Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What could aliens teach us about the Universe?

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Daniel talks to Noam Chomsky about how to communicate with aliens? 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, got you. 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. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy,

and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone? Maybe you've had an argument with a friend, or a disagreement with a coworker and try to talk it through. Sometimes, if you can get to a point of common understanding, you can find a way out the other side.

Other times, well, it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not rude to belge at the table. Or maybe it's rude to not belge at the table. When misunderstandings come from deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge the divide and understand each other. Now consider this. What are the chances we'll be able to make that kind of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally belch or not belch our way into planet-wide extermination?

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. exist and I have so many questions about how the universe works, from basic questions like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up to deeper questions, such as why these particles and not other particles, to cosmic questions like, is what we are learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal or hopelessly human-centric? And welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, where we ask all of these questions, and much more, and dive into what science does and does not know about the answers. We don't shy away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries because we think that everyone out there wants to know

the meaning and the context of our lives. How did it all start? How does it all work? How will it all end? And everyone deserves to share in our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion, extensive as it is. Because science is just people being curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we call it Daniel and Jorge explain the universe when today is just Daniel. My friend and co-host Jorge is away today, so it's just me, but you are in for a very special treat today. We have an interview today with a guest who I am super excited to talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguist and world-class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today to talk about a question

that I suspect nobody has ever asked him before. As regular listening, of the show are no doubt aware, I am very keen to believe in aliens. Not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed, but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone in the universe? I suspect the answer is no and that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we can't know until we actually know. So I'd like to believe, but as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non-alian interpretations of those videos. I know that some of you

out there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking, but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long as you stay open-minded enough to be persuadable given enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very well-trodden territory. Today's episode is about what happens next. Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth and don't fry us from space with a planet-wide death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit, beyond knowing that we're not alone. What excites me is that we might be able to ask them science questions. If they have traveled between stars to get here, assuming they aren't octopi from seas under Europa, then they must know more about the

universe than we do. At the very least, they probably know different things about the universe. And so we could compare notes and learn. Rather than just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles of the universe ourselves, we could get the answers straight away from our new alien friends. Or could we? Could we manage to set up a communication system that would allow us to talk to the aliens to communicate with them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome to Earth, please don't kill us, all the way to to what's inside an electron, or what happened before the Big Bang, or even just how does your warp drive work? Is that actually possible?

So on today's episode, we'll be asking the question, Will we be able to learn science from aliens? To help me explore this topic, I'm very pleased to introduce Professor Noam Chomsky. Pleased to be with you. Well, let me get started with something of a less serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all. of your emails. And that's something that I try to do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive

nearly as many as you do, and I'll admit to having been inspired by your approach here. But it's very much counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do, who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive? Well, first of all, I don't answer all of it. Anything that's within the realm of sanity, moderately, moderate. seriousness, which is a lot I try to answer. I just assume that people ought to be taken seriously. Well, wonderful. I hope that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving into today is first, how do we begin to talk to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into the question of whether we could actually learn things from

them, understand their mental models of the universe. But let's start with imagining what it might be like as a linguist to work on this problem. How do you begin? Say you receive a recording from SETI and they ask you if you think a series of pulses from space is language, if it has information, is it possible to know whether there's information in there without being able to decode it first and actually translate it? If there are any intelligent aliens, which is an open question, and if they exist, we could ever get in contact with them, which is an even more open question. Then the question would arise. It's a pretty remote question. And the only way to proceed as usual would be to try to find some common ground. Begin with that. So what's the likely

common ground? Well, there's some plausible openings. It was an interesting article by Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, maybe 30 years ago, when he addressed this problem in an interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of his students had done a thought experiment with touring machines, abstract computers. And it's known that you can have a universal touring machine, one in which you can put a program for any possible algorithm

and it'll implement it. And it can be reduced to a small size. I think the smallest is maybe two states and three symbols or something like that. So what they did was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with the smallest intrinsic characteristics states and symbols, and just let them run freely and see what they did. Most of them either got into endless loops or crushed, but some of them survived.

