Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The SF Universe of Sue Burke's "Semiosis"

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Daniel and Jorge talk about what happens when plants can think. Is eating a banana now murder? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, do you ever feel bad when you eat fruit? Not if it's delicious. I'm not going to get into it with you right now about the banana controversy, but don't you ever think that you're, like, eating part of a living organism? Yeah, but it's a plant.

Plants don't mind, do they? I don't know. Have you asked the plant? Have you talked to the plant? Have you talked to the plant's parents? You know, I think the day I talk to a banana is the day that I have gone bananas. I'm just saying there's all kinds of life out there, so it's good to be open-minded about what might or might not have feelings.

Hi, I'm Borheim, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm an advocate for the rights of bananas. But not any other fruit, Daniel? They're like apples, eat them. No, bananas are the tip of the spear. And once we win that battle, we will extend those rights to other fruits. What are we going to eat, Daniel? Where are we going to get our potassium? We're going to learn to photosynthesize eventually.

We'll just all become biological solar panels. Oh, I see. Wow. I'm so glad you're a physicist because your biology is a little off. I'm glad this is not a biology podcast. I just need some biologists and some engineers. And then I can start a startup, you know, to make that real. Then you need a business person and it never ends, Daniel.

And some investors. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we explore all the amazing and crazy things about the universe, we bring you to the forefront of scientific knowledge and scientific inquiry and scientific ignorance to show you what scientists do know and what scientists are scratching their heads about, to show you all the mystery and wonder of the universe and explain it to you in a way that hopefully makes you chuckle. Yeah, all the stuff that's making scientists confused and curious, but also all the things that make scientists scratch their chins and go, hmm, I wonder. And one thing we love to do is think about the way the universe works as we see it and wonder if there are other ways the universe could work. Are there other kinds of planets out there? Could life be different on those planets?

Could it be dramatically weirdly different? Yeah, and because there are people out there who actually do this for a living, and not just because they have tenure and they can do whatever they want. Was that a dig? I felt like that was a dig. What do you mean? I did wait till I had tenure to propose my photosynthesis biostart. Oh. to the NSF or did you go with NIH? To you, I just proposed it to you right now. Did you go fund me for

that one? That's my new Kickstarter. No, but there are people out there whose job it is to be creative and to push the boundaries and it's not just scientists thinking about how the universe is and how the universe might be. It's also artists and writers and specifically science fiction authors. Yeah, so today on the program, we'll be talking about another science fiction novel that is out there that has some pretty interesting ideas. And it's another episode in our series of interviews with science fiction authors where we talk to them about their book, their ideas, and how they came up with it. And I'm especially fascinated with how they built their science fiction universe.

A lot of these science fiction novels are fun because the game is to figure out what are the rules in that universe. How do they work? What are the laws of physics and what are the fascinating consequences? And that's the same game we're playing in this universe. So it's fun to sometimes shift field and work in another universe. You mean we're playing a game with God or whoever made this universe, Daniel, to see who's smarter? I don't know who set up the puzzle, but it is a fascinating puzzle. And I feel like we're in a huge detective mystery.

We're trying to figure out what the rules are. We'd be given a few clues. And that's what science is all about. That's why it's so much fun because occasionally you do learn something fascinating. You have a flash of insight and the universe reveals something deep to you. Right, yeah. Most physicists are like, I guess, like, like Christy, right? We don't drink as much tea, but essentially, yes, we are trying to solve a big murder.

Yeah, so today we're talking with a pretty interesting author who wrote a book that sort of takes a look at intelligent life in a totally new way. Yeah, a lot of listeners write in and wonder, what could alien life be like on another planet? Could you have other weird forms of intelligence that is hard to imagine? And so this one particular writer took on that question very specifically and wondered about different surprising forms of alien intelligence. intelligence. I like the tagline of her book. It's sentience takes many forms. Tantalizing. But, you know, I always wonder what intelligence life looks like, because, you know, I'm still waiting to meet some. You never met any? I'm still waiting to meet some. Except for our listeners, right? The smartest people on the planets. Well, we never met them,

technically. I mean, I've only met you, Daniel. Well, we met some of them on the live stream. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So today on the podcast we'll be talking about. The sci-fi universe of Sue Burke's semiosis. All right, Daniel, this is a new word for me, semiosis. Break it down for me, what does semiosis mean? That's the title of her book. It's the title of her book,

and it reveals something about her background. She's a bit of a linguist. In her day job, she does translations. So she's fairly well known in that community for doing translations of like old Spanish texts. Like she won an award for a translation of a Spanish text from the 1600s that was the first analysis. of stock markets ever written.

And so she's like a real technical grasp of Spanish and English and understanding of linguistics. And I think that motivates the title of the book, Semiosis, which is a bit of a technical word in linguistics and reflects like how to communicate through signs. Like you take a, you know, how to interpret sign language or how to use, you know, signs like road signs to communicate meaning. And so it's all about how intelligent creatures communicate to each other. Oh, I guess it's related to semiotics, I think I've heard. that word before.

