could tell us something about how organisms
go down the path to becoming a virus. Maybe you
lose a bunch of stuff as you go and you

(34:09):
end up with these very like shortened genomes. And not
everybody was convinced.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
It's like a company that's deciding, hey, we don't need
to have our own HR department, let's just outsource it
to some startup or AI or.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Something, and then they become parasites.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Wow, that was a quick step to criticizing corporate culture.
Wasn't it.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yes, that's right, But that's.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Fascinating to suggest that viruses used to be more fully
alive and have sort of lost this capacity or optimized
themselves so they realized they didn't need it. That's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, it's an interesting idea. I don't know if it's
an idea that's been presented elsewhere, and this was just
an example that really illustrated that that idea might have
some legs. But you know, not everyone was convinced. So
I read this paper in Science that was summarizing. So
I should also mention that the paper we're talking about,
the results are on bio archives, so they haven't gone
through peer review yet, but they're publicly available. But people

(35:04):
got immediately excited when it went on bioarchive, and Science
covered it, and Science did some interviews with other people
and they found a San Diego State University biologist whose
name is Elizabeth Waters. She wasn't part of this study,
but she does look at small archaeol parasites, and she
said that maybe this is a virus in the making.

(35:25):
She said, this is a bit of a jump. If true, amazing,
So she's like a little skeptical if it turns out
that would be super cool. But there are other organisms
with very small genomes. I think this one is particularly small,
but it's not necessarily the case that a small genome
organism is, you know, the missing link between becoming a virus.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
And this is an example of folks of good journalism
here because they went out and talked to somebody who
wasn't invested in hyping this result and who knows the details,
and asked her like, are you impressed by this? And
she was like, hm, you know, she's holding her fire
a little bit. And that tells you, like, we're not
all convinced that this is a big change that you know,
everybody's now going to update the textbooks or something, but

(36:10):
it is exciting and promising.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah, absolutely, And to me this highlights you know, so
maybe this is a little bit of a self defensive
statement I'm about to make here. So you know, you've
said that when physics is doing well, it's doing more
than just taxonomy. This is essentially just taxonomy. They found
something new. They were like, well, let's look at this
new thing, and maybe this is leading to a brand

(36:32):
new understanding of life or not life, depending on what
you co virus is, you know, and just how things
work and understanding our world a little bit better. And
so I would argue just taxonomy is really important. Thank
you for this fascinating just taxonomy, and thank you to
Pip Darcat for this fantastic discord. Question.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Well, if I could comment, I think that this is
a fantastic bit of science. But I think it's especially
interesting because it's not just taxonomy, right. You're not just
putting it there and saying, well, look, it's just there.
You're thinking about the consequences, You're drawing analogies, you're asking
philosophical questions about what it all means. So taxonomy is
very valuable, partially because it inspires this kind of deeper

(37:15):
thinking and making these connections. So I would say taxonomy
is step one in a really fascinating and valuable process.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Right, But you can't get to step two without step one.
But i'll give you Yeah, I agreed, Okay, I'll give
you that.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners. If
you have a question about the universe you've never really
had satisfactorily answered, please write to us. We would love
to give it a shot. You can email us to
questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. You can join
our discord and you can find the link to that
on our website Daniel and Kelly dot org. We really
would love to hear from you. So many people write

(38:09):
in and we respond and then they say, oh, my gosh,
I can't believe you actually wrote back. Well, we really do.
You will hear from us. Your message will not just
be ignored in the black hole of the internet.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
That's right. We can't wait to hear from you, all.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
Right, And so now we have a really fascinating physics
question from John.

Speaker 5 (38:25):
Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My name is John Chai. My
question is what would happen if the speed of light
suddenly changed, like let's say a giant cosmic switch were
flipped and suddenly the speed of light got cut in half.
Would it be completely catastrophic for all of existence or
would it go largely unnoticed because even half of the
speed of light is still really really fast. Thanks a lot,

(38:45):
and thanks for the great show.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Ooh, this is fantastic, And I think this is another
one of those questions where so you're always encouraging us
to take what we know and think, you know, if
we tinkered with it a little bit, how would that,
you know, break the universe? And essentially, like understanding how
tinkering with things would change things helps us understand if
we really understand what's happening. Yeah, and I use the
word understand a lot because I'm the most articulate person

