How might aliens perceive the Universe?

Daniel and Kelly talk about how aliens might experience the Universe and how it might shape their science, a topic from Daniel's new book "Do Aliens Speak Physics?" See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:10Daniel Whiteson?

  One of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy is a simple one. What is it like to be a bat? It's not a famous question because anyone cares particularly about bats, but because they wonder how our senses shape our experience. If you had dramatically different ways of perceiving the universe, would your mind form a very different mental picture? Do blind animals even have a mental picture? Or is our reliance on vision showing our bias already in the phrase "mental picture"? I wonder about bats, but not as much as I wonder about aliens. What is it like to be an alien? Do they have some version of our set of senses? Is their experience as alien to us as bats might be?

• 1:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Or is it much more alien? I'm curious about this, not just because it's a fun thought experiment, but because I wonder about how it shapes alien science. If they have a very different mental picture, or sonogram, or concept of the universe, how does that affect how they study it? What questions they ask? And maybe most crucially, how they express their answers, their understanding?

• 2:19Daniel Whiteson?

  This is one slice of a larger question that I dig into in my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?, where I imagine what it might be like to chat with visiting aliens about how the universe works and whether we'll have much science in common. If you're a listener to this podcast, I think there's a lot about this book you would enjoy. So please support me and the book and the project and order a copy. Thanks very much to all of you who already have. Consider today's episode a little taste test of Do Aliens Speak Physics? So, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary alien universe.

• 3:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I... What do I do? I don't know.

• 3:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't remember how to start a podcast.

• 3:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I don't remember who I am without this podcast.

• 3:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space. And I'm excited because today is sort of like the intersection of physics and biology.

• 3:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm not a biologist or a philosopher.

• 3:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are both so out of practice.

• 3:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by training, but I've been waiting for this day because I can't wait to talk to you about aliens.

• 3:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Daniel wrote the best book about aliens and we're gonna start talking about that today. And my question for you, Daniel, based on the topic that we're discussing today is, if you could perceive one thing that humans currently cannot perceive, what would it be?

• 4:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh, I absolutely know the answer to that question. Oh, wait, no. Can I get two?

• 4:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  No, dang it.

• 4:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sure. It's arbitrary. Why not?

• 4:11Daniel Whiteson?

  My first answer was spatial curvature. You know, I think the universe is mysterious partly because we can't see a lot of it and we have to infer it. But if we could directly see the actual curvature of space, look at a black hole and see how space is bent around it, I think we could learn a lot about... General relativity and about the nature of space. And I think we wouldn't even have to have learned it. It could be intuitive. You know, it could just be something that we naturally understand. And so, yeah, I would love if we could somehow directly see or experience the curvature of space itself. Is that a weird thing to say?

• 4:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, it's a much more selfish answer than my, or sorry, selfless, selfless answer than mine. You, you would like to be able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. I want to see pretty flowers better. So, so anyway, your answer way better than mine. And go ahead, I'll give you the second one. What is the second thing that you wish you could perceive?

• 5:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I wish I could see quantum effects. I wish I could see things in superposition. You know, like if a photon is approaching your eye and has a chance to hit your left eyeball or your right eyeball, you can only see it in one eyeball. You can only experience like a tiny little flash of light. You can't experience both probabilities because we're big classical things. But if we were like somehow weirdly small and quantum, then we could interact with it without collapsing its wave function. Somehow experience things in superposition. That would be really weird and awesome. And maybe then again, we would have some cool intuition for the way the universe worked and we wouldn't struggle so much to understand quantum mechanics. I just also really hunger to know like what other kinds of experiences are, you know?

• 5:49Daniel Whiteson?

  One thing is like how we interact with the universe. The other part of it is like how we actually experience it. You know, these qualia that are generated in our minds. You know, when your eyeballs see a certain wavelength of photon and then your brain tells you red, right? The red is not part of the photon. It's part of your experience. And I just think it'd be incredible if your brain could generate new kinds of experiences. Like if we could somehow see spacetime or see superposition, what would that be like? This is the part of me that like wants to sit on the rooftops, milk banana peels and just wonder.

• 6:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like if you could see superpositions, wouldn't the world be kind of overwhelming? Cause you'd be seeing like, you know, all of these sort of probabilities happening. And I think that would be too much for me. I'd be overwhelmed.

