How might aliens perceive the Universe?

24:48All right, we're back. And we spent the last segment sort of patting ourselves on the back for things that we could see. And now we are going to, you know, be a little bummed out by having Daniel tell us about all the things that we can't perceive. Right. So we can see some wavelengths of light. We can't see most of the wavelengths of light, but there's other stuff out there that we can't see no matter what energy it has. And it's everywhere. So an example are neutrinos, right? Neutrinos are produced by the sun. There's lots and lots and lots of them. Every sentence we say on this podcast, there's about a trillion neutrinos that pass through your fingernails.

25:22Whoa. Like a trillion. It's a huge number, right? And we are pretty far away from the sun. So for there to be a trillion neutrinos that pass through this tiny little area of all of your fingernails this far away from the sun, not trying to imagine how many neutrinos are coming out of the surface of the sun. So the entire solar system filled with neutrinos, like almost uncountably many neutrinos, but they just pass right through us. We don't feel them. They don't feel us. It's like another universe sort of on top of ours that we hardly interact with at all. And all of them come from the sun? Not all of them come from the sun.

25:56there are also cosmic ray sources of neutrinos. There are neutrinos from the center of the galaxy. There are neutrinos from nobody knows where that are super high energy, just like other kinds of cosmic rays. Neutrino astronomy is a fascinating area. With just beginning, we have cool, awesome neutrino telescopes at the South Pole that can see when neutrinos penetrate into the ice and create a muon. And they've instrumented the ice in a cubic mile. What? Like literally, they drill down a mile and they drop these cameras and then they fill it back with water again and freeze it into the ice. So there's a cubic mile of ice that they have as a Terankov detector to see muons moving faster than the speed of light in ice.

26:37It's really incredible. And you see those muons that are created by cosmic neutrinos. So anyway, neutrinos are out there. They're not rare, right? They're weird, but they're everywhere. But we can't sense them. No part of our body interacts with them very well. A neutrino only feels the weak interaction. It doesn't feel the electromagnetic because it has no charge. It doesn't feel a strong force. So the only way for a neutrino to interact with our bodies or with most kinds of matter is the weak interaction, which is super duper weak. So if you built like a wall made of lead, you'd have to make it a light year thick, a light year thick before a neutrino would have a 50 % chance of interacting with some part of that lead.

27:19So that's how little we can interact with neutrinos. And that tells you that there's a lot going on in the universe, literally trillions of things per second that you cannot see, that are just sort of here, also in parallel to us that we don't interact with, that are invisible and intangible. When you were talking about the Terankov detector, I think you said that we're not actually detecting the neutrinos directly, we're detecting the muons that get produced by the neutrinos. So these we still can't see. Exactly. We only know they're there based on the things that they create. Is that right? Exactly.

27:51Occasionally, once in a zillion times, a neutrino will interact with a piece of ice and create a muon, which we can see. And the presence of the muon tells us that a neutrino was there. But yeah, we don't have like a neutrino track. We can't say here was the path of the neutrino because no neutrino ever interacts more than once. Even to have it interact once with normal matter is like astronomically unlikely, which is why you need like gazillions of neutrinos to ever see any of them. Wow. It's amazing we know anything about them at all. Yeah. And this is something we've discovered only in the last few decades.

28:22And we have built neutrino eyeballs that can see neutrinos, right? That like tap into this enormous river of information that's happening right on top of us. Neutrinos, one of the most common particles in the universe, really everywhere. We like live in a neutrino ocean, a neutrino river. And we've built these incredible detectors that are capable of very occasionally forcing a neutrino to reveal itself. And with that, you can look out into the universe and you can see super cool stuff. Like, for example, you can see the sun in the middle of the night because to neutrinos, the Earth is transparent.

28:59It's like just barely there, man. So you have a neutrino detector. It doesn't matter if the sun is on the other side of the Earth or not. There's no day or night in neutrino light because the Earth is like a pane of glass to neutrinos. And so you can keep your neutrino detector running during the night. And they've taken a picture through the earth of the sun in neutrinos. It's super awesome. You should Google it. Okay. So they took a picture of the sun through the earth, but we don't have detectors. So were they looking for muon things in the ice? Yeah, exactly. They were looking for upward going muons, muons from neutrinos that have passed through the earth.

