Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's it like to be an alien?

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Daniel talks to Dr. Arik Kershenbaum about what alien animals might be like, how they might sense and communicate.  See 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. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I take it all. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming it?

I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me, I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No such thing. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Nealbarnett and I discuss flightings.

What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. view and it always makes me wonder about something. If the universe is filled with life, big if, and if some of it is intelligent and curious, then are they looking back at us right now? Are we some bright dot in an alien sky? It's like that moment in the movies where someone is looking at a distant building through a telescope only to spot someone else looking back at them. If only other planets were close enough for us to spot alien astronomers gazing back at us like a cosmic meat cute but even if we can't see them they might be out there as ignorant

about us as we are of them staring up into those alien nights and wondering if we are out there or maybe they're listening to an alien physicist on an alien podcast or maybe they don't look or listen at all and they experience the universe in very different ways Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I hope that there are alien particle physicists out there wondering what we have discovered and eager to share some notes. And welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart media, in which we explore all of the questions. being asked by humans, whether you're a particle physicist, a dentist, or a long-haul driver, we all wonder about how the universe works and we all long to understand it. And on this podcast, we ask those questions and do our best to answer them. But we don't pretend to know everything

or to have all of the answers. One of our goals is to bring you up to speed to the very forefront of human knowledge so that you can share a spot with the rest of us, looking into the abyss of everything that humanity does not yet understand. Because we want to know how the universe works. We are a curious species, always wondering. And one of the things that we wonder is, why do we wonder so much? Is it a natural product of being intelligent, problem solving creatures? Or is it just us? We see other animals on earth being curious. Dogs, cats, monkeys, dolphins all outwardly act as if they are intrigued by new things, by puzzles they have not yet solved. Which is why philosophers have long wondered,

what's it like to see the world through the eyes of a cat or with the nose of a dog or the echolocation of a dolphin? One of the most famous papers in philosophy is called, What is it like to be a bat? The short version is, we'll never know, because a bat likely experiences the world very differently than we do. But bats don't have our intelligence. So cast your mind back out into space

and wonder about that intelligent alien creature or blob or tree or floating ball of plasma that might be looking back at us. Can we imagine what their experience is like? So on today's episode, we'll ask the question, What's it like to be an alien? Obviously, it's not a question we can answer today, but that doesn't mean that we can't make some progress. We can turn our minds back to the earth and study the diversity of life here.

Its random outcomes, its consistent convergences, its diversity and homogeneity, and maybe gain some insight into how aliens perceive and experience the universe. My co-host and friend Jorge is on vacation this week, so I've invited a guest to come and join me in today's conversation about the alien experience. Dr. Arik Kirshenbaum is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge. He studies the evolution of acoustic communications in different animals, particularly the role that communication plays in the evolution of cooperation. He works with a number of different species, including wolves, dolphins, and hyraxes. And he's the author of the book The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy, What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens.

Now, we can't study aliens in the flesh, but if the principles that guided the development of biological life on Earth, natural selection, also apply elsewhere, then we can expect it may produce similar results. Not everything on Earth, of course, is inevitable. Some of nature is random chance, meteor strikes, and other pivot points, but some things crop up often enough that they may be inevitable even on other planet. I read this book and learned a lot, and so I was excited to chat with Dr. Kirstenbaum. So it's my pleasure to welcome Aurek to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. So I love that on your website, you list the organisms that you study, and there's wolves, dolphins, hyraxes, and aliens. Is it typical for

zoologists to think about aliens? Is astrozoology a burgeoning field, or are you the pioneer? It's not typical. It's not a burgeoning field. And, you know, the field of astrobiology is big. The field of astrobiology is big and really burgeoning because, you know, some of the new developments that we've had, both in terms of instruments like James Webb and discoveries that can be made about the atmospheres of other planets and things like that has really pushed forward interest in the origin of life and the possible chemical nature of life on other planets. But also it's not just the instrumentation. You know, there's been a lot of breakthroughs really in new theoretical ideas about how life could arise. And so there are a lot of astrobiologists around. There aren't

really very many anthropologists. And, you know, that's because, like you said, we can't actually observe any alien animals. So one might think, it's not much point, really. It's a bit of a waste of a career. But no, as an evolutionary biologist, which is what I really am, the conclusions that I draw about evolutionary biology, they're generally applicable. They apply on other planets. I think people are going to start to come around to this idea, that understanding the ecology and the ecosystem and the evolution of life on other planets is something we have to start thinking about. We're expecting to discover planets with some form of life on them. This is something we can't ignore forever.

And I really appreciate that your book makes an argument. A lot of biology books I read are fun and they're studied with cool examples that are interesting to learn about, but they don't always manage to tie them together into a coherent story. So briefly, is that the argument for your book that the process of evolution that occurs on Earth is likely to also guide the evolution of animals and critters on other planets so that we can make educated guesses about what they likely look like? Yes, and it's even a little bit deeper than that because natural selection is just a process, right?

We've known about natural selection for 150 years, and it's just one of those things that's inevitable, it's going to happen everywhere, it's a very simple process. But what's happened in the last 150 years is that biologists have not just understood how evolution works, but they've understood that there are a huge range of other phenomena that arise once you start having natural selection in a collection of life forms. And the interactions between those life forms are really important. The way those life forms interact with each other, that's what's driving the diversity on this planet.