• 6:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the world is already overwhelming. I mean, think about all the things that your body is interacting with and sensing. Mostly your brain is filtering it out to put together this story for you about your life and your experience and the environment around you. It's highly, highly filtered already. So if we could see quantum effects or space time curvature, that would just be like another part of the story. I don't know how your brain would sort it all out, but your brain already has to filter through the chaos to tell you what the world around you is like.

• 7:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but I'm used to that, Daniel. So that's okay. But you know what I want to see that I think would not be overwhelming? And I would absolutely love to see.

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  What's that?

• 7:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  So like bumblebees can see a greater wavelength of light than we can. And there's a bunch of things on flowers that are meant to attract bumblebees that we can't see. I would love to see flowers in all of their intended glory, you know? Like those other colors are meant to signal to bees who are their pollinators that like, I'm beautiful. I'm amazing. Come over here and I'm missing it. And I wish I could see those things. I think that would be amazing.

• 7:35Daniel Whiteson?

  I totally agree that there's a lot to the universe we're missing. And it feels frustrating that we can't interact with that. But I'm curious why you put those particular emotions and experiences on the bee and the flower. Like, do you think the bee has to think it's beautiful? Does the bee choose pretty flowers? Couldn't there just be something much more basic and simple about the bee's decisions? Like smell good or something?

• 7:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I totally over anthropomorphized or whatever. Yeah, no, I don't think.

• 8:04Daniel Whiteson?

  It was cute, though.

• 8:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I don't think the flower is thinking anything. I think the flower is just like, when I have more of this color, I get more insects walking on my face and like, and the insects are like, oh, there's this very bright stimulus over there and I should go over to that stimulus because my brain is telling me to approach the stimulus. Yeah, I don't think it's bumblebees being like, I love you flower. But, uh, but I still wish I could see more colors.

• 8:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it'd be interesting to go to an art gallery with a bumblebee like, which ones do you like?

• 8:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you know, if I could just like switch between the different visual systems of the different organisms that I study, that would be like such a great way to know how to, you know, like, did I design the experiment correctly? Or, you know, or the animal seeing something I don't see? I think that would be pretty cool.

• 8:48Daniel Whiteson?

  It would be amazing to get to switch like, let me see the universe from a dog's point of view. Okay, now from a bat's point of view. Okay, now I'm a dolphin, because it would help shake us out of the box that we're in. You know, I feel like we experience the universe a certain way. And from that, we assume the universe is a certain way. But there's so much out there that we're missing and we would be so much better informed and probably more clever about figuring out how things work if we had more than one angle on it, you know?

• 9:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 9:13Daniel Whiteson?

  If we could somehow triangulate the universe.

• 9:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Side note that maybe should get cut out. So you said, and now I'm a dolphin. My daughter came home and she was like, you know, my friend and I, we were talking about animals and how we're both furries. And I was like,

• 9:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  and how you're both. What darling? And she's like, furries. And I was like, hmm.

• 9:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're imagining this conversation you're gonna have with her. You're like, well, okay, let's talk about that.

• 9:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. And then Zach was in the room and he goes, Kelly? No. And I was like, and instead I said, what does that mean to you? And she said, it means we like pretending to be animals for a little while. And I was like, that's different than it means for adults. But anyway, I didn't say that. And I just said, wow, that's a lot of fun. Be careful who you say that to. I love you. And that was the end. Anyway.

• 10:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, there's something wonderful about children's imagination and how they're able to imagine being other creatures. And something I wonder about is how creatures on Earth experience the universe, but also creatures out there in the universe. Because of course, all the creatures on Earth share this environment we all evolved in. And when I think about how the universe works and how aliens might be figuring it out, one of the first questions you have to ask is like, well, what part of the universe are they seeing? What is it like to be an alien? If Kelly could put on her alien goggles, you know, how many of those different goggles are there anyway? Are they vastly different from the ones that we wear? And how much would that change? Our understanding of the universe.

• 10:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am dying to know, and I'm dying to know what our listeners think. And so we asked our listeners, how do aliens perceive the universe?

• 10:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks very much to everybody who jumped in with crazy speculation. Lots of fun. If you would like to join the crew, write to us to [email protected]. Here's what everyone had to say.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Aliens could sense fields, magnetic fields or other fields. They could see differently. See an ultraviolet and all of that kind of thing. There's probably no limit to what other creatures could use.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  It's kind of hard to speculate and imagine a sense that we don't have. Maybe a magnetic sense? Maybe they have a magnetic planet as well and they can sense magnetic north?

