Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How might aliens perceive the Universe?

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

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?"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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blocking blocks of the internet. Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to In Case You Missed it with Christina Williams, the podcast that's your go-to source for women's hoops. From buzzer beaters to breaking news, I bring you the highlights, analysis, and expert insights you need to stay ahead of the game. The people have spoken, and it's time to give the stories that matter most the spotlight. Listen to in case you missed it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And remember, in case you missed it, don't worry. I've got you covered. 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? Do blind animals even have a mental picture? 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 a bats might be, or is it 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 answers, their understanding. This is one slice of a larger question that I'd 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 will 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 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. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I, what do I do? I don't know. I don't remember how to start a podcast. That's right. I don't remember who I am without this podcast. Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm excited because today is sort of like the intersection of physics and biology. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm not a biologist or a philosopher. No, no. We are both so out of practice. Hi, 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 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? Oh, my gosh. I absolutely know the answer to that question. Oh, wait, no. Can I get two? No. No, dang it. Yeah, sure.

It's arbitrary. Why not? 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 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?

No, no, it's a much more selfish answer than mine. Sorry, self-list, self-less answer than mine. You would like to be able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. I want to see pretty flowers better. So, anyway, 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?

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 eye, 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 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 interact with the universe. The other part of it is like how we actually experience it, you know, these qualia that are generated in our minds, you know, when your eyeballs see a certain wavelength of photon and then your brain tells you red, 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 see spacetime or see superposition, what would that be like? This is the part of me that wants to sit on the rooftop, smoke banana peels, and

just wonder. I feel like if you could see super positions, wouldn't the world be kind 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. 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 spacetime curvature, that would just be like another part of the story. 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 like. Yeah, but I'm used to 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. What's that? 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 bumblebees that we can't see. I would love to see flowers in all 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. I think that would be amazing. I totally agree that there's a lot to the universe we're

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 bee's decisions? Like, smell good or something. Yeah, I totally over anthropomorphized or whatever. Yeah, no, I don't think... It was cute, though. Yeah, I don't think the flower's 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 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. Yeah, I don't think it's bumblebee's being like, I love you, flower. But I still wish I could see more colors. Yeah, it'd be interesting to go to an art gallery with a bumblebee, be like, which ones do you like? Yeah, that's right. Or, 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 animal seeing something I don't see? I think that would be pretty cool.

It would be amazing to get to switch, like, let me see the universe from a dog's point of view. Okay, now from the bat'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 figuring out how things work if we had more than one angle on it, you know, if we could somehow triangulate the universe. 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. And I was like, and how you're both, what, darling? And she's like, furries. And I was like, hmm. And you're imagining this conversation you're going to have with her. You're like, well, okay, let's talk about that. Yes. 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 we like pretending to be animals for a little while. And I was like, that's different than it means for adults. 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. Anyway.

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 of the first questions you have to ask is like, well, what part of the universe are they seeing? What does 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 different from the ones that we wear? And how much would that change our understanding of the universe?

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? 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 to questions at Daniel and Kelly. Here's what everyone had to say. Aliens could sense fields, magnetic fields or other fields. They could see differently, see an ultraviolet and all that kind of thing. There's probably no limit to what other creatures could use.

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 they are very advanced, maybe they also have quantum sense. I think the sense of sight, observation, recordation, and analysis. 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.

What alien life does exist out there would perceive the universe with either vibrations, radiation, vision, and that's about it. 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-lite style coordination, seamless, real-time exploration, navigation, and teamwork. It got to be vision, whether aliens and humans. We actually do sense gravity, but maybe they can sense mass, velocity, momentum, or what's around them.

Maybe they can sense brain waves. 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. 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 as something that we can't even imagine. Well, we have animals that currently use sonar to navigate their world, bats and dolphins, but neither of those species has made it into space. 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. I was like, more colors. I love the answer to the 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. Whoa.

Yeah, we're going to get trippy on today's episode. No. I'm just trying to cash in on all the UFO cryptozoology nonsense. There's a lot of it these days. You have a lot of opportunities. Okay, so it's time to jump in. 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? 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 your senses. give you some 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. Could be that too, though. I'm not going to 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's 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. Like, your eyes reveal a lot about the universe, but they only capture a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? Sad face. All those flowers out there are beautiful in ways that Kelly will never experience. Thanks for rubbing it in. Remember that the way vision works is photons.

hits 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 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 just a little dimmer, or it's in black and white, or an ant sees it in fractal 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. 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 has 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? Yeah, exactly. Which senses you have, don't just depend on, like, what information is out there. Senses are expensive, right? You've got to grow an eyeball. You've got to maintain it. You've 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 sense. sensitive to the UV if that's useful. It's got to have a survival benefit, right? Like, wings would 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 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. I'm definitely never going to be light enough to have wings that were in my future either. No, me either. But, you know, we have conquered this a little bit with technology, right? We have eyeballs which only see in a certain wavelength, but we have telescopes which can see in other wavelengths like the James Webb Space 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 fly through in the visible spectrum is opaque in the infrared. So if you like trying 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 infrared, you see different stuff. Out there in the universe, like infrared light can pass through different stuff than visible light.

