Latest / Art of the Question / How Realistic is Project Hail Mary? - Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen - #12
Transcript
- speaker-0: I think you have ⁓ such an interesting field of work and I'm very curious to hear ⁓ when did you first get interested in linguistics and why? speaker-1: Well, okay. So it was a love story, kind of. So I was in the Peace Corps, not sure quite what my plan was going to be. And I was so amazed. I just fell in love with my language teachers. They were so incredibly smart. They were, you know, they're working to teach this rabble, a rabble of Americans who, you know, didn't have much language experience and they were going to teach us all Spanish. ⁓ And I found that they were just kind of almost psychic and super empathic. And so I would be struggling, struggling, struggling to say something. And then they would give me just one word or one little grammar point and would unlock this whole amazing torrent of things that I could suddenly say to people around me. And I thought, damn, I want to be magic like that. I want to, I want to do that. And so I thought maybe I'd become an English as a second language teacher so I could meet people from all over the world and be cool like that. and so I went to grad school for that and discovered that, ⁓ yes, I could do that, but then there was also a science behind it and I could, I could engage the science part of my brain, which I, which I always wanted to do. And so that's, was the marriage of this magic language teaching, deeply intuitive personal thing, ⁓ that I learned from my language teachers, my Spanish teachers, and then just. hey, but we can also do a science at the same time. And so it was, I was, I was all in from there. speaker-0: That's awesome. Which languages do you speak? Do you also speak Spanish? speaker-1: I speak Spanish and then like a good linguist, I dabble. ⁓ I used to speak decent Japanese. When we went to China, I was mostly speaking to children. My Chinese, when it was good, were things like, come here, sweetie, I love you and mommy wants to give you a cookie, which did not fly with my grown ass Chinese grad students when I got back to the United States. I couldn't say, excuse me, your homework is due now. could say things like, Can you give that to mommy? Thank you! Context is everything. speaker-0: that's, that's cool. And what about Xenolinguistics? When, when did that enter into the picture? Because that's something entirely different. speaker-1: Kind of yes, kind of no. I looking at a discipline from a different angle is a good way to reveal its strengths and its weaknesses and kind of why you like it in the first place. ⁓ I always intended to be, to do, ⁓ kitty. Sorry. Also, my ⁓ screen reader just started talking, I'm sorry. ⁓ I was trying before we started to get that rooted into headphones, but I failed, so. speaker-0: No worries. speaker-1: If it starts talking again, I just smash my finger on this control. speaker-0: It's totally funny speaker-1: Xenolinguistics, ⁓ it was my original intention to do astronomy and physics. ⁓ And I love science fiction, of course. Of course I do. ⁓ And so when I discovered, after I got tenure and I was sort of settled in at Bowling Green State, when I discovered that there was this thing you could do where you could do space and you could do linguistics at the same time, there was nothing I could do. I was all in. And so I thought I would do some things with message construction because they let me. Like no one was there going, no, you can't do that. And the part of it, think the allure beyond getting to do science fiction and science and linguistics all at the same time was just that the people were so nice. know, it's a lovely welcoming, friendly ⁓ field of deeply geeky people. who want to make a difference in the world and do cool things. speaker-0: That's awesome. yeah, given the fact that we've never encountered an alien species, let alone an intelligent one, ⁓ Xenolistics is an interesting field of science. Why do you think it's still so important? speaker-1: Well, here's the thing. You have to do, you can't start zeno linguistics after you get first contact. You can't go, ⁓ my God, they're trying to talk to us and they're aliens. What, what even, how, what? You can't start there. You have to start ⁓ a long time before that. It's like you're going to get, like you want to have a pony and you're like, ⁓ I'll just prepare for the pony when I get the pony. You've got to, if you're going to have a pony, you've got to lay some groundwork, right? You've got to. you know, buy some hay and find a place to put it. ⁓ So the same thing is true with first contact. If you want to do first contact effectively, you've got to lay some groundwork beforehand ⁓ so that you have some idea at least where to start. So ⁓ the best time to start a really