• 11:31Speaker 05

  If they are very advanced, maybe they also have quantum sense.

• 11:37Speaker 06

  I think the sense of sight, observation, recording and analysis.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Well, life on Earth has such a variety of senses. It's hard to think of anything that's not already been invented. Maybe the ability to detect X-rays or some other form of light.

• 11:55Daniel Whiteson?

  What alien life does exist out there would perceive the universe with either vibrations, radiation, vision, and that's about it. If I were an alien and could choose a sense, I would like quantum entanglement sense, an instantaneous perception of distant correlated particles. This would allow for faster-than-light style coordination, seamless, real-time exploration, navigation and teamwork. It gotta be vision, whether aliens or humans. We actually do sense gravity, but maybe they can sense mass, velocity, momentum of what's around them. Maybe they can sense brainwaves.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Right. Just because physics is going to be the same there, there's no reason to think they would evolve a completely different way of sensing the world around them.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  What would be visible light to them would be determined by the composition of their local star and their planet's atmosphere. So they might see a completely different spectrum than we do and their brain would interpret colors as something that we can't even imagine. Well, we have animals that currently use sonar to navigate their world.

• 13:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bats and dolphins, but neither of those species has made it into space. All right. Well, it looks like some of our listeners are imagining that aliens have that sort of quantum sense that you were talking about, that they could perceive things at that level. That's a very good imagination, in my opinion, that had not occurred to me. I was like, more colors.

• 13:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I love the answer to the comments that bats and dolphins haven't made it out into space. And so maybe sonar isn't like the kind of sense that takes you across the universe. And my response to that is like, are you sure, dude? Maybe all those UFO videos are like the secret dolphin air force.

• 13:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa. Yeah, we're gonna get trippy on today's episode.

• 13:44Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just trying to cash in on all the UFO cryptozoology nonsense.

• 13:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's a lot of it these days. You have a lot of opportunities. Okay, so it's time to jump in. At the beginning of the episode, we talked about a couple of things that we can't perceive that you would like to perceive. So how much of the universe do we perceive as humans?

• 14:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's a great question. It's important to start with our perception because I think that a lot of people have the impression that we mostly understand what's around us. Yeah, there are mysteries about how it works, but there aren't like things hiding from us, that the things you see in the universe, your mental model of the universe is what's out there, that your senses give you some sort of like direct revelation of reality, right? Your legs are out there in front of you, your desk is over here, your dog is sitting over there, that you understand what's around you in the universe. And it's not that I'm saying that your senses are lying to you, that your dog is a hologram or something.

• 14:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be that too, though.

• 14:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not gonna rule that out, right? I haven't met your dog, who knows, right? Let's keep an open mind. Maybe your dog is an alien. But the point is that there is a lot more going on in the universe that we don't see. So like, yes, your senses tell you a lot about the universe, but there's a lot more out there that they're not telling you. And the most immediate is just in the form of light, like your eyes reveal a lot about the universe, but they only capture a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, right?

• 15:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sad face.

• 15:14Daniel Whiteson?

  All those flowers out there are beautiful in ways that Kelly will never experience.

• 15:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks for rubbing it in.

• 15:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Remember that the way vision works is photons hit your eyeball. And if they have the right frequency, they flip some protein switch, which sends a message up your optic nerve. And so your brain can then interpret that. But the electromagnetic spectrum is really, really wide from radio to infrared, and then a little slice of the visible, and then UV, X-ray, and gamma rays at the very top end. And the universe looks different in each one. Kelly was saying earlier, like, you like to put on a bat's goggles or a dog's goggles, right? Different animals see a different subset. Mostly, it's all concentrated near the visible range. But the universe looks different in each wavelength. It's not just like, okay, your dog sees the same stuff. It's just a little dimmer. Or it's in black and white. Or an ant sees it in fractal patterns or something crazy, right?

• 16:08Daniel Whiteson?

  The universe really does look very different in each wavelength because different stuff in the universe is either opaque or transparent, depending on the wavelength of light you're using.

• 16:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and evolution has sort of tinkered with what we're allowed to perceive and has focused in on the information that's most helpful for particular kinds of organisms. And this sort of left the rest of the stuff out so that your brain doesn't get overwhelmed. Or at least, that's my sense. Was that your sense by when you were doing this research?