and what they produced basically was the successor function. So Minsky suggested that maybe if an intelligence existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function. And that might be a way to establish contact with them. It has some linguistic interest, because you can show that if you take the simplest, possible human language, one which has only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest version of the computational principles that are used in human language. If you do that, you basically get the successor function. So maybe there's a point of contact. These systems also

with a little bit of tweaking, give you arithmetic. So maybe that's a broader point of contact. If you could establish that far, you could try to spread the range of intercommunication beyond. There's a lot of things you can do with just arithmetic, like coding thoughts and expressions, for example. If you really get sophisticated about it, you could do girdle number and get culture. So the assumption there is that they may have discovered similar mathematical principles, which they would recognize. If we sort of expressed our version of them, they might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures worthy of discussion? Well, there's a good chance that at least arithmetic, maybe not mathematics, but at least arithmetic is universal and absolute. If you really get fancy, there are models of non-standard models of arithmetic that don't satisfy Piano's axioms, but we can put that aside.

A basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system. The rest of mathematics is, in part, at least the human construction, can be done in different ways and still be consistent. Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been to demonstrate that. So it could be that if you go off into broader domains like set theory, you might find other ways of looking at things. It's a fair guess that at least arithmetic would be close than to be absolute so that anything we might call intelligence that we would recognize as intelligence

would at least hit on that. But how do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's just human thinking? I mean, is it a question of definition that these is the class of intelligence that we can communicate with and therefore we define intelligence to be people who think with a mathematical basis? Or can we actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to the universe rather than just a property of our thinking. Well, you're reaching into a much debated and rather obscure area of foundations of mathematics. There are viewpoints like Kirk Gertl, for example, who argued these are just the truths of mathematics or like the truths of physics.

They're just part of the world, you know, nothing to do with us. We can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena. The numbers are there in some ideal platonic world, and we grasp them the same way I can see the sun in the sky, just perception. There are others who try to argue that these are human creations. It's a characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question.

There are many sophisticated debates about it. It strikes me that in some sense we ask similar questions about the nature of biological life. We've been putting aside aliens and intelligence. We wonder what life might look like on other planets to make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity or the lack of diversity here on Earth. So we imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be universal to all life. Can we play the same game and think about how alien languages might work based on the diversity or the universality of elements of language here on Earth? Are there common structures to human languages or Earth languages that might be universal?

You can make some speculations based on what we know. What we know is not enormous, but speaking of human language, there's fairly solid evidence, that it's an essential species property, common to humans apart from severe pathology, and without any analog in other organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to humans and common to humans. Now, archaeological evidence is not definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence that indicates fairly strongly that before homo sapiens appeared roughly two to three hundred thousand years ago there's no significant

sign of symbolic activity maybe a scratch on a piece of wood or something like that not long after modern humans appeared means in evolutionary time like maybe tens of thousands thousands of years. Not long after that, you do start to get rich symbolic evidence of extensive symbolic activity. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like the cave drawings and so on. There's genomic evidence now that humans began to separate at least 150,000 years ago. Now, in evolutionary time, that's not long after humans appear. So putting all this together to plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some rewiring of the brain, which led to the basis for human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist elsewhere,

and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a short period of time. If that's true, we could then ask, is there something about human language that makes it possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be? So if you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of a process is evolution? Well, what happens is first some accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria, around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place. In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium,

swallowing another microorganism by accident. Well, that broke structural barriers could be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. It could be a shower of cosmic rays, you know, volcanic eruption. But some disruption takes place. In this case, back a couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium swallowing another microorganism.

Well, then the second stage of evolution is nature comes along, and it tries to construct the simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. There's a standard principle, sometimes called the Galilean principle, that nature is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it, and it is an assumption, but it has been so successful that it's not challenged, really. So I think we can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature steps in, constructs the simplest answer to how to deal with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution, which is winnowing, basically.

of the organisms that survived the second stage, which ones are more reproductively successful, and then it'll turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Now, going back to the case of language, what may very well have happened is that some disruption took place which led to modern humans.

They're different, obviously, in many ways, and we can roughly time it on the order of 2 to 300,000. years ago. Then nature came along, found the simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have some idea of what it might be. We're getting to the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomena of language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed. because it's there, everybody's gone it. So that's a possibility. If you count heads among linguists and people who study evolution, almost nobody accepts it, but I think it's very likely correct.