So if you want to see through gas and dust, you look through an infrared telescope. You get a different picture of the universe. We also have x-ray telescopes. So you look through an infrared telescope and then you need some sort of technology to translate that into something our brains can perceive, right? 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 wouldn't even know where to start. And so how well do we understand what we see in the infrared since it needs to be translated into something we can see? Yeah, I think this is something people don't widely understand. And when you get one of those beautiful images of the James Webb 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 Webb is of the infrared, and your eyeballs would totally ignore that. 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 Webb, and they made a picture on your screen, which emitted, photons at 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. 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, oh, 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 that we're always translating everything we

experience back into our intuition, which 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 not something we physically can do. 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. There's a vile sickness in Abbottestown.

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But they 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. And all of them come from the sun? Not all of them come from the sun. They're also cosmic ray sources of neutrinos. They're neutrinos from the center of the galaxy. They're neutrinos from nobody knows where. What? 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 ice and create a muon and then 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 Terenkoff detector to see mions moving faster than the speed of light in ice. It's really incredible. And 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 sense 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. It doesn't feel the strong force. So the only way for a neutrino to interact with our bodies or with most kinds of matter is the weak interaction, which is super duper weak. So if you built like a wall made of lead, you'd have to make it a light year thick, a light year thick before a neutrino would have a 50% chance of interacting with some part of that lead.

So that's how little we can interact with nutrient. And 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. When you were talking about the Terenkoff detector, I think you said that we're not actually detecting the neutrinos directly. We're detecting the muons that get produced by the neutrino. So these we still can't see. We only know they're there based on the things that they create. Is that right? Exactly. Occasionally, once in a zillion times a 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 was there. But yeah, we don't have like a neutrino track. We can't say here was the path of the neutrino because no neutrino ever interacts more than once. Even to have it interact once with normal matter is like astronomically unlikely, which is why you need like gazillions of neutrinos to ever see any of them.

Wow. It's amazing. We know anything about them at all. 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. Neutrinos, one of the most common particles in the universe, really everywhere. We, like, live in a neutrino ocean, a 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 just barely there man 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 Google it. Okay. So they took a picture of the sun through the earth, but we don't have detectors. So were they, were they looking for muon things in the... Yeah, exactly. They were looking for upward-going muons, muons from neutrinos that have passed through the earth. Okay. 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, right? You sit in your room and you watch TV. You have no idea that there's, like, gazillions of neutrinos flying in the air between you and the TV everywhere, flying right through you. There's a lot going on in the universe that we are not sensing. 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. They're just kind of there. Yeah. Is that fair? That's true. I think there's a couple 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 neutrinos have a lot of energy. It's an incredible amount of energy. If we could develop like neutrino synthesis some way to capture that energy, you could 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 neutrino synthesis. The other obstacle is 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, 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. Okay, so we can't see neutrinos. that's a bummer. What else can we not see? That's apparently maybe everywhere.

Yeah, neutrinos turn out to actually just be a clue that there's a lot in the universe that we can't 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 the matter in the universe,

80% of the mass in the universe is, dark matter. So we can 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 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 dark matter. This is, again, another part of the universe that'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 might not even be able to conceive of what it's like to hear. Apply that and extrapolate 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. We're just totally clueless, and we can't even really imagine what it would be like to know that it's there. I feel that's a very humbling fact. Yeah. How does it make you feel, Daniel? I'm putting out my psychiatrist head. 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, not the way that we imagined. And so I would love to meet aliens who have different senses who could, like, somehow detect dark matter of direct.

through, I don't know what means, or they figure it out a way to make neutrino interactions higher probability 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 the mysteries of it, right? 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?

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, Kelly. Oh, okay. All right. 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 it took a long time to discover, right? It's not like it's affecting our life all the time in ways we, 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 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 perceptoverse. They may interact with it differently.

They may have different needs. You know, I 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, right? Or in particular, where they need senses that pick up on neutrinos in dark matter, 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 this common environment on Earth, there is, I think, a broader sense

of animal sensation than most people understand. 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 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. What? 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 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. Maybe that's less likely to have evolved in the rest of the universe. Of course, this is all n equals one examples. And so you have to be very careful about extrapolating, but I think it's the best that we can do. 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 and everything keeping it, either one of those arguing that it's important personally. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It depends also on like 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 to put this together. And a fascinating example of the sort of timeline there is hearing. 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. Huh. Right? There was billions of years of life on Earth without basically ears. Was there not, was there less to hear?

Like, was it just bacteria moving around, quietly tiptoeing their way through the earth? 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 biologist 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 is in itself super fascinating. And we should dig into on another episode. But around 500 or 600 million years ago, life got big and noisy.

And like Arik Kirchbaum, the zoologist said, you know, that no ecosystem can exist for long without 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 eat each other. And so then it was an advantage to be able to hear is 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. So it sounds like it evolved quickly once it became possible. Do we know how many times hearing evolved? It's something people are working. on still. There's a bunch of fascinating clues 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. 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, there's only really two sort of fundamental mechanisms for 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. It's sort of like an equalizer in your stereo, right?