It's not related to osmosis or mitosis or myosis. Or full-on moses. This is semi-oosis. I'm a big fan of little osis. Miniosis. Miniosis. But that's pretty cool. I didn't even know they had awards in the translation world.

Yeah. Does that mean you haven't won any? Not yet. No. Apparently they don't give him for translating physics into human language. From math to English. I'm waiting for that. I wonder what the awards are called.

is it the excuse me this was the alicia gordon award for word artistry oh pretty cool yeah it's pretty impressive and so i had the great pleasure to read her book semiosis which came out very recently was also nominated for some awards in the science fiction world but it's her first science fiction novel pretty cool and so you got to talk to her daniel uh which is pretty cool and so later on we'll play the interview but first we'll sort of talk a little bit about the book and the science in and see how it holds up to the reading of a physicist. So, Daniel, break it down for us. What is the basic idea of the book?

Well, the book is really fun because it starts out as humans are exploring the galaxy. They are leaving Earth and trying to find other planets to live on. And so you immediately are on a colony ship and you're landing very rapidly on a new planet and there's this joy of exploration where you're like, what is this new planet like? And they very rapidly discovered

that this new planet has life on it. And it has life that sort of seems similar to Earth at first, There are plant-like structures and there are animal-like structures. But they soon come to learn that these plant-like structures are pretty different from earthbound plants in one very important way. Okay, so I guess I have a question already, which is when they go down to these planets, do they have to wear spacesuits? Or is it like Star Trek where they can just automatically breathe the air in those planets? They have been selective about the planets they visit and they have like the ability to scan these things far in advance so they can guess what the atmosphere is like. So on this planet, they can walk around without spacesuits.

I mean, they're looking to establish colonies, you know, permanent colonies. They don't want to be living under bubbles or in spacesuits. So they specifically went to planets that had non-toxic atmospheres. Right. And so what's the real science behind that? Is that likely that there are planets where we can breathe the air? It's fascinating, actually. We're just on the cusp of the ability to study exoplanet atmospheres.

It's an amazing field. And we think that it's likely that there are exoplanets and that they have atmospheres. and some of them have water vapor and carbon dioxide and stuff like this. But it's very difficult to get significant amounts of oxygen in those atmospheres without some form of life, without microbes for like a billion years pumping out oxygen. And so it's actually very scientifically accurate that if you find a planet that has oxygen, it probably already has microbes on it. Interesting.

But I guess I always wonder, like, what's the probability that we'll find a planet with an atmosphere with the exact same composition, you know, of the gases that, you know, humans need to breathe comfortably? Because isn't it, isn't it a very fine balance? Like, like if the oxygen level in our atmosphere dropped by a certain percentage, we would all die. Or if the carbon dioxide level went up by a certain bit, we would all die. Isn't it really hard? It's not that, no, it's not that hard. I mean, you can, most of the atmosphere is nitrogen, and that's pretty much inert to us. So you could replace that with a lot of different kinds of stuff. But you're right, there are bounds. If the oxygen level dropped too far, then we couldn't

breathe the air. We can tolerate a range of oxygen. but not a huge range. I mean, Earth has a like 21% oxygen, and if it dropped into the teens, you'd feel pretty sluggish. And if it dropped into the single digits, well, then you'd die. And if the carbon dioxide level was too high, it would be toxic for humans. But there are certainly bounds there, but we don't know very much about the distribution of atmospheres on exoplanets. We're like at the very beginning of that. So it's a fair question, but it's also totally not implausible to find an exoplanet with a non-toxic atmosphere. What we'd don't know is if there are any exoplanets out there with microbes producing oxygen for us to

breathe. That's a huge unanswered question. Oh, I see. Because oxygen doesn't happen naturally in planets. You need something to break out, break it out. Well, oxygen is around in the universe, but it's not nearly as abundant as hydrogen. It's there. But without microbes, it's all bound up, like in carbon dioxide and stuff. So what you need for breathing is oxygen by itself. That's just I guess there are maybe there are a lot of planets out there and so it's technically possible to find some that would have the same exact atmosphere as ours. Yeah, yeah, but the microbes are sort of a sticking point there. All right, so not implausible, so that's good enough here. Not implausible, no.

And so the plot is they go to a planet and it has an interesting new kind of intelligent life. Yes, and that new intelligent life is not an animal. Now, there are animals on this planet. They're like weird birds and weird ground creatures and predators and all sorts of stuff. They don't seem that smart, though. But the most intelligent creature on this planet is a plant. It's one plant. Well, there are actually a variety of plants with varying intelligence.