And I think we're moving towards showing it. Well, suppose you could. Then we would have reason to believe that if the kind of disruption that led to intelligent life ever occurred, occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow the same course. So essentially you're arguing that our language might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore a common point in evolution even on other planets. There is a thesis as a name called the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which sets as an ideal

to see if you can show that language is the simplest form of a computational system that will meet an external criterion. And the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. It means it has to have semantically significant atoms, which can combine, has to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming to properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now, we're very far from having demonstrated that,

but there's steps towards it. Does that mean, therefore, that we should be able to decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't there examples of human languages that we've had great difficulty decoding? For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics, would we have unraveled their mysteries without the Rosetta Stone? In the past several decades, there have been thousands of human languages of every typological variety that have been studied in some depth. And when you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The same is true.

If you look at anything you don't understand, it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology, about 40 or 50 years, it was assumed that organisms are so radically diverse that each one has to be studied on its own terms. Can't draw any conclusions from one to others. By now, that's known to be radically diverse. false. It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted in the forms that they can take and the nature of the way they're constituted. It's so extreme that it's even been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome, just basically one organism and then minor variations on it. It's not considered an impossible assumption, plausible, though not demonstrated

or something. Well, the same has happened in the case of language. You go back to the days when I was a student in 1940s, the virtually universal assumption was languages can vary in every possible way, and each one has to be studied on its own, and you can't draw any conclusions from one about others. It's kind of a foundation of philosophy of language, linguistics, and still pretty widely held, but I think we're moving in the same direction as biology. It's, as you study, would appear to be radically diverse languages. It seems that at a deeper level you do find uniformities, and it's even becoming increasingly possible that the component of language, which basically creates thoughts is close to uniform or maybe even uniform among

humans. And that the very locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how you externalize it. Like it's as if you had to take an analogy, it's take your laptop computer, which has a program and the program doesn't care what printer you link it up to. which may be something like that. There's an internal program. You can link it up to one or another computer. In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound. It could be signed, could even be touch.

Any sufficiently rich sensory motor system seems to be available as a means of externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally is picking up on a tradition of about several millennia. which lasted into the 20th century. There was a short break in the 20th century with the rise of behaviorism and structuralism and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism and physics. You should just look at the phenomena, the data,

no complicated theories. And the conception of language changed in the 20th century. became viewed as basically an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe. I think we're now learning that the tradition was correct. It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and ancillary property. In fact, very little of our use of language is communication.

It's almost all internal, what we call thinking. Well, this is super fascinating, and I have a lot more questions, 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 bomb. 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 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 story. Rite Time podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper

into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters, sharing their real stories of failure and success. I feel like this is my destiny. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know what I mean? Yeah.

But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back and we're talking to Professor Nome Chomsky about the possibility of communicating with aliens whether we could understand what's going on inside an alien mind and whether we might actually eventually be able to steal their physics ideas. So the picture you're painting is of language as just a way to get a thought from one brain to another and that there's some sort of internal concept which might be much more universal

and the details of whether you're sending an email or using social media or using semaphore flags don't matter as much as the information that's being communicated. But how do we know that that information could be universal? And doesn't there have to be some sort of internal representation inside the brain of that information? Doesn't that require some assumption of, you know, a basis set of vectors to define the space of that information? How could we ever know whether aliens or any other species for that matter really do share that universal sort of internal thought or whether the difference is. are just in the communication patterns. How could we unravel that?

Imagine you met the aliens. How would you go about figuring that out? Well, experimentation. We start by trying to find common grounds, maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspects of what's called universal grammar, core fixed properties of language. If you can really show that these are the optimal solution to the problem of...