29:39Okay. And you can tell even at night that there's a bright source of neutrinos. on the other side of the earth. You can tell where the sun is using only neutrinos, which is pretty cool. That is wild. But the sense that it gives you is that, wow, there's a lot going on. You sit in your room and you watch TV, you have no idea that there's like gazillions of neutrinos flying in the air between you and the TV everywhere, flying right through you. There's a lot going on in the universe that we are not sensing. And I guess it doesn't surprise me that much that we don't have sensors for neutrinos because they're mostly not interacting with things.

30:10They're not hurting us. They're not really doing anything that's important for our survival. They're just kind of there. They're just kind of there. Is that fair? That's true. I think there's a couple of things going on. One is like, would it be useful? Right. And your point you're making is like, they don't really tell you much except for like, basically where is the sun? Right. Which maybe at night, it'd be nice to know, like how far are we from dawn? But yeah, that's pretty marginal. On the other hand, like neutrinos have a lot of energy. It's an incredible amount of energy. If we could develop like neutrino synthesis, some way to capture that energy, you could continue to get energy at night, right?

30:46Plants wouldn't be limited to growing only during the day if they could develop some sort of neutrino synthesis. The other obstacle is like, well, is that technically possible? And the problem there is neutrinos hardly interact and there's no way we know to have any sort of reasonable interaction rate. And so, yeah, you could have materials which could absorb energy from neutrinos, but it would be a tiny little dribble because we're just not very good at it. And nothing we know is capable of interacting with neutrinos. Okay. So we can't see neutrinos. That's a bummer. What else can we not see?

31:17That's apparently maybe everywhere. Yeah. Neutrinos turn out to actually just be a clue that there's a lot in the universe that we can't see. And famously on this podcast, we talked about dark matter, right? Most of the mass of the universe is not the kind of matter we have any interaction with. Like even the weak interaction that we use to detect neutrinos is not something dark matter is capable of. And most of the matter in the universe, 80 % of the mass in the universe is dark matter. So we can interact with a little slice of a little slice of the universe. Most of the stuff that's out there that's shaped the structure of galaxies, right?

31:54That is the reason why there's stuff here and not out there that's holding the galaxy together. We have a lot of gravitational evidence for, we have no other way to interact with it, not even the weak interaction. And dark matter, again, is like neutrinos in that it's everywhere. There's dark matter in the room with me right now. I can't see it. I can't interact with it, but it's here. It's not like dark matter is some weird blob, like a new galaxy nobody understood. It fills the universe. We're moving through an ocean of dark matter. This is, again, another part of the universe that's sort of like, not like a parallel reality because it's part of ours, but it's a part of reality that we cannot access.

32:34It's like being deaf or something, right? Think about what a deaf person is like. There's lots of noise going on around them. They can't sense it. And I don't know what it's like to be deaf, but I imagine if you've been deaf since birth, you might not even be able to conceive of what it's like to hear. Apply that and extrapolate to dark matter. There's a lot going on around us, neutrinos and dark matter, all this kind of stuff that we do not know how to sense. We don't know what's going on. We're just totally clueless. And we can't even really imagine what it would be like to know that it's there.

33:05I feel like that's a very humbling fact. Yeah. How does it make you feel, Daniel? I'm putting on my psychiatrist hat. Well, it makes me feel a combination of ignorant, right? Like, wow, the things that we think my sense of what the universe is, is deeply misinformed, right? It's a little slice of it, but also excited, right? Anytime we're ignorant about the universe, that's an opportunity to learn, to pull back the veil of reality and say, oh, wow, the universe actually is this other way, not the way that we imagined. And so I would love to meet aliens who have different senses, who could like somehow detect dark matter directly through I don't know what means, or they figured out a way to make neutrino interactions higher probability so they can like directly see neutrinos and have some cool way to do it.

33:50I think it would be incredible to meet aliens and to understand how they see the universe and how that affects their ability to unravel the mysteries of it, right? So if we make the assumption that natural selection shapes organisms throughout the solar system, which may or may not be the case, I guess, but it seems like a reasonable assumption, what survival benefit could you imagine for organisms that can see dark matter or neutrinos? Or is it only beneficial to see them once you get to the stage where you're like trying to understand physics? Well, if you could see dark matter, then you'd be like the most awesome physicist.