(39:08):
on the planet. But you understand where I'm going.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
So yeah, and this actually connects to our earlier conversation
about the Fermi paradox. You know, another way to imagine
what aliens might be like that would make them very
alien is if they lived in a relativistic environment. You know,
what if they evolved in a situation where they're very
often going at eight tenths of the speed of light
relative to each other or relative to their houses or something,

(39:34):
and so they observe relativity in action as children, and
they develop an intuition for it, and to them it
makes perfect sense that moving clocks run slow, and moving
yardsticks look short and all this kind of stuff. You know,
if to them, the universe would be very different and
their path of their science would be very different than ours.
But here John is asking a different question. Basically, he's

(39:55):
imagining that he's at the control panel of the universe,
and he's got in front of him all these fundamental constants,
because there are these weird numbers in the universe that
seem to control how physics works. You know, why is
the weak force week? Why is the strong force strong?
Why is gravity so weak? Why is the universe this
big and not that big? Why are you galaxies this
size and not bigger? How come stars get this size?

(40:17):
It's like they are all these numbers in physics, and
some of them seem arbitrary. And so he's wondering if
he was at the control panel and he cut the
speed of light from three times ten to eight meters
per second down to half of that, what would change?
How would the universe look different? Would we notice? And
I think part of the motivation for this question is
that the speed of light is so fast that it's

(40:39):
essentially infinite. You don't take into account when you're walking
down the hallway the fact that the light that's hitting
your eyeballs is a little bit out of date, and
the person walking in the other direction is not actually
where they appear to be there slightly ahead of it
because the light has taken some time to reach your eye.
We treat it as instantaneous. So I think he's wondering
what life would be like, what the universe would be
like if it wasn't so instantaneous. If we sense that delay,

(41:02):
if the speed of light was slower and like, maybe
closer to the speed of sound.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Can I guess so? I feel like, because it's going
so fast day to day, we wouldn't notice anything, but
when we were looking out at like stars, we'd have
to take into account the fact that what we're seeing
was even farther back in the past. But how am
I wrong?

Speaker 1 (41:22):
No? I think you're mostly right. But before we dig
into all those consequences, I have to nerd out for
a little bit about what it means to change the
speed of light. I mean, I think if you're standing
at the control panel of the universe, the speed of
light is not one of those numbers, one of the
knobs for determining the nature of physics. I think those
knobs need to be dimensionless numbers, not things with like

(41:42):
meters per second in them, and not just because meters
and seconds are things humans invented, but because the dimensions
make it connected to so many other constants, like for example,
you could change the speed of light without noticing anything
if you also, at the same time accommodated other things,
like you changed the length of a meter and you
change the speed of light, we wouldn't even notice and

(42:03):
be like if you scale up the whole universe and
you scale up all the rulers, there's no change. You
can't tell if somebody does that. And so, for example,
if you change the speed of light, do those other
constants also change? Like the speed of light can be
expressed in terms of quantities from electromagnetism, which include things
like the vacuum permittivity of space. So if you change

(42:24):
the speed of light, you also change those which change
you know, how electricity works, or you somehow breaking the
universe and changing the laws of physics themselves. If you
change dimensionless constants, you can keep all the laws of
physics the same, and every time you change those you
really do get an effect. If you change dimension full constants,
then it's more complicated and ambiguous exactly how it propagates through.

(42:46):
But you know, we can make some simplifying assumptions and
play with it anyway.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
And see the speed of light is a dimension full constant.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
Right yeah, because it's meters per second, right, has two
dimensions to it, And you're right, of light is super
duper fast, like the fastest any human has ever traveled
relative to like a nearby object, you know, on Earth
is something like point zero zero three seven the speed
of light wo and you know that's like astronauts in

(43:13):
the space Shuttle orbiting the Earth. Right, And so we're
talking about tiny, tiny fractions, which is why we don't
observe relativistic effects. But you're right. One of the ways
that we do notice the speed of light is in
terms of what fraction of the universe we can see.
We look out into space and we see back to
the beginning of time, and we can do that because

(43:34):
light takes time to get to us, because the speed
of light is not infinite, and so the furthest thing
we can see is something where the photons were emitted
at the very beginning of the universe, essentially like three
hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, and
have been flying to us ever since. And the speed
of light limits how far we can see. So if
the speed of light was half what it was, we

(43:56):
would be able to see less of the universe because
these photons we're seeing now wouldn't have had time to
get here if the speed of light was half of it.
So the universe would still be the size that it is,
but we wouldn't see as much of it.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
And how would that impact our understanding of the universe?
Do you think?