restructuring and organizing a computable function, recursive function, that generates infinitely many things. That's the basis of language. So if language is a kind of an optimal solution to that, you could explore whether that's shared. At some point, you may get to points that are not shared. Then you try to discover what they are. It's not fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are the elementary particles. What's the, uh, chemical composition of the water. We don't perceive it, you know. It's a foreign universe for us. We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science, totally alien. I mean, there's a very interesting

history of this. I don't know if you want to go into it, but if you go back to the early modern science, Galileo and Newton, Leibniz, you know, Boygens, the great figures who founded modern science, they had a conception of what the world must be. It must be what they called a mechanical universe, the kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of ears and levers and so on. That was what the world must be. That's the basis of modern science. Newton's great discovery was to show that there are no machines. There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be ghostly properties, interaction without contact, repulsion without contact and so on. Newton thought this was completely absurd. He wrote that

no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could believe any of this. And in fact, if you look at his great work, Principia, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Because Newton felt, along with his contemporaries, that he had not found a physical basis for motion, interaction, and so on. He only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest of his life, he tried to find some mechanical formulation of this, of course, in vain. In later years, A major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe.

Newton's theories were intelligible. Leibniz could understand Newton's theories. Like Newton, Leibniz considered them absurd. Basically, the goals of science were lowered. Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and explain things, even if the universe that it provides is unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible to us. That's a fact about our cognitive systems. So any child will assume that the world is mechanical, like when you do experiments with young children and you have, say, two lines that move in common. A child will automatically assume there's an invisible bar connecting them.

It's just you have to have a mechanical universe. Well, you don't, unfortunately. It's not a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities just don't happen to conform to the nature of the universe. So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I think it's the same problem as we deal with an alien. Might be that they have a form of intelligence that is inaccessible to us. Fine.

If so, we'll try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form of intelligence. Maybe account for theirs and ours, a super theory. It will show what kinds of intelligence there might be. It's such a far-off dream that you can barely speculate about it. But I think that's the only way I can imagine we just have to proceed. In fact, using our own experience with our own history of science. It strikes me that you draw such a sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet. If I've understood correctly, you were arguing that humans are the only intelligent species on the planet

and the only ones with its capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about other species like dolphins or whales or pigs, which are known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication? Can we exercise these principles on dolphins? Every organism has communication. Trees communicate. So communication is kind of the universal. And if you think that language is just an instrument of communication, the modern behaviorist, structuralist approach,

which essentially rejects the conception of inner structure, which is radically anti-scientific, in my view. All of science is talking about inner structures, not just arrangement and organization of data, but structuralism and behaviorism eschewed the search for inner structures. Not allowed to do that. You can only look at the data and the organization of them. Well, that's a sure way.

of guaranteeing you'll never find anything. And exactly, pretty much that's what's happened. Well, I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought. At least we should have. We're now back to what great physicist Jean-Baptiste Parin in his Nobel laureate address described the essential nature of science

as finding the hidden invisibles that make sense of the complex visibles. I think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure from it, but it's a pathology which I think has to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see that communication, though it's what we observe, is the complex visibles.

It's not the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be, I think, pretty much what the tradition assumed, the construction of thought. Now, what about intelligence? That's too lucid concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not far from the desert. Out in my backyard, there are desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin to approach, and they can navigate in ways which are impossible for humans knowing, figuring out from where the sun is

whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere using solar evidence, solar azimuth to carry out what's called dead reckoning. You can wander around in the desert and find something to eat and you go in a straight line back to the nest. Humans can't do that. We can do it. We need complex technical instruments.

to be able to duplicate that. Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to head back to port. They can't just do it the way an ant does. So are they more intelligent than we are? Well, in some dimensions. The point is intelligence, at least if it means things like ability to solve problems, has many dimensions.

Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others. Other organisms differ. When you get the whales and dolphins, they have big brains, big, even relative to body size, complex brains. They do communicate over long distances in the ocean, for example. And they have complex behavior. They cooperate. They've worked together. Actually, I've watched dolphins.

I used to sail when I was younger. You could sail through areas where there were dolphins, and you could see them. If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling around the area, the fish driving them into a smaller area, and finally eating them all up. All right, that's complex cooperative behavior. Humans couldn't do it that easily. We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well, do they have anything like human language?