34:24And physicists have a huge evolutionary advantage because being a cool physicist makes everybody want to have your babies. And so, I don't know, it just seems kind of obvious, Kelly. Oh, okay. All right. No, joking aside, it's a good point. I don't know that it is relevant, right? Unless you're a being made of dark matter, right? You're some kind of alien directly made of dark matter, then obviously you'd want to sense dark matter. But otherwise, yeah, dark matter is mostly irrelevant to our life. And that's one reason why it took a long time to discover, right? It's not like it's affecting our life all the time in ways that's just a mystery.

34:58You know, it doesn't cause weather. It doesn't, you know, change the growing season. It doesn't attract leopards to us or protect us from hyenas or something. It is mostly irrelevant. We live in a little corner of the sort of perceptoverse, and we see most of the useful stuff in that slice of the universe. But it's not all of the universe. So yeah, it's not until you want to extrapolate outside of the part of the universe you directly sense that you need to think about these other parts of the universe. But aliens may have grown up in a different part of the perceptoverse. They may interact with it differently.

35:33They may have different needs. I think the question you're asking is also like, how likely is it that aliens grow up in an environment where they need other senses than the ones that we have, right? Or in particular, where they need senses that pick up on neutrinos and dark matter. But yes. And that's a great question. But to answer that, I think we, again, need to look at the experience here on Earth. Because even here on Earth, we see a very broad variety of the kind of senses. There are animals out there that have senses that we don't have. And so even though we all share this common environment on Earth, there is, I think, a broader sense of animal sensation than most people understand.

36:10Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive into those animal senses because this is the biology part that I'm super excited about. Although everything we've said so far about physics has been fascinating. But biology, let's get into it. For people who want to understand aliens, of course, it feels a little boring to turn around and say, let's talk about animals on Earth. What? But the argument is that if there are things that evolved many times on Earth, then that's a clue. It's a clue that maybe this is something that's very common. It's easy to evolve and therefore more likely to evolve out there in the rest of the galaxy.

36:43and if there's something that took a long time to evolve or evolved just once, you know, like human intelligence, then we think maybe that's something that's more rare. Maybe that's less likely to have evolved in the rest of the universe. Of course, this is all N equals one examples. And so you have to be very careful about extrapolating, but I think it's the best that we can do. If I could just push back for a second, like if something evolves once instead of evolving multiple times, instead of that meaning that it's not important, to me that could mean that it's supremely important. Like it popped up once and then nothing ever lost it because you can't survive if you lose it or something like that in a world where it's important.

37:20And so I could see many times it evolving or it only evolving once and everything keeping it. Either one of those arguing that it's important personally. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It depends also on like how long it takes to evolve, right? Because we're asking not just is it important, but is it common that if it takes a long time to evolve, that suggests that it sort of like requires a certain set of circumstances. Even if it does give you a huge benefit, it might be a difficult thing. It might be like one in a gazillion chances for the molecules to align for evolution to put this together.

37:51Yeah, yep. And a fascinating example of the sort of timeline there is hearing, right? We think of like hearing is obviously important and so many critters on Earth can hear. But it turns out that hearing only evolved like about half a billion years ago. Huh. Right? There was billions of years of life on Earth without basically ears. Was there less to hear? Like, was it just bacteria moving around quietly, tiptoeing their way through the Earth? Nobody really knows, of course. And this is like, you know, digging through the fossil record and speculating. And so we know very, very little. But the evolutionary biologists I've talked to suggested that that coincides with the explosion of large multicellular life.

38:36So life went from single to multicellular many times, actually, in the evolution of life on Earth, which is in itself super fascinating and we should dig into on another episode. But around 500 or 600 million years ago, life got big and noisy. And like Arik Kirschbaum, the zoologist said, you know, that no ecosystem can exist for long without someone trying to take a bite out of someone else. And so his speculation is that things got big and noisy and animals wanted to eat each other. And so then it was an advantage to be able to hear is somebody sneaking up on you? And like, is my lunch moving around in the bushes?

39:09And so basically, as soon as life got big and noisy, hearing evolved. And so that's suggestive, right, that it's not too complicated. As soon as it was useful, boom, hearing evolved. So it sounds like it evolved quickly once it became possible. Do we know how many times hearing evolved? It's something people are working on still. There's a bunch of fascinating clues because there are different pieces of hearing that all have to come together. Like on one hand, there are lots of different kinds of ears, right? Like our ears and dog's ears and insect ears, they all look really different. It might give you the sense like, hmm, maybe they all work really differently and they all evolved independently.