• 16:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Which senses you have don't just depend on like what information is out there. Senses are expensive, right? You've got to grow an eyeball. You've got to maintain it. You've got to give it blood. It costs energy and resources. So you're only going to develop it if it's useful. And you're only going to do the work necessary to make it sensitive to the UV if that's useful. It's got to have a survival benefit, right? Like, wings would be awesome. We don't have wings. Why? Because it costs a lot to make wings and to make the rest of your body light enough to fly. So that's why like, not every single critter out there has wings. So it's got to be useful in your context for your survival.

• 17:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  And there needs to be an evolutionary path to get there. Maybe we don't really have an evolutionary path to get to wings at this point. But anyway, yes, no wings, which is another bummer.

• 17:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm definitely never going to be light enough to have wings that

• 17:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no.

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not in my future either.

• 17:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, me either.

• 17:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, we have conquered this a little bit with technology, right? We have eyeballs which only see a certain wavelength, but we have telescopes which can see in other wavelengths. Like the James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared telescope because astronomers recognize that the universe looks very different in the infrared than it does in the visible. You know, for example, in the infrared, glass is opaque. Glass which light can fly through in the visible spectrum is opaque in the infrared. So if you like, try to look out a window in the infrared, infrared light does not pass through glass. And so if you take a picture of the universe in the infrared, you see different stuff out there in the universe. Like infrared light can pass through different stuff than visible light.

• 18:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you want to see through gas and dust, you look through an infrared telescope, you get a different picture of the universe. We also have X-ray telescopes.

• 18:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you look through an infrared telescope and then you need some sort of technology to translate that into something our brains can perceive, right? So one of the things that frustrates me about thinking about wavelengths I can't see is that I can't even really imagine what other colors would look like because I, yeah, I just, I don't even, wouldn't even know where to start.

• 18:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so how well do we understand what we see in the infrared since it needs to be translated into something we can see?

• 18:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think this is something people don't widely understand. When you get one of those beautiful images of the James Webb Space Telescope, it's showing it to you in the visible. If you put your eyeball where the telescope was, you would not see the same thing, right? You would see whatever visible light is going through the universe at that moment. But the picture from the James Webb is of the infrared and your eyeballs would totally ignore that. And so if there was, for example, no visible light there, you would just see black. You wouldn't see anything. And so if they wanted to be as accurate as possible and they took the image from James Webb and they made a picture on your screen which emitted photons of the same wavelength that were absorbed, you wouldn't see it either. It would just look black. So in order for you to see it, you're right, they shift those wavelengths up into the visible. So again, that's not how the universe looks.

• 19:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And so I think what you're suggesting is to really experience it, you'd need an eyeball which could receive the original. Photons and then your brain would have to have some kind of new response, some sort of like deepest, darkest red or some new colors out there. Yeah, exactly. And so you can't really experience what the universe looks like in infrared. You need to shift it into the visible and sort of mentally keep track of the fact, oh, this is actually infrared light and I'm seeing it translated. And that's important because if we have to translate it back into the visible, it means that we're translating it back into something we find intuitive. It tells you something about how we experience, interpret and understand the universe. So we're always translating everything we experience back into our intuition, which is partially determined by our native senses.

• 20:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the bigger project of like trying to unravel the mystery of the universe is a project of transforming the weird universe that's out there that doesn't always align with our experience of it into something we can intuitively understand, into something we can imagine seeing directly with our senses. But that's not something we physically can do.

• 20:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we've talked about things that we can see. Next, let's talk about some things that we can't perceive and let's do that after the break.

• 20:48Speaker 01

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• 22:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  All 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 bit bummed out by having Daniel tell us about all the things that we can't perceive.

• 22:12Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 22:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 22:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Like a trillion. It's a huge number, right? And we are pretty far away from the sun. And 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, now try 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.

• 23:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And all of them come from the sun?

• 23:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Not all of them come from the sun. There 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 then they've instrumented the ice in a cubic mile.

• 23:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 23:34Daniel Whiteson?

  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 Terenkov detector to see muons moving faster than. The speed of light in ice, it's really incredible. And you see those muons that are created by cosmic neutrinos. So anyway, neutrinos are out there. They're not rare, right? They're weird, but they're everywhere. But we can't sense them. No part of our body interacts with them very well. A neutrino only feels the weak interaction. It doesn't feel the electromagnetic because it has no charge. 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.

• 24:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you built like a wall made of lead, you'd have to make it a light year thick, a light year thick before a neutrino would have a 50% chance of interacting with some part of that lead. So that's how little we can interact with 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.