That's why we've got so many different plants and so many different animals and so many different beetles. It's because of the way they interact with each other. And so understanding how those interactions are driving diversity gives us a much more, a much deeper understanding of those processes. And if those processes, those deeper processes are also taking place on other planets, then we can start drawing some really quite deep conclusions. Just give you one example, the simplest example in my book, I think, is predation, right?

All life needs energy. We know all life needs energy. That's just a physical constraint. Where are you going to get your energy? I might get it from the sun. You might get it from other places. But there's lots of energy around in the other life on your planet. And sooner or later, someone is going to start taking it.

advantage of other life forms and start eating them. And in that sense, by thinking about the way that organisms interact with each other, we can predict things like, well, there are going to be predators and there are going to be prey on alien planets. I really enjoyed this line in your book. I was going to call it out later. You write, predation is universal because no ecosystem can exist for long without someone trying to take a bite out of somebody else. The selective pressure on acquiring as much energy as possible is just too strong. That strikes me as maybe the experience of somebody who grew up in a household with brothers and sisters, you know, competing for enough food at the dinner table.

But it's interesting because it's not an argument that I've heard anywhere else. It essentially seems to be arguing that complexity arises also from interaction and competition, that you're like unlikely to find an alien planet with a really sophisticated, intelligent creature and nothing else, right? An ecosystem with just like a single organism, is it? Is that the argument that you're making? I think that's very true. And that works on a couple of different levels.

The thing about natural selection, of course, is that it has no foresight. So organisms don't evolve to be the best they can. They evolve according to the conditions in which they find them. If the conditions are simple, if the challenges they're facing are simple, then they will evolve simple traits. If the challenges facing them are very complex, there may be an advantage to have more complex behavior or more complex structure. So the complexity of individuals in an ecosystem really arises directly out of the complexity

of the challenges they face. And those challenges are almost always to do with interactions with other organisms. I know there are a few other things as well, physical environment. But basically, what drives the complexity of life is the complexity of the interactions. So, yeah, you're not going to get

intelligent technological aliens evolving in deep space, for instance, which is a bit of a trope in science fiction. You know, you've got these aliens floating through space and they're super intelligent. But that's not going to happen because their ancestors never had any challenges to overcome. They never had any interactions they had to deal with.

And so that kind of intelligence isn't going to evolve. So, yeah, I'm going with the interactions as being the key thing. And those interactions have to be with basically objects of another species. You can't just have interactions within a species. We're competing with your brothers and sisters for enough milk from your mother, for example. Well, you can, but the implications of that are that some organisms will, develop some techniques to deal with that situation and other organisms will develop different techniques to deal with those challenges and then you get a divergence and then you get speciation

and so it's almost inevitable that as the challenges become more complex you're going to get different organisms a system with all the same organism with complex challenges is very unlikely to persist for a long period of time so you mentioned science fiction is that your experience when you read science fiction that it grates on you because it doesn't reflect sort of a best thinking about how evolution might play out on other planets. Are you generally unimpressed? Or have you read a few things that you think are actually insightful and contribute to the space of ideas? I don't. I don't mind. I like science fiction. And I see its role as being a particular role. And its role is not really to inform on scientific hypotheses. There are cases where people

have made a really big effort to try and explore all kinds of potential ideas and potential situations. using science fiction and that's always welcome but you know i mean i love a good star trek and i don't really think that it's got much to do with what aliens are like but that's okay that you know that's that's not the end of the world well star trek is of course one of the most ridiculous examples you know humanoids that speak with sort of strange accents and funny turns of phrase and have wiggly foreheads are you familiar with the work of a gregg he is a fantastic book that's one of my favorites is called diaspora in which they discover a water world that has a single organism in it, an algae that weaves itself into these weighing carpets that can break and

reconnect in ways that actually make them a Turing machine so that the complexity arises from the arrangement of fairly simple organisms. And you know, it's this kind of, are they intelligent, can we actually penetrate to them? Can we understand what their experiences? Are they experiencing anything because the complexity arises from the combination of many organisms rather than inside a single organism? And this is a, this is another trope that, that's, quite interesting and has been explored by a number of science fiction authors. But again, from an evolutionary perspective, the question's got to be, why are these algae a Turing machine? How did that actually happen? You know, how did that come about? Because presumably they started with

simple algae that didn't have this complex structure. Somehow that complex structure must have come about. Now, did it come about? Because the algae that are organized into a complex structure were more successful and out-competed the other algae. If so, there's a good mechanism. That could have happened. But if they're just floating there and there's nothing much going on, it's hard to see how that could happen. So Fred Hoyle, I'm sure you know, Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer, wrote a fantastic science fiction book back in the 50s, The Black Cloud. It's really one of the best science fiction books ever written, and I love it dearly. But in the sort of introduction of the foreword to a recent edition that was written, Richard Dawkins, absolutely

tore, or Fred Hoyle to pieces, he's dead now, of course, but tore him to pieces over his unrealistic biological assumptions that a cloud of gas floating through interstellar space could become sentient. There's just no challenges facing it. And no process of successive and progressive and gradual increasing complexity. That's what we've got to explain. If we want to explain alien life, that's what we've got to explain. So we're all, of course, very interested in alien life and how it might arise. And, of course, we're all stuck here on Earth with no other examples to draw from. And you often hear people complain that this is, you know, a single example, N equals one.