39:46But if you dig into it, underneath it, there's only really two sort of fundamental mechanisms for interacting with sound, even if your ears are very different shapes. And there's the vertebrate and the invertebrate. So vertebrates, basically, vertebrates like us have these systems of hairs like we have in our ears that respond to frequencies based on the length and the thickness of the hair, essentially the string tension of the hair. It's sort of like an equalizer in your stereo, right? The hairs like shake when the right frequency comes along and it lets you like basically decompose sound into frequencies, super amazing biological technology.

40:21That's one mechanism, but invertebrates, insects, et cetera, have a completely different mechanism. They have like a drum stretched surface that vibrates in response to different sounds. And so there are these two different mechanisms. And that suggests like, okay, maybe there were two times that hearing evolved. But then my friend Matt Georgiani sent me a paper suggesting that like underneath it all, there's a biochemical pipeline there that might be actually in common. And so it could be that there's one core development, which gave us the ability to be sensitive to sound. And the rest of it is just sort of like frosting on the cake.

40:57But you know, this is all very fresh research. we don't really know the answer. It's super fascinating to me to dig into the history of this and wonder how many different ways of hearing evolved and then died out, right? Maybe those things were out-competed. It's amazing. It is, and it involves chemistry. So I guess if chemistry helps us understand biology, we ought to give it a shot. But on that note, so we've talked about hearing and how hearing differs in the animal kingdom. Let's go ahead and take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about some other senses that earthlings have.

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45:31All right. So I've already complained that like birds and insects can see a greater range of wavelengths than I can, or at least can see some wavelengths that I can't. what other things can animals on this planet that I share with them, what can they do that I can't? Or what can they do better? Well, on the topic of things that birds can see that you can't, have you heard the story of the ultraviolet tits?

45:56When I was interviewing for grad school in an animal behavior lab, I had not heard about great tits before, which is Paris major. This is a bird species. and I had a deer in the headlights look when the professor whose lab I was interviewing in asked me about great tits. But anyway, I recovered eventually. I thought that must be a species of some sort and I got into that person's lab. So anyway, okay, go ahead. Tell me about the ultraviolet tits. The ultraviolet tits are a species of bird that look just sort of generic. They're one of these LBJs, as the birders call them, you know, little brown jobs.

46:33But what they discovered is that those of these birds don't look very spectacular in the visible. In the ultraviolet, they are absolutely fabulous. And they discovered this using Vaseline. And so they put Vaseline on some of these birds because Vaseline is opaque to ultraviolet. You can see through it in the visible, but it blocks the ultraviolet. And so birds that used to be sexually very popular, when you put Vaseline on them, no longer were the ladies interested. And then if you take pictures of them in the ultraviolet, you can see all these colors and patterns are just not visible to us without ultraviolet eyes.

47:08So yes, Kelly, you're missing out on the ultraviolet tits because of your limited eyeballs and mine. And I am missing out on a lot of not safe for work jokes, but I'm going to contain myself and let's move on to the next, the next sense. You know, there's some things that I think are very well known, like bats and dolphins, for example, use echolocation to understand what's out there in the universe. Dogs have a much richer sense of smell in the universe. akin to seeing other frequencies of light dogs can pick up on so many tiny microscopic amounts of things. And what it's like to be a dog, to experience the universe primarily through smell and with poor vision, I can't even imagine.

47:47Those are fairly well known, but I think more fascinating are the things that are less familiar, which are directly sensing fields. And one of the listeners commented, wouldn't it be amazing to be able to sense fields directly, magnetic fields, electric fields? and you know there's fascinating research about how birds migrate across the world and whether they have some sort of internal compass that interacts with magnetic fields and we talked about it once in the podcast before there used to be a theory that birds use these pairs of electrons that would flip spin and the spin flip of the electrons would change in response to magnetic field that maybe they were sensing that using some proteins in their eyes but i think then And you commented that there's actually another theory, or that's no longer the number one theory of how birds sense magnetic fields.

48:32I say lots of smart things. That might be a smart thing I said, but I don't remember. I do remember we were talking about humpback whales and whether or not they sense magnetic fields. And the current understanding was, if so, we have no idea how they do it. And so I don't know where we are with birds right now. But we do know that lots of fish can sense or even generate electric fields directly. They have these organs in their body that can create electric pulses. You're all familiar with electric eels, right? They just generate a bolt of electricity. Well, in some cases, it's very useful to be able to sense electric fields left by other organisms.