The hairs like shake when the right frequency comes along and it lets you like basically decompose sound into frequencies, super amazing biological technology. That's one mechanism. But invertebrates, insects, et cetera, have a completely different mechanism. like a drum stretched surface that vibrates in response to different sounds. And so there are these 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 ability to be 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, though, 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 out-competed. It's amazing. It is. And it involves chemistry. 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. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from... A dream. A familiar place can look completely alien.

Get back, everyone. He's going to next. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe. Jule State and Ray Wise.

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Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper AI, AI Built for Marketers. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians as asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life, but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it?

The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything, I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? date. There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening now. All right. So, I've already complained 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? Well, on the topic of things that birds can see that you can't, have you heard the story of the ultraviolet tits?

When I was interviewing for grad school in an animal behavior lab, I had not heard about great tits before, which in 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 must be a species of some sorts. And I got into that person's lab. So anyway, okay, go ahead. Tell me about the ultraviolet tits.

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 discovered this using Vaseline. And so they put Vaseline on some of these birds because Vaseline 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 Vaseline 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're just not visible to us without ultraviolet eyes. So, yes, Kelly, you're missing out on the ultraviolet tits because of your limited eyeballs and mine. And I am missing out on a lot of not safe for work jokes. But I'm going to contain myself and let's move on to the next sense. 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 frequencies 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 to experience the universe primarily through smell and with poor vision I 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 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 mechanics. magnetic field that maybe they were sensing that using some proteins in their eyes. But I think then you commented that there's actually another theory, or that's no longer the number one theory of how birds sense magnetic fields. I say lots of smart things. That might be a smart thing I said,

but I don't remember. I do remember 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 we do know that lots of fish can sense or even generate electric fields directly, right? They have these organs in their body that can create like electric pulses. Like you're all familiar with electric eels, 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 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 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. 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? 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 their electromagnetic fields. So it must depend a lot on the frequency. Yeah, it's a good question. Oh, apparently platypus and dolphins can also, but they're aquatic organisms. And so anyway, so interesting. What a counterintuitive world we live in. All right. 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 solved, if any? Are they tackling the same questions? And so this question of perception is important because we want to understand how aliens might see 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? Right.

The question that keeps Daniel up at night. All right. And so what are some options for how aliens might perceive the universe different than we do? 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, 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, your brain is electromagnetic, right? There's currents in your brain. And the way it operates is through electromagnetism. And electromagnetism can be transmitted through the air. And it can be received through the air, right? That's how radios work. So it's not inconceivable 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 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. Yeah. So first of all, when you said telepathy, I thought maybe we were 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 messages from our brains and connect the messages so we can all sort of, like humanity as a whole could share all of our thoughts together. I find that horrifying. 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.

I think social media is taught us that knowing what 15-year-olds think is usually a bad idea, yeah. That's right. That's right. But I wonder, so, you know, 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, that get, like, aggregated to give us a memory or a thought. Could you really transmit that information from one brain to another 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. 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 Kelly? 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.

I represent it. 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 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.

to communicate in situations where voice or smell or sight is not helpful. 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. Try again. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Braincasting, where you can't unsubscribe. Oh, no. 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 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 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 and to sense superposition so you could like taste electrons and like see quantum objects, then that would be a very different kind of sensation of the universe. So we 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 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. 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? If so, which one?

Oh, my gosh. I cannot imagine giving up taste or smell or sight or sound just so you know. I don't know. Why can't I have it all, Kelly? Because thought experiments are meant to be. tough. I guess. And you know, as interesting as it is to imagine the biology of these things, would it evolve under what situations? Might it evolve? To me, 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 translate it 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. Colliding black holes do not 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 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 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. So if you've listened to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe for 30 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 a fantastic book. Although I got to say the chapter on how hard it has been to translate other languages was also particularly, like, fascinating and had 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. And there's lots of really fun drawings in there by my friend

Andy Warner, who did an incredible job of imagining what these aliens might look like. Super fun. 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. See you next time. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would.

We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows if you contact us we will get back to you we really mean it

we answer every message email us at questions at danielandkelly.org or you can find us on social media we have accounts on X Instagram blue sky and on all of those platforms

you can find us at D and K universe Don't be shy write to us There's a vile sickness in Ampestown You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out.

From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everybody, it's snacks from the trap nerds, and all October long, we're bringing you the horror. We're kicking off this month with some of my best horror games to keep you terrified.

Then we'll be talking about our favorite horror in Halloween movies and figuring out why black people always die further. And it's the return of Tony's horror show, SideQuest written and narrated by yours truly. We'll also be doing a full episode reading with commentary. And we'll cap it off with a horror movie Battle Royale. Open your free A-Hard Radio app and search trap nurse podcast and listen now. The internet is something we make, not just something that happens to us.

I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech and culture podcast. There are No Girls on the Internet. In our new season, I'm talking to people like Anil Dash, an OG entrepreneur and writer who refuses to be cynical about the Internet. I love tech. You know, I've been a nerd my whole life, but it does have to be for something. Like, it's not just for its own sake. It's an inspiring story that focuses on people as the core building blocks of the Internet. Listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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