We don't know if what we have seen is typical or unusual. And in your book, you take a different approach to this problem. Can you explain for our listeners how we escape the sort of N equals one prison? Well, the N equals one criticism is slightly disingenuous. N equals one what? One planet. That seems a little unrealistic, since there are so many different. life forms on this planet. Really what they're saying, I think, is n equals one biochemistry,

because that's really what unites all life on Earth. And we only have one example of a system of a biochemical system that can produce life. Apart from the biochemistry, there's sufficient diversity here that there's no justification for saying it's only one example. Is it a problem that we only have one example of one kind of biochemistry when talking about alien life? Well, it's not a problem for me because everything I do totally ignores the biochemistry. When you think about evolution and natural selection and evolutionary biology, it doesn't really matter on what biochemical framework organisms are based.

They can be based on DNA. They could be based on some other structure. People like to ask whether carbon chemistry is necessary. I mean, most people think that carbon chemistry probably is necessary, but that's from theoretical considerations, not from empirical observations. So, I mean, I think you can criticize descriptions of intelligent life, technological life on the basis of there only being one example.

And that becomes particularly problematic when we think about language. So we only have one example of language, and that really is a problem. But I think to say that we only have one example of life is not really true at all. So the argument you're making is that we have many examples of life responding to similar circumstances and, for example, coming up with similar solutions, wings on bats and wings on birds and wings on insects, for example, suggest that flight might be a common outcome of animal evolution. Is that the argument? That's right. And if you want to take the N equals one complaint or objection seriously, and honestly, then you would have to ask yourself,

does the fact that birds and bats and insects all have wings, is that fact somehow the result of some commonality. There's n-equals one commonality, the fact that they are all on the planet earth, or the fact that they are all based on carbon chemistry. Does that really explain this commonality of wings? And it's almost impossible to answer yes, there. It's very hard to see how the fact that wings evolved independently three times could really possibly be based on the commonality between these organisms. The only thing they have in common is that they are bilaterally symmetrical. So they have one wing or two wings on each side of their body, because they have an axis of symmetry down the middle,

they have a left side and the right side. And that certainly is shared. All those three organisms evolved from a common ancestor that was symmetrical. So that's a potential argument. But my counter argument to that is that symmetry is so incredibly useful that we're going to see it on other planets as well. So to make the argument that the kind of things we see on Earth are likely to also crop up in alien animals,

what assumptions are we making exactly? Let's be explicit about them. We're assuming that evolution, is a universal process that happens here. It's going to happen everywhere. Aren't you also requiring that the conditions are similar? I mean, evolution is, as you say, in response to the circumstances. Are we assuming then that there are rocky planets, that there's air for things to learn to fly through, for example?

I think the two kinds of assumptions based on what you mean by life being similar to life on Earth. I think that there are assumptions that support the claim that evolution and natural selection and all these processes that we understand very well from life on Earth, that they will apply on other planets. There are certain assumptions there, and those are assumptions like the basic assumptions of natural selection, that organisms reproduce, that organisms vary, that they're different in their characteristics,

and that they can pass that difference on to their offspring, and that those differences have an effect on how they survive and reproduce. And those are the basic assumptions of natural selection. As long as those assumptions are met, natural selection will occur. Can I stop you there and ask you about one of those passing information onto your offspring? I mean, that fundamentally

is rooted in the biochemistry of life on Earth, right? Can you imagine a different fundamental biochemistry for life that has a different sort of process for passing along information that might lead to wildly different sort of higher level evolution? Unfortunately, if that condition isn't met,

then we've lost the most important feature of natural selection, which is that complexity can accumulate. If organisms reproduce or duplicate, whatever word you want to use, but don't pass on their own traits to their duplicates, then complexity cannot accumulate, and you'll just be stuck in a soup of chemicals, never becoming life. So I say that these assumptions are conditions for natural selection applying and occurring, but if they don't apply, and if it doesn't occur, then complexity cannot accumulate.

So the conditions for natural selection occurring are, it's a little bit unfair of me because I am actually assuming that they are met. But then the other thing is, the other direction to take it is that just because natural selection, in theory, occurs, doesn't necessarily mean that life will achieve the kind of complexity we see on Earth. So, for instance, people have speculated that there might be life on the surface of Titan, Titan with its, lots of flowing liquid, not water, and rivers and lakes. and mountains and so on. And the fact that this liquid is not water is irrelevant, really. You could invent a biochemistry based on ethane or something like that. The problem is that at whatever it is, minus 180 degrees on the surface of Titan or chemical reactions will be extremely slow. And in that case, even if there is life on Titan, it really won't have had time to evolve the kind of complexity that we see on Earth. Life existed on us for over three and a half billion years.