Be kind of strange if they did, but there's no evidence for it. They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have ours. Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth a couple hundred thousand years ago. A very strange organism emerged accidentally. You look at the history, the long evolution of humans. It's a long series of accidents. and started with, as I said, the formation of complex cells back billions of years ago

than many other accidents. One of them, 65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth, wiped out about 80% of species, ended the age of the dinosaurs. There were some small mammals around that managed to survive. Okay, that's us, pure accident. a million other accidents along the way. And this series of accidents ended up at a point where one last accident seems to have provided

a computational procedure or a human language, which is not found elsewhere in the organic world. And then seems that nature just found the simplest way to do with it. Maybe that's what happened. we don't know, but that's what it begins to look like. If so, it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like human language in dolphins or whales. In fact, take our closest relatives, chimpanzees, there have been extensive efforts, totally pointless in my opinion, but very extensive efforts to see if you could, with massive training from infancy,

see if you could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee, all total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's about as ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do the waggle dance of bees. I mean, you could probably train graduate students to do something that looked kind of like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not doing it the same way. It's a different organism, functioning differently.

We're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no great chain of being, starting with bacteria, ending up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many different branches. Organisms go in many different ways. And they have their own forms of what we might call intelligence. We have ours.

Desert ants have theirs. Dolphins have theirs. It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found that chimpanzees could acquire language. It would be like saying that chimpanzees have this amazing ability with enormous survival value, but they never thought of using it till humans came around. It's as if someone were to come along and show humans, hey, you can fly. You can get away from that lion that's chasing you. why don't just fly and humans said oh I never thought of that and you go like that and you start

flying that's not going to happen that's not the way biology works if there's a capacity that's of survival value you're going to use it so the message I'm getting is that you don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures on the earth to develop the kind of symbolic language that we could decode so it's not a fair proxy for the question of could we understand an alien intelligence okay well I have a lot more I want to ask you about, but first, let's take another 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 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. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome

to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit Union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with

raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing

their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know what I'm me? Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Okay, we're back and we're discussing with esteemed Professor Chomsky the possibility of communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier. You said that the possibility of trying to decode an alien language is a remote possibility. And I'm wondering if it's something that linguists as a field are excited about or think about. You know, biologists, if you told a biologist, I have a sample of life from another planet, they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately. They would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited about this as well, or is this something that just is so remote that nobody really takes seriously?

Some linguists are interested in it. Actually, I'm one of the very few. I'm a co-author of a couple articles and what's called xenolinguistics. What could you do if you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is something along the lines of what I discussed. I don't think it's a topic that interests many linguists because there's nothing to say about it. First of all, we have no idea whether alien intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure, with Fermi's paradox. Where are they? You know, I mean, from a point of view, an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours. So there ought to be lots of life. It should have

evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to investigate it, searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far, total zero, nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility is they're just not there, that the series of accidents that led to humans was so totally improbable, which wasn't duplicated. In fact, I'm not confident to judge their accuracy, but there are studies published in serious, peer-reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course, lots of the universe just isn't accessible. but the parts that we can conceivably have contact with,

or maybe that's true. If so, there won't be any. The answer to Fermi's paradox is there aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually, we're in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence has discovered the capacity,

develop the capacity to destroy everything. The doomsday clock of the bulletin of atomic scientists measures that every year. Now, has the human species developed the moral capacity to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't. And it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity to constrain it. If so, there might have been any number of human civilizations, and they all destroyed

themselves, because it's just natural law. It's the way it works. Could be another answer to Fermi's paradox. But the fact of the matter is, they're just not there, or at least we can't find them. So given that, it doesn't attract a great deal of interest to look into how to deal with it, except just the kind of thing we're talking about, amusing puzzle to think about, how could you proceed? To say my own opinion, we proceed very much in the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is an alien world. The universe is an alien world to us, totally alien.

We have no grasp of it, but nevertheless, we've been able to learn a lot about it. Well, I think it's a very intriguing question because it goes at the heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've learned is universal. And of course, we won't know anything until we actually meet aliens if that ever happened. But, you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of my field of science in popular literature all the time. And sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe-inducing. There are lots of fictional descriptions of how linguists might communicate with alien intelligence.

I wonder what your thoughts are on various fictional depictions. Is there a particular fictional depiction of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or at least amusing? The only thing that I think is plausible is what I just described. It's like the problem of finding out the inner nature of an organic compound. We don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is. There was a period of human science, a flourishing, active, vigorous period, created modern science. basically Galileo to Newton in which there was such a picture.