• 24:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you were talking about the Tarankov 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. We only know they're there based on the things that they create. Is that right?

• 25:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Occasionally, once in a zillion times, a neutrino will interact with a piece of ice and create a muon, which we can see. And the presence of the muon tells us the 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.

• 25:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. It's amazing we we know anything about them at all.

• 25:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And this is something we've discovered only in the last few decades. And we have built neutrino eyeballs that can see neutrinos, right? That like tap into this enormous river of information that's happening right on top of us. Neutrino is one of the most common particles in the universe, really everywhere. We like live in a neutrino ocean, a neutrino river. And we've built these incredible detectors that are capable of very occasionally. Forcing a neutrino to reveal itself. And with that, you can look out into the universe and you can see super cool stuff. Like, for example, you can see the sun in the middle of the night. Because to neutrinos, the earth is transparent. It's like, just barely there, man. So you have a neutrino detector.

• 26:16Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 26:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 26:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Of the sun in neutrinos. It's super awesome. You should Google it.

• 26:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so they took a picture of the sun through the earth. But we don't have detectors. So were they, were they looking for muon things in the?

• 26:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. They were looking for upward going muons. Muons from neutrinos that have passed through the earth.

• 26:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 26:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can tell even at night that there's a bright source of neutrinos.

• 26:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 26:55Daniel Whiteson?

  On the other side of the earth. You can tell where the sun is using only neutrinos, which is pretty cool.

• 27:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is wild.

• 27:01Daniel Whiteson?

  But the sense that it gives you is that, wow, there's a lot going on. Right? You sit in your room and you watch TV. You have no idea that there's like gazillions of neutrinos flying in the air between you and the TV everywhere. Right? Flying right through you. There's a lot going on in the universe that we are not sensing.

• 27:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I guess it doesn't surprise me that much that we don't have sensors for neutrinos. Cause they're mostly not interacting with things. They're not hurting us. They're not really doing anything that's important for our survival. They're just kind of there. Is that fair?

• 27:30Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. I think there are 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? Plants wouldn't be limited to growing only during the day. If they could develop some sort of neutrino synthesis. The other obstacle is like, well, is that technically possible? And the problem there is neutrinos hardly interact. And there's no way we know to have any sort of reasonable interaction rate.

• 28:13Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 28:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we can't see neutrinos? That's a bummer. What else can we not see? That's apparently maybe everywhere.

• 28:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, neutrinos turn out to actually just be a clue that there's a lot in the universe that we can't see. And famously, on this podcast, we talked about dark matter. Right? Most of the mass of the universe is not the kind of matter we have any interaction with. Like even the weak interaction that we use to detect neutrinos is not something dark matter is capable of. And most of the matter in the universe, 80% of the mass in the universe is dark matter. So we can interact with a little slice of a little slice of the universe. Most of the stuff that's out there that's shaped the structure of galaxies, right, that is the reason why there's stuff here and not out there, that's holding the galaxy together. We have a lot of gravitational evidence for. We have no other way to interact with it,

• 29:16Daniel Whiteson?

  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. It's sort of like, not like a parallel reality because it's part of ours, but it's a part of reality that we cannot access. It's like being deaf or something, right? Think about what a deaf person is like. There's lots of noise going on around them. They can't sense it. And I don't know what it's like to be deaf, but I imagine if you've been deaf since birth, you might not even be able to conceive of what it's like to hear.

• 30:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Apply that and extrapolate to dark matter. Like, there's a lot going on around us. Neutrinos and dark matter, all this kind of stuff that we do not know how to sense. We don't know what's going on, which is totally clueless. And we can't even really imagine what it would be like to know that it's there.

• 30:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like that's a very humbling fact.

• 30:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  How does it make you feel, Daniel? I'm putting on my psychiatrist hat.

• 30:25Daniel Whiteson?

  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've 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. I think it would be incredible to meet aliens and to understand how they see the universe

• 31:07Daniel Whiteson?

  and how that affects their ability to unravel the mysteries of it, right?

• 31:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 31:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, if you could see dark matter, then you'd be like the most awesome physicist. And physicists have a huge evolutionary advantage, because being a cool physicist makes everybody want to have your babies. And so, I don't know, it just seems kind of obvious, Kelly.

• 31:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 31:48Daniel Whiteson?