years. And for the first three billion years, it was very, very, very simple. So it really took a long time for complex life to get off the ground. So just because these conditions have met, doesn't mean we'll necessarily see something like Earth. But isn't that another example of the n equals one argument? I mean, we know that life started fairly rapidly on Earth and that it didn't become complex very rapidly. Can we conclude from that that, you know, one, life is likely to start in other places because it happened rapidly in Earth and that complexity does take a long time or were we just unlucky? So the argument that we don't know how likely it is for non-alive chemicals to become alive. We don't know how likely that spontaneous change is has been a very good argument for

the an equals one position. And things have changed a little bit in recent years for a couple of reasons. One, of course, we've discovered so many planets. I mean, there's just so many planets. We never thought there would be billions upon billions of Earth-like planets in the galaxy. So the numbers game changes a little, but it doesn't alter, of course, the fundamental objection that maybe life on Earth was a tremendous fluke and it's just not replicated anywhere else. But recently, and as I said, the field of astrobiology has become very, very big and a lot of people working, a lot of scientists working on the question of origin of life, coming up with a lot of hypotheses that seem to indicate that there are potentially many roots to life arising from

non-life, different by chemical propositions, different ways of getting chemicals to combine stably and make reproducing molecules and so on. And the general feeling, although of course it's not proven, is that the probability of life arising from non-life is probably not all that unlikely. Wonderful. Well, I have a lot more questions about how that all works, 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 oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time 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. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just...

I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. 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.

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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. All right, we're back and we're talking to Dr. Eric Kirshenbaum about what aliens might look like and how they might crawl across the surface of their alien planets. And we've been talking about the likelihood of life starting on other planets and also the likelihood. likelihood that it looks similar to ours, whether it shares with us movement or communication or intelligence or these kinds of features. And I want to get back to a question. I think I interrupted your answer and I want to hear more your thoughts on this about the likelihood that life arises in our kind of context. You're absolutely right that there are billions of planets just in our galaxy and many of them are rocky and many of them are likely to be in a region where there's enough solar radiation to make water liquid on the surface, et cetera, et cetera. So there are many situations like Earth where life might arise, but does that mean that's the most likely place for life to arise?

What about places like underground oceans that we have even in our solar system? Do we know if alien life arises that it's most likely to arise in our kind of circumstances? No, we certainly don't. And as you say, underground oceans are tremendously interesting environment where we would love to explore. we are, of course, somewhat limited at the moment that with our tools that are capable of looking at the, taking spectrographic measurements of the composition of the atmospheres of alien planets, that somewhat limits us to planets with reasonable atmospheres. You know, in the future, who knows, the first indications of the sub-underground oceans on Enceladus and Europa came from observing, you know, plumes of. of water escaping from underground. That may even be possible in the future with exoplanets.

Hard to imagine, but it's possible. And there have been some very, very interesting and peculiar suggestions from scientists, from astrobiologists about different places that life could exist. I've heard recently a suggestion that even gas planets like Neptune could possibly host a band or a sphere of liquid water at some level in their atmosphere. So there are many places where conditions for life might be right. And because we're still far from finding out exactly what pathways led to life arising on Earth, I think it's a little bit optimistic to be examining those weird environments as well

and trying to figure out how life might have arisen on Neptune or Enceladus. But we'll get that. But in the context of the arguments in your book, for example, It seems like the assumptions we're making are that evolution happens and all the details that you later previously and also that we're talking about sort of a similar kind of context, right? That evolution happens in the kind of biological context that we've experienced. And we don't need to assume that that's dominant or that it doesn't happen in other

context to explore what life might be like on an alien rocky planet with water. So two things, two things to say to that. One is that when you say that the context, and I presume, you mean things like, well, the fact that organisms are close to each other, that they can interact, that they're not spread out over an obscenely larger area or volume. That's actually quite an easy assumption to make because, again, as I said before, about accumulating complexity. If those organisms aren't interacting, they're not going to evolve. They're not going to evolve into the kind of complexity that we see. There may be alien equivalent to bacteria spotting

here and there on the surface of some planet that can't interact with each other. But there's no reason for them to evolve into more complex life forms if they never interact with anything. So I think that it's true that there are certain assumptions about interactions and so on that I make, but that's with the hindsight or retrospective assumption that there will be complex life there and not just bacterial life. But the other thing that I want to say that I always have to say because it's really important to be humble about these things. There will undoubtedly be examples where I am completely wrong. I have no doubt of about that. But those examples are going to be really rare, right? The galaxy is full of rocky planets

like Earth with water on the surface, and it's full of carbon chemicals. And life, which shares a lot in common with life on Earth, will be common. Sure, there'll be, there'll be weird stuff. There'll be weird stuff that I've never thought of and no one has ever thought of. But that's going to be rare. Water is exceptionally common in the universe. Common chemicals are exceptionally common in the universe. And so I think it makes a lot of sense that something rather like what we see here is not going to be uncommon. Absolutely. And the argument you're making seems to be built on these convergences, these suggestions that these kind of things happen several times on Earth. So we don't have just n equals one. These are things that seem more inevitable than rare. But there are also

examples here on earth of pivot points, moments when faith took us one way and it might have gone another. You know, we have these moments in our lives. You know, when I was deciding where to go to grad school, I basically flipped a coin between two universities. And because I went to one, I ended up meeting my wife and I have these kids and my life would be very different if I hadn't gone in those other directions. You know, so can we also look at the history of life on earth and identify those pivot points and say, if this thing about life on earth is unlikely to be found somewhere else because it arose from this random weirdness? Can we also make those kind of observations, not just find the commonalities?

Well, possibly, but I loved your example. If the coin had gone the other way, no disrespect to your wife and kids, you probably would have found another wife and had other kids, right? And it still would have happened. And in that sense, I think it's a pretty good illustration

of the convergence. Are there pivot points on Earth that led to very particular configurations of life on Earth? It's hard to think of them. If you think of the major pivot points on Earth, so the major mass extinctions which are really the ones that people talk about.