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Ooh, yeah, that's a really fascinating question. You know, I
think we would still see a lot of the structures. Obviously,
we could still see the whole Solar System and the galaxy,
and the structures of the galaxy like the galactic clusters
and the nearby galactic clusters. Those are not so far away,
and we would still see the early universe. It's just
that photons from the early universe were be coming from

(44:34):
a closer bit of the early universe than in a
scenario where the speed of light was faster. So, to
directly answer your question, I don't think that would make
a big difference. Right. We would still see the whole
history of the universe. It's just in a smaller chunk
of it. But the chunk we're seeing right now is
really really big. It's big enough that already we can
see that when you zoom out, mostly the universe is uniform,

(44:55):
right that there's not a lot of structure at the
highest level, I mean the solar systems, galaxies and galactic clusters.
But once you zooma up past that, it's basically just foam.
You know, there's no real structure anywhere. And so we
can see enough to get that, which I think is
the biggest structure in the universe. And so it's big
enough in the universe is old enough for us to

(45:16):
glimpse that. But there is a connection there.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
You're just a little bubble in the foam of the
universe that nobody would notice it start.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
But you know, the structure of the universe also would
be different if the speed of light was smaller, because
the speed of light is not just the speed of light,
it's the speed of information, and it limits the biggest
structure you can make at any point in the universe,
Like in order for a structure to form, you have
to have it interact and communicate. Like even gravity is
limited by the speed of light, and so there isn't time,

(45:48):
for example, to form a structure that's bigger than the
speed of light times the age of the universe. It
just hasn't had time to like gravitationally assemble. And so
if the speed of light is slow, that means the
biggest structure you can have would be smaller in the universe.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Oh so what is the biggest structure that we have
what would be in small end by this slower speed
of light.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
Well, this is actually kind of a current mystery because
we see structures like the slowan great wall. This is
like sheets of galactic clusters, which at the highest level
like the edges of those bubbles in the foam, though
some of those are bigger than the speed of light
times the age of the universe. So it's a bit
of a puzzle like how did that form? Are we
misinterpreting it something that we didn't understand? You know, one

(46:34):
of my favorite things about science is that we have
all these threads that should all tell one story because
we think there's a thing that's happening in the universe,
and when they don't, that's a hint that there's something
we don't understand. And there's so many different ways to
attack the same question. So that's a current mystery. But yes,
some of those biggest structures, you know, superclusters of galaxies
woven together into foams and voids would be smaller. So

(46:58):
basically like the foam would have smaller bubbles.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Okay, all right, so we've looked at the very big picture.
If we go back to Earth, what would be different?
So like when I turn on the light switch, I
probably wouldn't it wouldn't be I'm guessing that wouldn't be
like a noticeable difference in how long it took for
the room to get right. What about other stuff?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, so the speed of light is so fast that
even half the speed of light is crazy fast, and
there's no way that you would even notice. But we
might have been able to measure the speed of light
a little bit sooner in our history, right, people tried
to measure the speed of light for decades with all
sorts of hilarious contraptions with lanterns across mountains, and basically
there rose like, yeah, it's just too fast. We don't know.

(47:41):
It's faster than we can measure. So we would have
figured that out sooner, which might have given us a
handle on relativity earlier. And so I think in that
universe we might have figured out physics one hundred or
two hundred years earlier, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh then we wouldn't have had Einstein because what would
he have done? Probably not thing.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Somebody else would have been Einstein.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Okay, all right, all right, but what do you have
had the same hair? It's the important question.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Really, That's what it all comes down to. This whole
production is really just to get us to Einstein's hair.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
But if you imagine like slowing down the speed of
light even more so that its effects are visible every day. Like,
imagine if cars moving along the highways were relativistic, you know,
if they were moving at like eight tenths of the
speed of light, you know, because the speed of light
was crazy slower, then we would have that kind of
alien intuition. We would notice relativistic effects every day, right,