But there's one specific kind of bamboo, a grove of bamboo, like an extended grove of bamboo, which turns out to be very intelligent. Oh, so it's like a complex organism. So it's not, is it one organism? It's like one bamboo or like a bunch of different bamboos that talk to each other? Well, it's both. There are different groves of bamboo. each one is its own individual. So it's not like one bamboo plant.

One chute is its own individual. It's like a whole grove communicate. They have like tangled roots the way Aspen do here on earth. You can think of them as one individual. But then, you know, one grove over here has one name. And then another grove on another hillside might have another one. And so they're sentient. Like, um, yes.

They actually have a consciousness. Like, uh, they think. They think. They plan. They communicate. They talk to each other using pollen, for example. They can, you know, send little signals to other groves or they are sentient. They talk to each other.

They send little pollen messages to each other. They have points of view. They have personalities. Parts of the book take place from the point of view of this bamboo grove. What? It's the first person narrator for part of the book. They speak English? They do learn to communicate with humans.

Oh, wow. How do they write or speak to us? Yeah, it develops slowly. First, the plant on one of its stems learns learns to control the coloring. of the stem and so it can form words on the stem of the plant so that people can like look at it like a screen. What? And it develops all these new abilities to like hear what people are saying or to smell

them. It can control its development in this amazing way. It has a real grasp of like the biochemistry of what's going on inside it. So it can like do its own biological engineering. Like genetically it can change itself. I don't know if it's genetic. It didn't get down to that level of detail. But it has a lot of control over how it wants to grow and what capabilities it wants to

wants to produce and it's highly intelligent and it's fascinating because the relationship between the plants and the animals on this planet is sort of inverted like the plants are kind of in charge and they train the animals they will like produce a fruit the animals want if the animals do what the plants need them to do like disperse their seeds or protect them from from aggression from other plants and stuff like this how fast can they grow these fruits pretty quickly yeah and so when the when the humans land on this planet they unbeknownst to them land right in the middle of a great war between two plants. And they end up eating the fruits from one plant and eating the fruits from another plant. And this one produces poisonous fruits and

this one doesn't. And so they slowly figure out that there's something complicated going on here and they learn to interact with the plants. It's like landing in the middle of a flame war on Twitter or something. You're like, what's going on? I don't understand. Yeah. And the plants on the planet are bewildered. You know, when these humans show up, the plants wonder like, where are their plants. You know, you can't just have animals wandering around without plants. It's like, you know, kids out in the street without their parents or something. Because on that planet, the plants are in charge. Well, it sounds pretty interesting, but I guess my question is what happens in the book, like the humans land and then what happens? The whole book is just sort of an exploration of this

organism or is there some drama going on? No, there's some drama. It turns out that this planet, while it has a good atmosphere, is a real challenging planet for humans to live on, because there's almost no iron available on the surface. You know, we need iron for our blood. We need iron for lots of things in our body. And also, iron is pretty important for our technology. But on this planet, the way the tectonics happened and the way iron settled or the amount of iron that was available when the planet formed means that there's almost no iron available on the surface. The only iron you get is from like the occasional meteorite.

So it's a real challenge. And when the humans land, they initially struggle. Well, they struggle for lots of reasons. This is just one of them. And what they learn to do is learn how to survive on this planet, essentially. by forming a relationship with these intelligent plants. You know, first humans show up and they want to be in charge and they want to establish their own colony and be independent. But eventually they learn that if they want to survive, they have to build a relationship with these plants.

They have to learn to work together. All right. So it's more sort of like a colonization novel. Yeah, yeah, except that the, you know, the colonizers. Working with the natives. In this case, though, the natives win because by the end of the novel, the humans essentially give up and put the plants in charge. Really? At the end, they think the plants are more intelligent than them. Yeah, the plants are better at making decisions, that long-term planning.

They have a better grasp of the details. Did those humans also elect a carrot is president? I feel like you're inviting me to compare politicians to fruits here, but I'm going to avoid being political and just say that they all seem bananas to me. All right. Well, let's get into the science a little bit more and whether or not it's plausible from a physics point of view to have a planet like this or a plant that's intelligent from a biology point of view. and then we'll get into the interview with Sue Berg.

But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged,

and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't

is a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast. on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden, you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying, like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it in my eyes closed. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right.

I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about the sci-fi universe of Sue Burke's novel, Semayosis. And in it, plants are intelligent. So is that, Daniel, is that even plausible, I guess? You know, like, I wonder, like, if you look at a neuron, you wouldn't think a neuron is intelligent.

But if you get a whole bunch of them, a few billion, then you get a human brain. So is this kind of what's going on here with the plants? Like, if you get enough simple plants, you might get some sort of complex consciousness out of it. Yeah, and it's a really hard question because we don't really understand the rise of intelligence or what's critical about it or consciousness or all this stuff. So, of course, I turn to my local expert. My wife is a biologist and I asked her, hey, do you think plants could ever be intelligent? I didn't tell her the context or anything. So if she first said, that's ridiculous.