If you think about the Permian mass extinction, which was huge, like 90% of species went extinct. When life rebounded after the Permian mass extinction, it really wasn't all that different. It really wasn't. I mean, certainly that mass extinction was a huge push in the way that diversity developed and evolved over the millions of years afterwards.

And there's no doubt that we wouldn't have died. dinosaurs and we wouldn't have primates, we wouldn't have humans if it hadn't have been for the Permian mass extinction. But if you look at the animals that lived afterwards and the animals that lived before, they're different. But all the niches are basically still the same, basically very, very similar sort of stuff going on. So clearly there are physical characteristics of Earth that determine what kind of life we have, the density of the atmosphere, the transparency of the atmosphere as well is a hugely important one than the nature of our oceans determine the kinds of life that fly in the air and swim in the sea but that's really the response to physical constraints

on the environment rather than the pivot points per se and what about the one that's most to our hearts you know intelligence you're saying that the niches are effectively the same before and after you know the common story that you hear is dinosaurs were wiped out by this meteor which might have also missed Earth if had, you know, been pulled gravitationally by another object and that because the dinosaurs were wiped out, there was room for mammals to flourish, dot, dot, dot, dot. You get humans and technological life. Are you suggesting that even if the meteor hadn't hit the earth, if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out, that something would have arisen that was intelligent and technological? Not an easy question to answer without a time machine and interfering with the course

of history. But we've got some clues, right? So we can look, for instance, at, if you look at a plot of the diversity of life on earth since the Permian mass extinction, you'll see a pretty linear increase. I mean, it's just going up and up and up. And it's true there was a dip when that media hit and there was a nice big mass extinction there. And then diversity just kept on climbing again. So it's almost as if, just with the simple metric of how, of the diversity of species, it's almost as if it didn't make much difference. You know, it changed things a little bit, maybe, the increase in interactions between species just kept on going up. Is it possible that it could have flatlined at that point?

I suppose it's possible, but it seems really unlikely. It does seem unlikely. It's true that we can invent all kinds of stories about exactly what happened after the dinosaurs went extinct. We can't be very confident about them, but the usual narrative goes that these nocturnal mammals all of a sudden didn't have to be so scared about coming out during the daytime, and so they could exploit niches that weren't available to them before and so they diversified

and so on. It's very hard to imagine that this kind of radiation wouldn't have happened at some point. It just seems like the opportunities were there and opportunities get exploited in evolutionary time. They really do. That might be the first time I ever heard somebody say the phrase nice big mass extinction, but I suppose from an evolutionary biologist, that is the way you look at it. That great. Well, I want to dig a little bit more into thinking about the details of animals on alien planets because you go well beyond these sort of general arguments and you talk very

specifically about what we can learn about alien animals from animals on Earth. And I want to focus first on senses. You know, here on Earth, we have a wide variety of senses, but humans don't have all of them, right? There are certainly senses that exist in the animal kingdom that don't exist in humans. What can we say about what aliens might experience? Are they likely to be able to sense magnetism the way birds do or sense electric fields the way fish can?

Two things about senses. Senses are really interesting. One is that senses are really, really constrained by physics, right? There's just some things you can and can't do. In a vacuum, you're not going to use sound. It's not going to happen. So, you know, in an opaque atmosphere, you're not going to use light. So there's a lot of stuff that's really easy to predict,

just based on the physics. But as a biologist, I don't want to spend too much time talking about physics. And from an evolutionary perspective, there's another really interesting thing about senses, which is that senses evolved because they gave an advantage. They gave an advantage to some organism. Now, typically, that advantage would be finding food. So if you have an amoeba and it's in water and it detects a concentration gradient of nutrients, and it can move up that concentration gradient

because that ability gives it a definite advantage. It gets more food that way. And senses have to be understood in terms of what advantage they give. It's a huge, you know, it's this huge idea that aliens are going to have these super senses and they're going to have these wonderful things that we don't even imagine

and they have all these incredible abilities that we can't conceive. Well, maybe, but only if it gave their ancestors an advantage, only if the organisms from which they evolved, and probably the organisms from which they evolved a long, long time ago. They had to have the advantage. If you look at all the senses that exist primarily in animals today, they've been around since the simplest animals.

Sensing is a really crucial thing for animals. I should probably mention, I'm sure we'll come up against this again when we talk about intelligence, but I should probably mention why I talk about animals all the time and what I mean by animals, because animals... are something quite different. Animals have a big challenge, which is moving around and finding food

and avoiding becoming someone else's food and finding a mate and all this spatial constraint. Where do you go and how can you go? Where can you go? Really drives a lot of complexity in the animal world because they need to solve these spatial problems. Sensing is a perfect example. The reason that animals sense

and plant senses are much more simple than animal senses because plants don't need to move. animals need to decide do I go left or do I go right now aliens may have organisms that look like plants that you may have animals like root right that's a plant that moves around I would call that an animal because for me an animal is something that has to move and make decisions about moving and the moment you have to make decisions about moving you need sensing you need to be able to sense the world around you and so why for example did our ancestors not need to sense electric fields or magnetic fields, but the ancestors of birds and fish did.