  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 we, that's just a mystery, you know, it doesn't cause weather, it doesn't, you know, change the growing season, it doesn't like attract leopards to us or protect us from hyenas or something. It is mostly irrelevant. We live in a little corner of the sort of percepto-verse, 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

• 32:33Daniel Whiteson?

  outside of the part of the universe. You directly sense that you need to think about these other parts of the universe. But you know, aliens may have grown up in a different part of the perceptiverse. They may interact with it differently. They may have different needs. You know, I think the question you're asking is also like, how likely is it that aliens grow up in an environment where they need other senses than the ones that we have, right?

• 32:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or in particular, where they need senses that pick up on neutrinos and dark matter, but yes.

• 33:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's a great question, but to answer that, I think we again need to look at the experience here on Earth. Because even here on Earth, we see a very broad variety of the kind of senses. There are animals out there that have senses that we don't have, right? And so even though we all share this common environment on Earth, there is, I think, a broader sense of animal sensation than most people understand.

• 33:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive into those animal senses because this is the, you know, like biology part that I'm super excited about. Although everything we've said so far about physics has been fascinating, but biology, let's get into it.

• 33:33Daniel Whiteson?

  For people who want to understand aliens, of course, it feels a little boring to like turn around and say like, let's talk about animals on Earth.

• 33:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 33:40Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, the argument is that if there are things that evolved many times on Earth, then that's a clue, right? It's a clue that maybe this is something that's very common, it's easy to evolve and therefore more likely to evolve out there in the rest of the galaxy. And if there's something that took a long time to evolve or 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.

• 34:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  If I could just push back for a second, like if something evolves once instead of evolving multiple times, instead of that meaning that it's not important, to me, that could mean that it's supremely important. Like it popped up once and then nothing ever lost it because you can't survive if you lose it or something like that in a world where it's important. And so I could see many times it evolving or it only evolving once and everything keeping it. Either one of those arguing that it's important personally.

• 34:42Daniel Whiteson?

  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's 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.

• 35:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yep.

• 35:04Daniel Whiteson?

  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. Right? There was billions of years of life on Earth without basically ears.

• 35:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  What was there not? Was there less to hear? Like, was it just bacteria moving around quietly, tiptoeing their way through the earth?

• 35:32Daniel Whiteson?

  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. So life went from single to multicellular many times, actually, in the evolution of life on Earth, which is in itself super fascinating and we should dig into on another episode.

• 35:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Daniel Whiteson?

  But around 500 or 600 million years ago, life got big and noisy. And like, Aric 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 if somebody's sneaking up on you. And like, is my lunch moving around in the bushes? And so basically, as soon as life got big and noisy, hearing evolved. And so that's suggestive, right? That it's not too complicated. As soon as it was useful, boom, hearing evolved.

• 36:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it sounds like it evolved quickly, once it became possible. Do we know how many times hearing evolved?

• 36:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It's something people are working on still. There's a bunch of fascinating clues, because there are different pieces of hearing that all have to come together. Like, on one hand, there are lots of different kinds of ears, right? Like, our ears and dogs' ears and insect ears, they all look really different. And it might give you the sense Like hmm, maybe they all work really differently and they all evolved independently. But if you dig into it, underneath it, there's only really two sort of fundamental mechanisms for interacting with sound, even if your ears are very different shapes. And there's the vertebrate and the invertebrate. So vertebrates basically vertebrates like us have these systems of hairs like we have in our ears. They respond to frequencies based on the length and the thickness of the hair,

• 37:20Daniel Whiteson?

  essentially the string tension of the hair, sort of like an equalizer on your stereo. Right. The hairs like shake when the right frequency comes along and it lets you like basically decompose sound into frequencies, super amazing biological technology. That's one mechanism, but invertebrates, insects, et cetera, have a completely different mechanism. 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 Giorgiani, 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,

• 38:04Daniel Whiteson?

  which gave us the ability to be sensitive to sound. And the rest of it is just sort of like frosting on the cake. But you know, this is all very fresh research. We don't really know the answer. It's super fascinating to me that to dig into the history of this and wonder like, how many different ways of hearing evolved and then died out, right? Maybe those things were outcompeted. It's amazing.

• 38:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  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, uh, 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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• 40:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I've already complained that like birds and insects can see a greater range of wavelengths than I can, or at least can see some wavelengths that I can't. What other things can animals on this planet that I share with them? What can they do that I can't? Or what can they do better?

• 40:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, on the topic of things that birds can see that you can't, have you heard the story of the ultraviolet tits?

• 40:35Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 41:04Daniel Whiteson?