Absolutely not. Why did she say that? Well, there's a whole history of studying plants here on Earth where people try to understand, like, do Earth plants feel pain? Do they have responses? Do they have any sort of nervous system at all? And there were some labs about 10, 15 years ago that claimed that they had evidence that plants could feel things or respond, maybe even feel pain. And it's a complicated question because plants do have sophisticated reactions to stimuli, right? There are plants that if you touch them, they will close up or a Venus fly chapel, like, you know, eat an animal.

They strive, right? They seek out the sun and the water. And if you cut them, they actually have some sort of like emergency reaction to being cut. Yeah. And so I called up another friend of mine who was actually a neuroscientist. You're like, my wife that didn't have a satisfying answer. I'm going to call somebody else. Yeah.

Well, you know, she's a microbiologist. So I called an actual neuroscientist who works on Drosophila, like fruit flies and how their minds work. And she said that, you know, plants don't have a central nervous system the way we understand it, but they do have these kind of mechanical reactions. You know, they do respond to stimuli. And so it's really best to think of plants sort of like on a continuum. It's not easy to say, like, there's a clear distinction between how plants work and how animals work all the way up to humans. It's sort of, you can place them on a continuum. Right.

An individual plant, I think, is what you're saying. You can maybe think of them as intelligent, but not that intelligent. Yeah. But I think maybe what she's getting to in this novel is, like, if you get enough simple plants, maybe you could get consciousness out of it. Yeah, and you also only need to take another step, which is maybe these plants are not just like Earth plants. They have nervous systems. There's no reason why on another planet, plant-like organisms couldn't develop something akin to a nervous system,

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

so that you can have things happen quickly. You don't have to wait for the delay as signals transmit from like one side of the hill to the other side of the hill, right? That would be a slow thought there. That would be a slower thought. And so in this case, it's sort of like a distributed intelligence. Each plant is intelligent in its root, and then together they form. a personality. In the novel, though, the plants are pretty responsive. So, you know, sometimes it takes

some time to think, but you can have a conversation back and forth with these plants. Oh, really? Well, I guess if you have enough of them, maybe, you know, it's fast that way because there's so many plants involved. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we do the same thing with our computing, right? We have big clusters of computers to answer questions. And you have part of it that's responsive to the user and other parts of it that are all thinking about deep stuff, you know, to provide information later on. And these computer systems are very responsive. It's like the idea of the hive mind, you know, like if you have a question, just ask the internet. I'm not sure the internet is that intelligent, but yeah, there are examples of, you know, starlings or, you know, insects that act sort of as one organism.

And then I was amazed that this neuroscientist friend of mine pointed out that there are other organisms here on Earth that have nerves and sort of mental states, but no brain. There's this organism called a hydra, which has like a nerve. net. So there's no core brain. It's not like all the nerves are clustered together. They're sort of distributed through the body. But, you know, it has a nervous system. It has mental states. It's very simple. But there's an example of sort of distributed brain that can actually have some intelligence. It doesn't have a concentrated processing. It just kind of is. It's like a human without a conscious brain. Yeah. Or it's like if your brain was spread out through your body instead of concentrated in your skull. Oh, boy. That would be a massive headache if you, if you

All right, well, there's another piece of science here in this book about low iron in the planet. Like, it's a planet that has very little iron. I'm just wondering if that's possible because, you know, aren't most planets sort of made of rocky iron types of metals? Yeah, it's hard to assemble a planet without some heavy metal at the core. I mean, that's what really seeds the gravitational attraction is accretion of stuff. Right. Remember, solar systems start, you have blobs of gas and dust and rock. And the heavy stuff starts to gather together.

And that's why most of these planets have a heavy core. Even things like Jupiter, right, has some ice and rock at its core. And that sort of seeded the creation of those gas giants. And so it's very unlikely to have a planet that doesn't have some iron in it down below. But the question is, can the iron be available at the surface? And that's a question of like, how quickly did the planet cool? How long did it stay hot? You know, if it stayed hot for a while and there's time for these things to sort of settle through the liquid core,

then it's possible that all the heavy stuff goes all the way down and you only get sort of lighter elements near the surface. Oh, so it's possible to have an iron-rich planet, but just not available for the plants and animals up top on the surface. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. So that's also not implausible. It's not implausible. And it's sort of fascinating to imagine, like, a situation where the only iron you can get comes from the sky.