49:10Our bodies all have electric fields because our neurons work on electric currents. And so I'm generating an electric field right now. And if I could directly sense electric fields, I could tell through a wall whether somebody was at my door or stuff like that. There's all sorts of ways you can interact with the universe. And fish do this. It's not like a hypothetical. This is something that's out there in the universe available for bodies to interact with. And you don't have to go to some alien planet to find an example of it. You just have to look underwater. Okay, so as far as I know, electric fields like this are only sensed by fish.

49:43And fish are aquatic. Is there something about being an aquatic organism that makes picking up on electric fields easier or more useful? I think it's actually more difficult because water is a conductor. So, for example, electromagnetic signals propagate more easily through air. But I think it depends also a lot on the frequency, right? Because obviously, like, photons move through water in their electromagnetic fields. So it must depend a lot on the frequency. Yeah, it's a good question. Oh, apparently platypus? and dolphins can also, but they're aquatic organisms. And so anyway, so interesting.

50:19What a counterintuitive world we live in. All right. And so all of this, of course, is fascinating because we're curious about the biology of life on Earth. But in my book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? The number one question is, how do aliens think about the universe? What mysteries of physics have they solved, if any? Are they tackling the same questions? And so this question of perception is important because we want to understand how aliens might see the universe, which dictates the questions they ask and the answers that they will accept. And so all of this, of course, building up to the question of, you know, how do aliens see the universe?

50:54Right. The question that keeps Daniel up at night. All right. And so what are some options for how aliens might perceive the universe different than we do? Yeah. So we talked about some of them already, which I think are pretty unlikely. You know, seeing dark matter, seeing neutrinos. To have an eyeball that could see a neutrino, you'd need like an eyeball the size of the earth. And it seems pretty unlikely to me that you're going to generate that massive an organ for very little payoff. So I think that would be very expensive. But, you know, there is another option out there that I'm kind of surprised we don't have.

51:27And so aliens might develop it, which essentially is telepathy. You know, we were talking about how our bodies work on electric fields. well your brain is electromagnetic right there's currents in your brain and the way it operates is through electromagnetism and electromagnetism can be transmitted through the air and it can be received through the air right that's how radios work so it's not inconceivable that in your brain you could develop basically an antenna which can generate electromagnetic pulses not too far afield from what fish and eels can do and could receive electromagnetic pulses, right?

52:03And if you could do this, then I could send you a message brain to brain without going through sound or without like using some hand gesture, basically telepathy. And so there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to communicate brain to brain. I don't know why we have it. It seems pretty awesome. Or maybe you'd be terrible. Yeah, so first of all, when you said telepathy, I thought maybe we were gonna start talking about Bigfoot or some other cryptid, and I wasn't sure I was on the right podcast. But when I was talking to the brain computer interface community, they were saying that they are essentially trying to like take messages from our brains and connect the messages so we can all sort of like humanity as a whole could share all of our thoughts together.

52:42I find that horrifying. I think that I get through my life much better because most of my thoughts don't get shared and only the nice ones get shared. I think social media has taught us that knowing what 15 year olds think is usually a bad idea. Yeah, that's right. Right. That's right. But I wonder, so, you know, these brain-computer interfaces, I think, would include a step where there's a lot of processing of the electromagnetic information before it goes from one brain to another. Do you think, I mean, so there's so many signals that would need to get, that get, like, aggregated to give us a memory or a thought.

53:15Could you really transmit that information from one brain to another just with, like, the mess of electromagnetic information that comes out of our brain? Because that information is also like Kelly is breathing right now. Kelly's moving her hands. It seems like it would be very muddled. It would be hard to know exactly what's going on with the message. Well, the same question could be applied to how we speak to each other, right? Like, Daniel, how could you possibly convey what it's like to smell a rose just by pushing sound waves through the air at Kelly? Like, that seems impossible. But, you know, there's a process there.

53:46I think about it. I decide how to capture it. I represent it somehow. I push it. You interpret it. Maybe it comes across wrong. It's not going to be like, here's Daniel's entire brain experience. It's like, I'm sending you a message. You could start with pings, Morse code, something very simple. It doesn't have to be like full direct access to my brain. It's just a way for me to communicate with you without going through sound. So like astronauts could just like talk to each other without needing radios, essentially. Basically biological radios. And it's not impossible. I don't know why we don't have it.