Can you not imagine any circumstance in which that would be an advantage to us? Using electric fields to sense the presence of fish, for example, in water, you know, while hunting in shallow lakes, is there no circumstance in which case those other senses would have been an advantage to our ancestors? Shothera. And just as though our advantages to us having wings, right? Who wouldn't want wings? I'm not saying it's not an advantage.

But the evolutionary path that we followed is constrained by what our ancestors, constrained by the cost-benefit analysis of our ancestors. So, you know, our ancestors were better off evolving big eyes. That served them much better than an electric sense. Electric sensing is really, really complicated. It's very, very difficult. It requires very, very specific organs in your body. And if you really don't use them very much, then it's just not worth it.

So our ancestors didn't benefit at all, or wouldn't have benefited, at all from electric sensing, and so they didn't have them. We might like wings now, you know, you might even think that our ancestors could have benefited from wings sort of climbing through the trees in the jungle, but they were constrained by their ancestors as well. They're not the simplest thing in the world to evolve wings. So the process of evolution always involves these cost-benefit trade-offs. And in that cost-benefit analysis, it's just, it just wasn't worth our while.

It just wasn't worth our ancestors, our ancestors while. So your comment about aliens and their super senses, I take that to be an argument that probably alien animals will have some subset of the kind of senses we see here on Earth, that there isn't some new amazing sense that they've evolved that we've never seen before. Well, that's a question for you, right? That's where the physics comes in. That's constrained by physics. It's true that animals on Earth use pretty much all of the senses that we think are possible. through our understanding of physics magnetisms are really a really rare one it's a bit of it right but it's not it's not hugely important but you know earthlings use um use pretty much everything is there another sense out there like gravitational sensing or something or neutrino sensing maybe i don't know tell me so that was the next question i wanted to ask you about and i'm particularly struck by the example of magnetism i mean here's an example where a creature develops a sense

to something that's very subtle and hard to pick up. I mean, it requires a really delicate chemistry to happen in their eyeballs for them to be sensitive to these magnetic fields. And at the same time, we know from the physics at least that a lot of the universe is invisible to us, right? We are surrounded, as you say, by neutrinos. A hundred billion pass through every square centimeter per second. And they carry a huge amount of energy. It took a long time on Earth to develop vision and photosynthesis. Is it possible that if we waited a few billion, million years that plants would develop like neutrino synthesis where microbes are learning to eat energy from neutrinos somehow? Is it impossible to imagine? Or do you think it's just sort of

hasn't happened yet here on Earth? Impossible is big word, but improbables is a reasonable word. And the reason is that natural selection only works when it provides a concrete advantage at every step of the way, right? You've got to have an advantage by having half a neutrino detainment. detector. And given that a neutrino detector is probably pretty complicated, you'd have to explain why having some sort of very simple primitive ability to detect neutrinos would be of an advantage. And that's very hard to do. One of the nonsense arguments against evolution is that, well, how could you evolve an eye? And half an eye is not useful. Half an eye is incredibly useful. The very simplest organisms that were able to detect a shadow from a bit of light had a huge advantage,

a huge advantage over other organisms. So you would need to see something like that with one of these extrasensis, one of the ones that hasn't been detected. You'd have to see a real advantage for that very simple innovation. All right. And I have lots more questions about what it's like to be an alien and experience the universe. But let's take another 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 end. Ambulance is 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 2, 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. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. 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.

Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. 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 runway. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasias 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 auditioned 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 talked 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, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasasas Come Again as part of my culture podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, we're back and we're talking to Dr. Arik Kirshenbaum about his book, The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy. And I noticed that you say the Guide to the Galaxy, is that a tip to Douglas Adams instead of thinking about the guide to the universe? It is, but then again, even astrobiologists. and I mean lab-based astrobiologists, unlike me. Really, our thoughts are pretty much limited to the galaxy.

The galaxy is something we can know about. Unless we're talking about highly advanced technological civilizations in other galaxies, we'll never know about them. I think the galaxies are really reasonable laboratory in which to work. It is true that while there are trillions of other galaxies out there, there are millions of light years away, whereas our galaxy is only tens of thousands of... light years across. And so they do seem frustratingly distant. And so we were talking about

sort of how aliens might sense the world. And you're making the argument that we use most of the reasonable seeming senses and everything else is probably unlikely to arise because it doesn't convey a benefit at every stage of evolution. And we talked about neutrinos, for example. And you know, for the folks in the audience who are interested in physics, we know, for example, also that the universe is filled with dark matter and that there's kinds of radiation out there that we cannot sense directly, but we've developed these technological eyeballs in order to discover them and to see that they are part of our universe. And so I think the argument you're making is that it's unlikely for these things to naturally arise biologically in aliens unless they have

a pronounced benefit along every step of the evolutionary path. And in your book, you make this argument specifically about how this impacts alien civilization. And you say, for example, that alien civilization will probably rely on vocal communication rather than say communication of complex ideas using sense. So I want to dig into that a little bit more, how building on this basic experience and sensory networks, that's likely to impact the structure of alien civilization and alien intelligence. Yeah, and it does sound a bit too radical of a suggestion, doesn't it, that aliens are going to talk like us, a bit of a coincidence. But then again, you know, we are constrained by physics here. There are only so many different ways that you can convey information