And, you know, before humans were able to mine the earth and pull out these heavy metals, that was also the case. You know, there are examples of, like, Vikings that forged swords from meteorites, you know, because that was the first metal that was available. And that's pretty awesome. That's like, and you can imagine how that inspired all sorts of mythology. Right. Well, I guess my question is if these humans had star traveling power and they could go around colonizing, couldn't they just go and, like, grab a meteor from the nearest meteor? belt or something that has a lot of iron or if they have that technology can they drill down until they get to some iron on the core it didn't pack for that um yeah they didn't pack for that

they didn't bring deep mining technology and you know when they land their technology very rapidly degrades and so they end up you know they start out as a starfaring technological civilization but then one generation two generations five generations deep they're at a much lower level they're at a farming subsistence to um technology and they have to build up a local infrastructure structure basically from scratch they had some bad luck when they landed some of their key technology was lost in a crash from some of their shuttles and so but i think it's pretty typical to imagine that if you land on a planet you're not going to be able to benefit from the heavy industry of earth for very long you really have to be able to build the stuff up locally you don't think that

this you know like history would repeat itself and they would have a bronze age and an iron age and start mining things you know what yeah but history took a long time right that's thousands of years. And now even if you know how to do this stuff, it's not that easy. You know what they should have done is they should have brought Ryan North's How to Invent Everything Book, when he talks about how to create all of human civilization in about a hundred years. You would think they would bring that on a colonizing ship to another planet. You know, a little instruction set or an encyclopedia, but it sounds like to me they forgot. No, they brought a bunch of experts. Oh, no. The experts are always the first ones to die in a

sci-fi movie. That's right. They lost some of those and they lost some of their more specialized technology. All right. Well, it sounds really interesting. And again, if anyone is interested, the novel is called Semiosis by Sue Burke. And so, Daniel, you had a chance to talk to an interviewer about her book. I did. We had a lot of fun. All right. Well, here's the interview of Daniel with sci-fi author, Sue Burke. Could you please introduce yourself for our audience? Hello, my name is Sue Burke, and I'm a writer. I'm the author of the science fiction books semiosis and interference, along with a bunch of other stuff and short stories. I was a journalist for quite a bit of time, and I'm also a translator from Spanish and to English.

Wow, that's amazing. And I read from your website, you're also a poet. Yes, I write poetry as well. Wow, wow, quite prolific. So let me get started by sort of getting acquainted with how you view the universe and science fiction universe by asking you about sort of standard science fiction universes that exist out there in your view on them. For example, what's your opinion about the Star Trek teleporter? Do you think that when you step into a Star Trek teleporter, it tears you apart and kills you, reassembling you somewhere else, or that it actually translates you, moves you from one place to another? Actually, as an author, I think that that was a workaround for all of the mechanics of getting someone from hither to yon.

it's what we call in the business hand waving that we'll tell you that this is this is just fine don't look at it too hard and that's how it works and it just saves them a whole lot of time and effort and boring things that people wouldn't want to see so there's realistically it wouldn't work just because it would take too much information to build someone rebuild someone and where would you get the parts anyway. That's right. I mean, because there's a lot that goes into our body, and what if you went to a place that didn't have, I don't know, a lot of calcium, you wouldn't have bones.

You need a 3D body printer with all the supplies. Exactly. Yeah. So then would you be willing to step into one? Say I somehow overcame all the technical obstacles and put one together. Would you be willing to use a teleporter? I would be willing to be the million person to do that. That's fair.

So then in other science fiction universes, what technology that you see there would you like to see become real? Well, let's see. The Star Trek communicators, of course, are now real, and that is just super cool. Also from an author, that makes sometimes plotting very difficult because if you could talk to anybody at any time about anything and look things up at all times, that changes human dynamics in ways that are maybe too subtle for us to one. understand because we just live through it. Perhaps, yeah. So then let's turn to your book and the main topic of it. First, congratulations. It's a wonderful book. I really enjoyed reading it. Well, thank you. I read a lot of science fiction. I'm frankly a little picky about what I

read and what I like, and I found yours to be really wonderful, very creative, very well executed. So congrats. Thank you. And in my reading, sort of the main intellectual concept, like the novel idea, is coming to a planet where plants or the equivalent of plants, the sessile creatures, have higher intelligence and have evolved these complex relationships with each other and also with the equivalent of animals on the planet. Is that a fair way to describe sort of the core nugget of the idea? Yes. In fact, that was the exact idea I wanted to explore. Awesome. So tell me, where did that idea come from? Did you start from having that idea and then

trying to tell a story in that world? Or did you have sort of a story you wanted to tell? And this is the idea you needed. Yeah. Actually, it all started when one of my houseplants attacked another house plant and killed it. It just grew around it and wrapped itself around the other plant until it died. And then it happened to another plant and I started to get suspicious. And I began to do some research and I discovered that plants are very active, even aggressive. We don't think of that because we don't see them move usually.