  The ultraviolet tits are a species of bird that look just sort of generic. They're one of these LBJs, as the birders call them, you know, little brown jobs. But what they discovered is that though these birds don't look very spectacular in the visible in the ultraviolet, they are absolutely fabulous.

• 41:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 41:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And they discovered this using Vaseline. And so they put Vaseline on some of these birds because Vaseline is opaque to ultraviolet. You can see through it in the visible, but it blocks the ultraviolet. And so birds that used to be like sexually very popular, when you put Vaseline on them, no longer were the ladies interested. And then if you take pictures of them in the ultraviolet, you can see all these colors and patterns are just not visible to us without ultraviolet eyes. So yes, Kelly, you're missing out on the ultraviolet tits because of your limited eyeballs and mine.

• 41:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 42:00Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, there's some things that I think are very well known, like bats and dolphins, for example, use echolocation to understand what's out there in the universe. Dogs have a much richer sense of smell in the universe. You know, akin to like seeing other frequencies of light, dogs can pick up on so many tiny microscopic amounts of things. And, you know, what it's like to be a dog to experience the universe primarily through smell and with poor vision, I can't even imagine. Those are fairly well known, but I think more fascinating are the things that are less familiar, which are directly sensing fields, right? And one of the listeners commented like, wouldn't it be amazing to be able to sense fields directly, magnetic fields, electric fields? And, you know, there's fascinating research about how birds migrate across the world

• 42:44Daniel Whiteson?

  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 you commented that there's actually another theory, or that's no longer the number one theory of how birds sense magnetic fields.

• 43:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I say lots of smart things. That might be a smart thing I said, but I don't remember. I do remember we were talking about humpback whales and whether or not they sense magnetic fields. And the current understanding was if so, we have no idea how they do it.

• 43:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I don't know where we are with birds right now.

• 43:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But we do know that lots of fish can sense or even generate electric fields directly. Right? They have these organs in their body that can create like electric pulses like you're all familiar with electric eels, right? They just generate like a bolt of electricity. Well, in some cases, it's very useful to be able to sense electric fields left by other organisms. Like our bodies all have electric fields because our neurons work on electric currents. And so I'm generating an electric field right now. And if I could directly sense electric fields, I could like tell through a wall whether somebody was at my door or stuff like that. There's all sorts of ways you can interact with the universe and fish do this. It's not like a hypothetical. This is something that's out there in the universe, available for bodies

• 44:11Daniel Whiteson?

  to interact with. And you don't have to go to some alien planet to find an example of it. Like you just have to look underwater.

• 44:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So as far as I know, electric fields like this are only sensed by fish and fish are aquatic. Is there something about being an aquatic organism that makes picking up on electric fields easier or more useful?

• 44:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it's actually more difficult because water is a conductor. So for example, electromagnetic signals propagate more easily through air. But I think it depends also a lot on the frequency, right? Because obviously like photons move through water and they're electromagnetic fields. So must depend a lot on the frequency. Yeah, it's a good question.

• 44:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, apparently platypus and dolphins can also, but they're aquatic organisms. And so anyway, so interesting. What a counterintuitive world we live in.

• 44:59Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 45:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. The question that keeps Daniel up at night. All right. And so what are some options for how aliens might perceive the universe different than we do?

• 45:41Daniel Whiteson?

  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 neutrino, you'd need like an eyeball the size of the earth. And it seems pretty unlikely to me that you're gonna generate that massive an organ for very little payoff. So I think that would be very expensive. But you know, there is another option out there that I'm kind of surprised we don't have. And so aliens might develop it, which essentially is telepathy. You know, we were talking about how our bodies work on electric fields. Well, your brain is electromagnetic, right? There's currents in your brain. And the way it operates is through electromagnetism. And electromagnetism can be transmitted through the air. And it

• 46:24Daniel Whiteson?

  can be received through the air, right? That's how radios work. So it's not inconceivable that in your brain, you could develop basically an antenna, which can generate electromagnetic pulses, not too far afield from what fish and eels can do, and could receive electromagnetic pulses, right? And if you could do this, then I could send you a message, brain to brain, without going through sound, or without like, using some hand gesture, basically telepathy. And so there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to communicate, brain to brain. I don't know why we have it. It seems pretty awesome. Or maybe you'd be terrible.

• 46:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  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, could share all of our thoughts together. I find that horrifying. I think that I get through my life much better, because most of my thoughts don't get shared, and only the nice ones get shared?

• 47:29Daniel Whiteson?