and so many different channels, so many different media. There's light, there's sound, there's smell, there's touch, there's vibration, there's electrical fields, it's magnetic fields. The list is not long. And I'm sure that that entire list will be exploited by organisms here, there, everywhere across the galaxy. The question is which of those channels can be used for complex communication, because technology relies on complex communication. You want to build a spaceship, want to build a radio telescope, right? You need the instructions manual. You need to be able to say this part plugs into that part. So there needs to be the capacity to have a certain level of complexity. Which of those media, which of those physical channels support that kind of

complexity? Well, you know, I argue that smell probably doesn't. There are a lot of problems with using chemical cues for communication. Loads of animals do it, right? It's one of the oldest forms of communication, but it's always going to be simple. Smells get mixed up, they travel very slowly. It just doesn't sound like it's a reliable channel for conveying information. Vision and sound really are the two that can hold a lot of information

and are reliable over reasonable distances. And the third one, which is really reliable and can hold even more information, is electrical fields. It seems like those three channels are the only physical channels that are capable of carrying enough information really to be a complex language and to convey complex technological ideas.

We use the first two, of course. We don't use electrical fields. There are some animals on Earth that do, not many. And that's really because it's actually a very challenging. It's a very challenging thing to do. But I don't doubt that there could be technological alien species that have an electrical communication, electrical language.

And so we're building up an argument that suggests that aliens probably move, that complexity arises from competition among these bits all trying to eat each other, that they're probably communicating with each other. Does this give us enough of a sort of complexity soup to suggest that intelligence is likely to arise? How much of a reach is it to suppose that this kind of context will lead to alien intelligence? Well, for a zoologist, it's no leap at all, right? as a zoologist will tell you all animals are intelligent. Intelligence is a fundamental property of animals because if we define intelligence as the ability to solve problems, that's precisely what animals have to do. They have to solve problems.

They have to decide whether to turn right or to turn left. They have to find food. They have to decide whether an image that they see on their retina is a potential food source or an animal coming towards them to eat them. Those challenges, which are critically, I mean, important thing about those challenges is that these challenges are time critical. Animals have to make decisions quickly, straight away. Is it a predator? Should I run? Should I turn left? Should I turn right? And that's intelligence. That's precisely what intelligence is. So the simplest, simplest animal has

intelligence. Now, of course, you're going to say, that's not fair. That's not what I meant. I meant intelligence like us. I would define human intelligence in the way that you want it to be defined. What you're really asking about is technological intelligence. Okay, there's this joke from SETI scientists that I like to tell, which is that there are two kinds of organisms in the universe, folks and critters. Folks is anyone who can build a radio telescope and critters is everything else. And the rationale behind that is there might be some really intelligent alien species out there, really fantastically clever. If they can't make a technology to send signals to us, we'll never know. we'll never know about them unless they come and visit right yeah but they'll need that technology then

okay you'll have to have that technology or we'll never know about them build a radio telescope build a spaceship whatever so there is a criterion which is an interesting criterion i wouldn't call it intelligence because as i said all animals are intelligent but there is an interesting criterion of this technological intelligence the ability to build a radio telescope the ability to build a spaceship come and visit us and i think that's what you're asking is it something like that. I mean, essentially, I want to get to the question of whether we can make a mental connection with these aliens. How likely is it that we have enough in common that we could communicate with them and get some insight into what I think is the deepest question, which is what is it like

to be an alien? How different is it from what it's like to be a human? And can from that we draw some interesting conclusions about, you know, the nature of consciousness and intelligence itself? If we find aliens to be very similar to humans, we find them to be just alien enough, that we can understand them, but they're weird enough that we can learn something about the nature of intelligence. I think that'd be especially interesting. So one thing I really appreciated about your book was this exploration of what we mean by intelligence, especially the part in your book where you argue that if aliens are found to be as intelligent as humans, might we consider them to actually be human, right? You can imagine granting them rights and treating

them as persons. So what do you think that we can say about alien intelligence based on what we have learned here on Earth. And is it just philosophical or is it built from a sort of argument about the experience of aliens, the senses that we were talking about earlier? Well, of course, it seems very, very unlikely that we'll ever go and visit an alien planet and look at the different alien animals on it. It would be wonderful, but it seems unlikely. But if we were, we'll do a thought experiment.

And we were to land on a planet, okay, most of the planets with life are just going to be bacterial slime, right? probability is the vast majority there's only been bacterial slime on Earth for two and a half billion years and so chances are alien planets most alien planets are going to be like let's say we find one that's got complex life

and we land on that planet it's got complex life and we look around I claim that we will see things that appear to us the equivalent of trees things that appear to us the equivalent of animals those things that appear to us

the equivalent of animals will have a wide range of what we think of as intelligence There will be, I don't know, slug-like creatures that don't seem to have very much intelligence. There will be primate-like creatures that seem to have considerably more intelligence. So I think that that diversity of intelligences is very likely to occur, and I think we would recognize it. I think we would recognize the parallels with animals on our planet, because, of course, intelligence will arise for exactly the same reasons as it arose on Earth. However, now you're asking about the technological aliens if we can even find any of those.