Although if you think about carnivorous plants, they can move fast. But between themselves, it's pretty much a constant state of war, except when they decide it's better for them to cooperate. They can do all sorts of things. And the more I researched that, the more I realized that, what if they could think? Because they don't seem to think the way that we do. But if they could, then what? And that was the idea I wanted. And I needed to do that in science fiction because obviously it's counterfeit.

reality. And then what would be the way plagued to explore that? So I would need a planet where they could do that because if they started doing it here on Earth, well, that wouldn't work for technical reasons. So, okay, well, set up a planet and then we'll put some humans there and then what could happen and how could I make those events show what the plants could do and how they would react to things and build a story around that. Some of our listeners, I told them I'd be interviewing you and they asked me to ask you how that might change people's relationship with the plants, like in terms of ethical questions. Like, what does it like to eat the fruit of an intelligent plant?

Is it all right if they are giving you consent, but otherwise not? How does that sort of change that relationship? That was built into the story because plants do sometimes want fruit. They definitely want you to eat because they make it edible. In fact, they make it very attractive to you. And they do that because that's one of the ways that they spread their seeds. They have many other ways too. But is that a want in the sense that there is an advantage to them?

They have evolved to do this? Absolutely. Or are you attributing, you know, an intention, a desire to the actual organism? We don't know if it's an intention or not, but we know that is the purpose of the fruit is to be attractive to us so that we eat it and remove their seeds. Some plants and tomatoes, for example, their seeds can. actually go right through our digestion unless we cook the tomato it comes out at the other end and ready to go nicely fertilized yes um and that happens with other things and wheat grows a whole lot

of seeds because they know some of them will be eaten but not all of them will be eaten because there's just too many that's why they make make so many and that's true of other grains too one of the interesting things is that human beings discovered this and we start growing wheat fields and there's a kind of a grain called rye rye just started moving into those fields because it looked like a really good way to live because you got lots of care and then you know all of them and then you planted more seeds. And so Rye volunteered to become domesticated because that was a good way to work. And you can see now oak trees, for example, they just do not cooperate at all. It's a whole other subject, but yeah, oak trees just don't behave

well. Apple trees, on the other hand, apple trees clearly thought it was a good idea. They were quite willing to do that. Think about marijuana and how we can breed that into the little things that basically do nothing but grow flowers and sap. And they're very willing to do that too because it works for them because they keep getting replanted. So some plants want to do it. Some plants don't. They have all sorts of other ways to do that. And some of it is actually very abusive to animals. So it seems to me like this concept of plants having intention and intelligence that You see it as a natural extension of the sort of continuum of plant relationships to animals now, not something totally distinct, but just sort of like an exaggeration or an extension of what's happening in our universe. Oh, yeah. We grew up with each other and we depend on each other. And if you could put that where we would all have to think about that, both them and us, then as you say, it does cause ethical questions, which I tried to explore in the novel. But it also makes it more clue that that's what we're doing.

here. We don't think about it enough, I think. If you talk to ecologists and especially farming ecologists, we're doing some things that are very scary and wrong and they're going to come back to get us. But that relationship exists here. We just don't think about it very hard. I mean, have you thought about your tomato is talking to you when it turns red? Well, it is. But we're just so used to that that we don't realize that we are in communication. And some people talk to their tomatoes, right? People talk to their plants. Oh, yeah. I don't know if they listen, but I do that too. Well, I talk to my children, and I don't know if they listen, but I do it anyway.

Well, let me ask you this. Do you imagine that the universe that you described could exist, those kinds of plants could exist here in our universe? I mean, do you imagine that there could be an alien planet out there in which plants do develop intelligence? Do you think there would need to be a different set of laws of physics or that there's some scientific principle that that needs to be sort of hand-waved. No, they could do that now. And in fact, there's some debate over whether they do that here. One of the things is that beyond, you know, tomatoes turning red and fruit showing that it's great.

How much do they really need to talk to us about? We know they communicate with each other a lot, but they might not have that much to say to us. So, well, hey, they do communicate here with each other. We haven't deciphered that, but we know, for example, whales communicate with each other. other, and we're not sure what they're saying either, just because we can't break that code. It could very easily happen somewhere in the university right now, the way I wrote about it, give us another million years for the plants to keep making changes, and perhaps we could enter into a more direct relationship with them.

And so the plants in your novel, do they have like a central nervous system? What is the sort of implementation, the strata, on which this intelligence is built? Yeah, they have a central nervous system, which helps them to communicate with us. more like we communicate with each other. There is a neurobotonist named Mancuzzo, and he says that the way that plants work, because they don't have a central nervous system, but they work, if you can imagine,

a flock of starlings and how they all can fly sort of in the same direction and in giant flocks. The way they do that is they all just look out at the birds that are closest to them and follow them. And then in an aggregate, it looks like they're one giant thing. Right. And he says that it works with plants that same way as that each cell looks what's going on with the cells around it, adjusts to that.