  I think social media has taught us that knowing what 15 year olds think is usually a bad idea. Yeah.

• 47:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. But, but I wonder, so you know, that, these brain-computer interfaces, I think, would include a step where there's a lot of processing of the electromagnetic information, before it goes from one brain to another. Do you think, I mean, so there's so many signals that would need to get, that get like aggregated to give us a memory or a thought. Could you really transmit that information from one brain to another, just with like the mess of electromagnetic information that comes out of our brain? Cause 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.

• 48:10Daniel Whiteson?

  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 this process there. I 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 and you could start with pings, you know, Morse code, something very simple. It doesn't have to be like full direct access to my brain. It's just a way for me to communicate with you without going through sound. So like astronauts, right? Could just like talk to each other without needing radios, essentially.

• 48:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Basically biological radios and it's not impossible. I don't know why we don't have it. It seems like as we evolve, it could have been useful, but I guess not. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but it also doesn't seem to me to be impossible to imagine that aliens could have this kind of biological apparatus. Maybe they find it useful to stay closer together or to communicate in situations where voice or smell or sight is not helpful.

• 49:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. I'll be like, oh, sorry, sorry.

• 49:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Brain casting where you can't unsubscribe.

• 49:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 49:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And so that's just an example and that's, you know, just out of our imagination. But I think there's lots of situations out there evolutionarily that could create some need for something we can't yet possibly imagine. So I think there's lots of possible senses out there and some of them that could be available if aliens have a very different environment than ours. Like in our environment where we're pretty big and we're pretty slow. We're not sensitive to things like relativity. So we didn't need to be able to see directly the curvature of space and time. And we're not sensitive to quantum mechanics, which is why it took us so long to discover quantum mechanics. But now imagine super tiny aliens, like microscopic aliens. And I don't know how you evolve if you're

• 50:19Daniel Whiteson?

  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. And so then you just have to imagine like very different environments, different from ours. You know, vast aliens who are made of dark matter and are as big as solar systems. Why not? Aliens whose life works on very, very long time scales instead of short like

• 50:59Daniel Whiteson?

  ours, you know, where the solar system looks chaotic instead of, you know, slow and stately the way it does on our time scales. It's so hard to imagine these things because we're in our little human box.

• 51:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you said earlier that you'd like to be able to perceive objects in superposition, would you give up any of your current senses to be able to see that? If so, which one?

• 51:21Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 51:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because thought experiments are meant to be tough.

• 51:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess.

• 51:40Daniel Whiteson?

  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. Of course, sound doesn't propagate through space. Colliding black holes do not chirp as they eat each other. But that's how we can make sense of it, right? And the lesson there is the kind of senses that we have determine the model of the universe we build in our brain. They determine like what's intuitive for us.

• 52:25Daniel Whiteson?

  As we've been talking on the podcast a lot recently, what kind of answers we accept. You know, if you ask me a question about the universe and I explain it to you in ways that are intuitive, you're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. This planet goes around that planet. I can imagine it and it clicks together in my mind. Well, the kind of explanations that you accept depend on the kind of ways you experience the universe, because that determines the language of your intuition. And so if you are a quantum alien or a dark matter being, or you can see neutrinos, or you can hear other people's thoughts in your mind, you could have a very different way to experience the universe, which affects the questions. But then also fundamentally, it can affect the answers that you accept and the way you think about the universe. And therefore, the kind of theories you build about the universe.

• 53:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if you've listened to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe for 30 seconds ever, you know that Daniel loves aliens. And he did an incredible amount of work for Do Aliens Speak Physics? And he interviewed a ton of different specialists. And of course, the chapter where he talked to the biologist is the best chapter in a fantastic book. Although I gotta say that chapter on how hard it has been to translate other languages was also particularly 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.

• 53:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's lots of really fun drawings in there by my friend Andy Warner. He did an incredible job of imagining what these aliens might look like.

• 53:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super fun.

• 53:58Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 54:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  See you next time.

• 54:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 54:26Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 54:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 54:39Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 54:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 54:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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  drive a spacious Grand Highlander, or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at trade-in. Get a great deal today, and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places. This is Danielle Fishel from Pod Meets World. Every purchase is a financial decision, so it's worth asking, what am I getting out of this? If you're using the Chase Freedom Freedom Flex Card, you can maximize your cash back on things you need. Groceries and gas, cash back. Dinner, cash back on that, too. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. Sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply. Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series, on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.