What are the chances that we will have basically common ground with them? It's a completely different question whether we will ever be able to learn their language. That will put aside for the moment. But assuming that we could learn their language, would we be able to talk to them? Would we be able to understand them? Would we be able to understand the psyche experiences? You know, if they do use electric fields to communicate, they're using. of the world, if you can call it a view, maybe we need to think of a new word as kind of electric

view. If they sense the world using electric fields, their perception is going to be so utterly different from ours. Would we find common ground with them? And I think you can probably guess that my answer is going to be yes. And the reason that my answer is going to be yes is because if we were lucky to find such a species, the only reason they have an intelligence that is similar to ours is because they've been through a similar evolutionary history to ours. That's the only reason they would have it, right? We don't exactly know what caused our ancestors to evolve the intelligence that put us in the place that we are now, in the mess that we are now.

But whatever that pathway was, it's quite likely that a similar, not identical, similar pathway will have evolved for these intelligent aliens. And if that's the case, then yeah, there is. common ground. That seems to me a strong argument, but I also think about the kind of experiences of intelligent animals here on earth. And I wonder about the very kind of argument you make there where you say, let's look at the variety of things we see on earth. And, you know, as we look around on earth, we see fairly intelligent creatures that we think might have very different sort of mental internal states. You know, take, for example, an octopus that has like a central brain, but

also seems to have semi-independent arms that it like passes instructions to and then they execute them however they like. What does it like to be an octopus? It seems like it might be very different from the experience of being human. And that kind of barrier, that kind of different flavor of intelligence might prevent a barrier to real effective communication and, you know, technological transfers. Yep. But then again, there's a barrier between us and those animals on earth. We can't understand what it's like to be an octopus, right? We can't understand what it's like to be a dolphin. Why not?

Because they don't have a language. It's because they don't have a language. I mean, if you could go up to an octopus and ask, what's it like to be an octopus? You might find its answer somewhat confusing, but at least you'd get an answer. At least you'd have an insight into what they're thinking. And it's language that's really the key thing here.

I mean, language is the only way that we can interrogate the minds of other creatures in any detail. We can do experiments. There are experiments we can do. There are very clever experiments that we do to investigate to what extent animals understand themselves, to what extent animals understand that other animals are different individuals and so on. But really, if you want to know how are you feeling, you know, what do you think about

this poem or whatever, that requires language. And now the question is, are these hypothetical, technological aliens of ours going to have language? Yes. If they're technological, they have language. You cannot write that spaceship instructions book without language. You cannot build a spaceship without language. You have to say to another alien, you know, it has to be the screwdriver.

So that barrier that exists between us and other intelligences on Earth is a real barrier. And I agree that there are many kinds of intelligences that will be hard to understand. But at least we would have that window. May not help. May not solve the problem. We may find that alien-talking octopuses are so different from us. that we simply cannot understand what they're thinking, but at least it gives us a chance.

At least it gives us a window. I agree that if they're technological, it's likely that they have language. But then the question is, what are the chances that they are technological and isn't there a naive argument to make that it's unlikely that we see lots of intelligence, even fairly strong intelligence on Earth like Octopi,

that isn't technological, and only one example of the case that it is ours, and therefore it's unlikely for aliens, even intelligent aliens, to be technological on other planets. Yeah, but unfortunately, that's back to the critters argument. We would never know until we can get to those planets and count how many intelligent animals there are that haven't developed spaceships. That unfortunately is a closed door to us. All talk about talking to aliens, communicating with aliens, meeting aliens.

This is all very much based on this hypothetical situation where we find highly intelligent technological aliens that will talk to us, how likely that is. we have to be pessimistic, I'm afraid. So then my last question is more about you, which is, why are you interested in this question, this hypothetical question of alien life? You're a zoologist. Are you plenty of examples for things to study here on Earth? Why spend time wondering about alien life? Why not just wait until we do discover it?

And then you can talk about the concrete details. Why did you write this specific book? As it happens, this is really the subject that we just touched on. I research communication. That's what I do. And I'm interested in things like how much are animals saying? How much they're saying to each other? How complex are the messages that they pass to each other? Big question, you know, are humans the only ones with language? And to answer those kinds of

questions raises, to investigate those kinds of questions, we haven't exactly got answers yet. To investigate those kinds of questions means we need to look at some very fundamental ideas, what is language, what is communication, what's meaning, right? What's meaning? Can you have meaning without language? Does that even make any sense? Does an animal, does a dolphin mean something when it makes a particular sound. And so looking at these questions and trying to find ways to answer these questions and trying to find ways to ask animals, the answer, really does touch on the kinds of issues we've just been talking about. What is the difference between the mind of a human and the mind of a chimpanzee or the mind of a parrot? Why are we different, actually?

In what way are we different? Are we different? Clearly, we are. We have language. How has that come about? why has that happened? Is it inevitable? As you say, maybe a language will never arise on on any other planets or maybe it will. Maybe it is inevitable. Has it arisen before on Earth? Is it only humans? These are the kinds of questions that I deal with on Earth, but you can see that they have implications for thinking about who we're ever going to talk to if we're ever going to meet anyone. No, absolutely I agree. I think that framing it in terms of what's going on on other planets is a great way to think about what's unique on Earth, what's special on Earth, what's common on Earth. So really, we can learn a lot about ourselves. And so I learned a lot of reading your book.

I really enjoyed it. And thanks very much for coming on the program and answering all of our naive questions. Yeah, they're great questions. I loved it. Well, thanks very much. And I encourage all our listeners to check out the book. Again, it's called The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy. And the author is Dr. Arik Kirshenbaum. Thanks very much for joining us today. and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you on take it all! I'm Mani.

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