And in that way, plants can do things that look very complex and they are very complex, but they can do it without a central nervous system. And so then the plants in your novel, did they have a nervous system for communication, but it's distributed through the plant, or is there some sort of hub, like a brain-like thing in the plants that you described? Yeah, their brains are in their roots, which might not be, well, we know that their roots do a whole lot of things here, too. And I want to point out that plants have personalities. They make different decisions because they have to make decisions. When they decide to put out their leaves and spring is a life or death decision.

If they get that wrong, and then the weather gets screwed up, they can wipe out a whole growing season, and that would be fatal. And different trees, even of the same species, even growing next to each other, will sometimes decide to do things differently. One tree will pick one day and the tree next to it will pick the next day. Why do they do that? How do they do that? Will they make a whole bunch of choices inside of themselves? Do you think some trees like are procrastinators and they just don't get around to it? Procrastinators, some seem to be very cautious. They've been described as cautious by botanists.

Some trees are willing to take a lot more risks. And this is true of other plants as well. It's hard for us to notice because they move so slow. And unless you're like watching them like a scientist every hour, you can't see what they're doing because we have other things to worry about. But different plants make different decisions that are very important. And we can kind of guess that some of this, there's natural variation between them because they have to adjust to change. conditions all the time. So they try all sorts of different things and different individuals will be doing things in a different way. They certainly have their own individual personalities. That's

right. We're having a lot of fun talking to Sue Burke, but let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with more. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers, the pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Pull that. Turn this. It's just, I can do it my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. and then as we try the whole thing out for real wait what oh that's the run right i'm looking at this thing listen to no such thing on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts all right we're back with my interview with sue burke science fiction author of semiosis So let me ask you about the sort of spot that you put these folks in because you created this wonderful universe, you introduced the humans to these intelligent plants, and then you gave them some hard problems to solve.

And one of the challenges in your universe is that the planet they land on has a very low iron content, which of course iron is something we need to survive. Tell me about how you made that choice and whether you did some sort of like science consulting to talk to folks. No, I started, because, okay, I'm going to put them on another planet. Well, what do we know about other planets? began to do research into that and in books, and scientists put things out. One of the things I learned is that when planets are formed, they all pretty much seem to be the iron nickel sort of core that we have. But on our planet, iron, quite a bit of it has stayed on the surface.

It's very easy to find iron here. It's easy to find iron on Mars. But if a planet was formed and just a few little things went differently, there wouldn't be iron on the surface. And when I read that, that inspired an understanding of a conflict that was going to happen because plants need iron. We think that animals need iron and we do. But plants also need iron for some of the chemicals to do photosynthesis. So plants need iron. Animals have iron. Plants already eat animals when they need to if they can't get enough nitrogen in their localized environment, they'll do in carnivorous and start to eat us. So if they need iron, and we have iron,

and if they can think, they'll start to think of ways to get the iron out of us, which is a whole... And so we become fruits. Yes, we become food for them, which is a whole series of other ethical concerns that appear in the novel very quickly. Right. I thought that was really fun and fascinating. And it's interesting to imagine how a culture would survive with a very small amount of iron. You know, they'd basically be harvesting meteorites and recycling as much as they could. So I was also really interested in how you got these sentient beings to work together. Because not only did they need to work together and to communicate, but you had them actually come to a common understanding, like to actually understand each other, to develop relationships and friendships. Do you think that's necessary?

That's basically how a society works, how a civilization works. Among humans, we're so close to what we do that we don't always see it, but we work out of human connections, interconnections with different people. We have large organizations that allow us to work under it so we understand how we have agreements built into how we relate to each other. We are naturally social beings, human beings, just as other primates are. But here's the thing. Plants are social beings too. We know trees like to be around other trees. like itself. And they communicate, as we've noticed, they send messages through their roots. They send messages through the air with chemicals. And a tree that is among other trees like it will be

healthier and live longer than a tree that is alone. And that is also true of human beings. If you put a human being in solitary confinement, they suffer terribly, physically and mentally. So that you have two groups of social beings that come together. And they're going to behave as social beings and set up social constructs and all of the Hobbs and other sorts of political philosophers and their thoughts about how we do that remain true. The fact that it's two different species and such different species puts in some problems, but also some solutions. And in your book, you try to use beauty and sort of appreciation, you know, joy to sort of connect our experience with theirs. Like if we could enjoy the same music, then we had something in common. And as I'm

sure you know, some of the probes that we've sent out into interstellar space have had samples of human music on them. Do you think that that will be well received? You think of there are aliens out there that received that probe or hear our broadcasts that they'll like, you know, thump along to our music and be like, hey, those are folks we can understand. They might, they might not. Again, this is a theme that is explored by many writers in fruitfully and would be a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun. How much do we recognize? How much do we have in common. If a rock was alive, and they could be, the problem is they would be so slow. They could make music that we could never hear because even over generations, we don't live long

enough. If they're too fast, would be hear them. So the question you ask is maybe, and the fun is, when would we, and when would we not, and why? Or if we hear something and we know it's music, even if it sounds horrible to us, and we can't stand it. It's black, it's fingernails on a blackboard, but we know they're making music. Yeah. Would that be enough? Yeah, they're trying. That we have in common.