Turned out there isn't any such picture. So we give up on that hope. We now study everything from the outside, including our own intelligence. Our intuitive belief of what it ought to be is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it tells us nothing about what we're studying. That was the lesson of Newtonian physics. actually I think. Well, I think the deep question that I'm curious about here is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say, we use the visible evidence to try to decode what the

invisible truths about the universe are, whether those really are universal. And the way you're describing it sounds to me like you, the universe is fundamentally ununderstandable. We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example, alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that make sense to them? Even the human stories have varied over the last few hundred years for our understanding for what might be going on in science. So is there a chance if we ever met aliens that we could talk science with them, that we shared some sort of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe? Well, I can only repeat. The only way we could find out is by starting with common ground, no other way.

Common ground might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence. It's about as far as we can go. After that, it's just asking, forgetting aliens, what might we discover about the nature of elementary particles? Who knows?

You know, discover it when you discover it. Well, I have a sort of sociological question then for you, which is if aliens made themselves known and arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted to communicate with us. Do you think that linguists and scientists would be allowed contact? Do you think that society and politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extraterrestrials? For it to know what humans will do, take a look at the United States, the country we know best.

There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures are passing laws that's say that parents can sue teachers if they teach things the parents don't like, okay? That's the kind of creature we are. In Stalinist Russia, you could be sent to the gulag for it in states in the United States. You can be sued by parents for it. Will's going back to your question, will the politicians allow scientific communication? of them don't even allow human communication. Well, speaking of communications, there is some history.

We have sent some messages out into space. There's, you know, encodings on the Voyager. There's a message we've sent from Erecebo. Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those? Do you find those to be well constructed in general? Or do you think that they're sort of just reflective of the thinking at the moment? Well, we'd have to begin with things like simple arithmetical truths.

If you have two things over here and three things over there, do you have five things altogether? If you can get that far, we can go on from there. So it seems to me that to summarize what I think is your view is that it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all intelligence and language, and from that we might be able to build up some grammar based on the most basic operations. Is that a fair summary?

It's a fair summary. Tempted by Platonism, the idea that numbers are real. They're just there. We discover them. We don't create them. It's a contentious idea. It's not very clear what it means,

but something on that order seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be there for every form of intelligence. As far as language and thought are concerned, that depends on the answer to an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing thought, having ways to express thought, agents, actions, events, and so on? I think there's this work pointing in that direction.

There are steps towards that conclusion. It's a minority opinion. Most linguists don't pay any attention to this, and those who do them. It doesn't make any sense. I think there is work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns out to be true, well, then we have another way to deal with alien intelligence. If it is really optimal, basically as a natural law,

should show up everywhere where nature operates. Okay, that's a possible wedge, possible, based on a lot of empirical assumptions. Well, let me ask you a silly question then to end, which is all human culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform concept of what is a joke. You think that it's likely that aliens, if they're intelligent and communicate in some way that's intelligible to us, We'll be able to make jokes, we'll get our jokes, we could understand alien humor. Actually, I just read an interesting book about that, about humans. It's by social history.

It's a study of early modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what were jokes. So it turns out that one of the great jokes in, I guess, the 18th century, was massacring cats. The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a very interesting book. It's a study of the ways in which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cats. Just one example. The way they looked at things in the early modern period,

not that far from us, 18th century. And a lot of things that look like jokes, not look like jokes to us. All right. Well, I hope when the aliens arrive, they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much. really appreciate you humoring me for these silly, but what I think are fascinating questions that probe not just the nature of our language, but the nature of our thought and maybe

the nature of our understanding of the universe. So thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to think about, especially on the topic of whether or not some of the ideas, the stories we tell about elementary particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicist as well or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves in our ongoing effort to understand this crazy bonkers universe that's out there to me one of the deepest ways to get a handle on this mystery will be to talk to alien physicists about it if it ever happens because they might reveal that the way we are looking at the universe is very human-centric that we have missed

something obvious because we don't have one of the senses that they have or we have not developed a branch of mathematics or maybe even mathematics is holding us back. But we won't know until we have a chance to interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very much for joining us. Tune in next time. 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, 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. 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. Now, 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, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.