(48:37):
Like we would see that cars moving along the highway
are shrunken, and that you know, the people on airplane
trips don't age as much, right, And it would really
change the experience of going Like on a long flight,
you take that fourteen hour flight to Dubai, it doesn't
feel like fourteen hours, right, It only feels like ten
minutes or something. So that's really cool. You don't get

(48:58):
to watch seven movies but you also get your time back, right, Yeah,
so that would be really cool, but it would also
make things really hard, Like it's already challenging for me
to figure out my calendar with time zones, you know,
like which time zone are they in? What does that
mean for me? Like, I don't know why that's so complicated.
Now imagine that on top of that, you need to

(49:18):
take into account relativistic effects, so like where's Daniel Binn,
Where is his clock? How much slower is it? It
would make coordinating things much more complicated because we'd have
to give up on the concept of simultaneity. One of
the weirdest consequences of relativity is the fact that clocks
are not synchronized, which means you don't all agree on
the order of events. And mostly on the surface of

(49:39):
the Earth, we can't notice that because everybody's moving very slowly.
But if we were moving faster relative to the speed
of light, that would be a real effect and people
would disagree about important stuff, and yeah, that could have
real consequences. It would make life a lot more complicated.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
And just to remind myself, you were talking about if
it was more than just half the speed of light,
it would have to be yeah, quite a bit more.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
Okay, yeah, just half The speed of light probably would
have almost no measurable effect on life on Earth, except
maybe it would take longer to like download a movie
from some website in Siberia, because the speed of light
also influences your download times, right, Like you're downloading data
from across the Earth. That's a significant difference, and so

(50:21):
the ping time between your computer and that computer is
limited by the speed of light because that's the speed
signals move across the Internet, and so it would take
a little bit longer. You know. In that case, when
you're downloading a big movie, the latency is not a
big effect. But if you're trying to have like a
conversation in real time with somebody on the other side
of the Earth, then there could be more lags there.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Well, I'm glad that the speed of light is what
it is then, because otherwise it would be hard to
record this podcast with you.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
Yeah, that's true. And then looking out into the cosmos,
there would be other changes actually in what we see
out there. Black Holes would be much more significant. The
size of the radius of a black hole depends on
the speed of light. You calculate the short siled radius,
the point past which things can't escape the gravity of

(51:08):
a black hole that has a factor in it from
the speed of light. It goes like one over the
speed of light is squared, So if you shrink at
the speed of light, that means a larger event horizon
for the same mass. Right, So black holes with mass
in our universe would have a much larger radius in
this universe where the speed of light is smaller. This

(51:28):
means they could have like a bigger effect on their galaxies. Right.
We have black holes at the center of all galaxies
and they're really massive, but they're not that big, you know,
they're tiny compared to the size of a galaxy. But
crank down the speed of light by a big factor
and they can grow. And so like the centers of
galaxies could have like gargangcheu in black holes, not more
massive than the current ones, but just bigger, and that

(51:50):
could actually help them grow to more massive quantity. So
it would really change black hole physics a lot if
you change the speed of light.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
But we probably would not get sucked up by a
black hole. I guess everything could be different if all
the black holes were different sizes.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
In the end, you got to make it about yourself. Kelly, Right,
what is the impact on Kelly's life?

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Have you met people? I'm just asking the question that
the people are asking themselves.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
You're right, y'all are going to be fine, don't worry.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Thank you, Daniel.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
All right, well, thank you very much for that question. John.
Let us know if we scratched your Doppler itch.

Speaker 5 (52:26):
Hi, Daniel and Kelly, thanks a lot for pondering my question.
And I really enjoyed listening to your speculation on how
our world might be different if the speed of light
got cut in half. And I also enjoyed listening to
you think about what might happen if we took it
to the extreme and it slowed down to like a
noticeably slow amount. To be honest, I was hoping for

(52:46):
some explanation of how change in the speed of light
might be catastrophic to our existence, but I guess in
science it really doesn't depend on what you're hoping for.
Thanks a lot, and thanks for the show.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
All right, Thanks very much everybody who sent in their question. Please, pes,
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