Well, I hope that one day we get answers to those questions. There are questions that I'm very curious about as well. So I was just glad in your book that to see those humans get to meet aliens and connect with them on this deep level, work together and, and experience each other's joy. That was wonderful. Great. So thanks very much. Well, thank you. It was a pleasure for me, too. Take care. Stay safe. As you can see, no question is too nerdy for me.

All right. Pretty interesting conversation there about plants and intelligence and my favorite procrastination. Yeah, I did that one for you. I asked her if she thought plants procrastinate. And you know, you can hear in her voice that she really thinks that plants here on Earth are part of a sort of continuum of communication and therefore some effectively. some kind of intelligence, you know. Tomatoes talk to you by changing color and plants communicate to you by... Wait, what? Tomatoes talk to me? Tomatoes tell you when they're ripe, right, by changing

color. Oh, I see. I see. They're training me kind of what you're saying. Exactly. Just the way the plants in her novel train their animals to do something or not do something. Apple trees, you know, induce you to eat their fruit by making them tasty and all sorts of stuff. And it's a question about whether you could, like,

attribute any intention to the apple tree, or if it's essentially a dumb biological machine. But she's definitely right that they communicate. Right. And at the end, aren't we all dumb biological machines, standing? That's a deep question about the universe. I certainly don't have the answer to. But she's very pro-plant, I guess.

She's really into nature and plants. Yeah. I'm not sure where she would come down on, you know, whether bananas have rights. I didn't feel like it was respectful to ask her that question. I just assumed that bananas are in charge. Then why are you eating them and they're not eating you? maybe I'm well I'm just doing their bidding is this is part of the long game for bananas

but I was also impressed she really thought about the science of her book she was not trying to create something in a completely alien made-up universe she was just imagining how life could be different on another planet you know she looked at the way things work here and she just tweaked it a little bit she's like let's exaggerate this element of it or play out this thing here on earth which she didn't think was widely enough appreciated all right well pretty Cool. Well, I guess it kind of makes you think about what intelligence could be like in other planets, right? Because it doesn't necessarily have to be like we have it here on Earth. You know, like we talked about last time in a lot of Star Trek episodes and movies like Star Wars, they imagine life pretty similar to us with like, you know, four limbs, five fingers. But really, I mean, life out there could take on any form. It could be like sentient clouds or blob of silicone, right? That's right. And as much as I say, I'd like to talk to aliens. there's a good chance that aliens out there have an intelligence, if they are out there and they are intelligent, that their intelligence would be very difficult for us to understand.

A key element in her book is that these humans and these plans find a commonality. They find a way to talk to each other. They have things in common. They appreciate things. They both want to survive. They appreciate beauty or something. And so it's a question of like, will those aliens be able to understand that we are intelligent? Can they see intelligence in us?

Right. Or whether they think about intelligence the same way we do, they might see it as something totally different. That's right. And, you know, we famously sent out signals into space. And like on one of the Voyager probes, for example, we put some music. And I always wonder, like, aliens get that. Are they even going to understand that it's music? And if they do, is it going to make them like us less or more? Is that the kind of thing that we'd have in common with aliens? Could you sound like static to them? You know, an annoying sound. Yeah, it could sound like the annoying music their kids listen to. And then they're like, I'm going to skip that planet entirely. Obviously, we should be sending out tomatoes. And bananas. Just in case, you never know.

We really have no idea what the forms of intelligence are. And so even a book like this where it seems pretty weird to imagine intelligent plants, that's really not very far from what's happening on Earth compared to what could really be out there. Yeah, who knows, right? Who knows? And also, this book reminded me of one of my favorite comics, Jack Handy, one of his deep thoughts, which is, if trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might if they screamed all the time for no good reason. Yeah, that's a

classic for sure. Do you think maybe she had a little bit of that in her motivation? You know, for us to think a little bit differently about plants and not be so cavalier about cutting them down or eating them. Yeah, I think she's definitely pro-plant. But I think also her goal is just to make us think about our intelligence and the context of our lives and to remember that things out there in the universe could really be very different from the way they are here on Earth. Yeah. And they probably are. And let's hope they are because it would be pretty disappointing if we met aliens and they were just like humans and they had only figured out what we have figured out and so we basically learned nothing from them. And they're like, we thought you

guys had the answers to everything. What have you been doing all these years? Come on. I'm going to write the most boring, disappointing science fiction novel ever. In our version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy, the answer is 37. What's your answer? All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed this episode and we hope you check out Sue Berg's sci-fi novel, Semiosis. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I think you'd like it as well. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. podcast from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back-to-school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money?

No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown & Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.