54:19It seems like as we evolve, it could have been useful, but I guess not. I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But it also doesn't seem to me to be impossible to imagine that aliens could have this kind of biological apparatus. Maybe they find it useful to stay closer together or to communicate in situations where voice or smell or sight is not helpful. Yeah, well, and maybe this is the future of podcasting. We can just really think our conversations hard at the Extraordinaries, and they'll be like, they can communicate with us. Like, oh, Kelly, that didn't make sense. Try again. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

54:52Braincasting where you can't unsubscribe. Oh, no. And so that's just an example. And that's, you know, just out of our imagination. But I think there's lots of situations out there evolutionarily that could create some need for something we can't yet possibly imagine. So I think there's lots of possible senses out there. And some of them that could be available if aliens have a very different environment than ours. In our environment, where we're pretty big and we're pretty slow, we're not sensitive to things like relativity. So we didn't need to be able to see directly the curvature of space and time.

55:29And we're not sensitive to quantum mechanics, which is why it took us so long to discover quantum mechanics. But now imagine super tiny aliens, like microscopic aliens. And I don't know how you evolve if you're super duper tiny, what the biochemical infrastructure for life would look like in that scenario. But if you were small enough to be able to interact with photons in a quantum way and to sense superposition so you could like taste electrons and like see quantum objects, then that would be a very different kind of sensation of the universe. It would give you a very different window into how the universe works.

56:04And so then you just have to imagine like very different environments, different from ours. You know, vast aliens who are made of dark matter and are as big as solar systems. Why not aliens whose life works on very, very long timescales instead of short like hours, you know, where the solar system looks chaotic instead of, you know, slow and stately the way it does on our timescales. It's so hard to imagine these things because we're in our little human box. When you said earlier that you'd like to be able to perceive objects in superposition, would you give up any of your current senses to be able to see that?

56:41If so, which one? Oh my gosh. I cannot imagine giving up taste or smell or sight or sound. So yeah, no, I don't know. Why can't I have it all, Kelly? Because thought experiments are meant to be tough, I guess. And, you know, as interesting as it is to imagine the biology of these things, would it evolve under what situations might it evolve? To me, the reason these questions are important is because it shapes how we think about the universe. Like we were saying earlier, you take a picture of the universe in the infrared, you translate it into the visible. When we detect gravitational waves from the rest of the universe, typically they're translated into sound so we can listen to the gravitational waves.

57:27Of course, sound doesn't propagate through space. Colliding black holes do not chirp as they eat each other, but that's how we can make sense of it, right? And the lesson there is the kind of senses that we have determine the model of the universe we build in our brain. They determine what's intuitive for us. As we've been talking on the podcast a lot recently, what kind of answers we accept. If you ask me a question about the universe and I explain it to you in ways that are intuitive, you're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. This planet goes around that planet. I can imagine it and it clicks together in my mind.

58:01Well, the kind of explanations that you accept depend on the kind of ways you experience the universe because that determines the language of your intuition. And so if you are a quantum alien or a dark matter being, or you can see neutrinos, or you can hear other people's thoughts in your mind, you could have a very different way to experience the universe, which affects the questions. But then also fundamentally, it can affect the answers that you accept and the way you think about the universe and therefore the kind of theories you build about the universe. So if you've listened to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe for 30 seconds ever, you know that Daniel loves aliens.

58:39And he did an incredible amount of work for Do Aliens Speak Physics? And he interviewed a ton of different specialists. And of course, the chapter where he talked to the biologist is the best chapter in a fantastic book. Although I got to say the chapter on how hard it has been to translate other languages was also particularly like fascinating and had a bunch of stuff I didn't know. So anyway, I highly recommend Do Aliens Speak Physics. If you want to hear more on Daniel's thoughts, both scientific and philosophical, for what it would be like if we were to encounter aliens and how we might be able to communicate with them.

59:12And there's lots of really fun drawings in there by my friend Andy Warner, who did an incredible job of imagining what these aliens might look like. Super fun. Thanks very much, everybody, for going on this tour of potential ways aliens might sense the universe and how it could shape the way that they understand it. This is part of our journey to understand what we do know about the universe and what we are missing out on. Thanks very much, everybody. See you next time.

59:42Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Aging is real, and so are the benefits of new Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Water.

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