carefully articulated, ⁓ wide reaching, xenolinguistic science is way before you have a first contact so that ⁓ you have some strategies in place and so you know kind of what your philosophy might be and you pin down what your assumptions are and you begin to question those assumptions. you've got to, I mean, we might even be late in starting zentral linguistics depending on when first contact comes. speaker-0: Well, do you think there is extraterrestrial life out there? speaker-1: Yes. mean, I can think anything I want to do. is or isn't, right? But the universe is very, very, very, very, very, very big. And as far as we can tell, life is very pervade, very strong and stubborn and ingenious. So A, it's a more fun bet. And B, I just really think that it would be quite Astonishing if there weren't other intelligences or at least, now I'm going to go with other intelligences. If there weren't other intelligences out there, I'd be sort of disappointed. And I really think there probably are. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, both are pretty scary, right? If we it's the classic like being alone in the universe is terrifying. But potentially, yeah, the fact that there's potentially other life out there as well is perhaps as terrifying. But I would hope so. I would hope so for sure. I've been, yeah, very interested, even even if it would be something I wouldn't call it small that's for sure but even if it's like Mike microbe small in the literal sense microbial life like they're currently investigating on on Mars. ⁓ That's yeah even that would be would be truly truly astonishing ⁓ before. speaker-1: I don't think it would, it would be astonishing. It would be earth shaking. I would freak out. But I I agree with Jill Tarter, who said that it would be just profoundly comforting to find that somebody else made it. When you think of the freaking mess we are making of our planet and how unkind we are to each other and how I just feel like, I don't know if we're going to survive this or not. really don't. But to have some other intelligence out there that has made it through what we're making it through. It's like we are the teenager bent on self-destruction, but we've got a lot of promise, but are we going to make it through or not? I mean, you remember how you felt when you were 14, right? That's kind of where we're at. To know that somebody else made it and we can make it too, that would just be such an incredible, hopeful thing to me. speaker-0: Yeah, no, me too, for sure. And before we get into ⁓ the details of Xenolinguistics, if we just talk about regular language, English, for example, do you think that the way we formed language, formed English in this case, ⁓ was influenced by the way we literally see the world? Do you think that Um, um, that because, um, um, most people view the world that we see the world that that shapes our language. speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Our sensory inputs. I mean, you could even, there's all kinds of ways of delving into this question, but the most obvious way is look at our language. And if you notice the verb I used there was, look, we use verbs of perception and verbs of visual perception are very prevalent in English to mean, find out or understand. We say, I'm going to go see if that's true or I'll... I'll look that up or ⁓ let's look at that for a minute, meaning let's think about it. ⁓ even, ⁓ those sensory inputs shape our vocabulary. It's a little more of a difficult quest to find out if they shape syntax. ⁓ But we know that they to some extent shape cognition, right? So, I what else have we got? All we have is our sensory input. We are just brains in little dark silent skulls, right? That our brain just is, it's just a blob of goo, right? And luckily it's got these marvelous sensory inputs. We've got touch, we've got all the senses that we have. And so of course those affect everything we do. ⁓ So yeah, I think the short answer to question is ⁓ for good or ill, absolutely our gathering of senses has a profound impact on how we are as beings and how we think of everything and our language is part of that. speaker-0: Yeah, but doesn't that also introduce a certain bias when trying to communicate with extraterrestrial life, for example? speaker-1: It can, it's a bias when we talk to one another, right? So ⁓ everything we do, if we have a, so there's two parts here. Everyone has their set of senses and everyone has the cultural background that is built up because of that set of senses. So I, a fully blind person, don't have a lot of trouble conversing with other humans because I share a cultural context, right? And I share almost everything except, except light perception, right? ⁓ Which is not a barrier given that we share all this cultural context. I grew up in a world where everyone else, most people around me are sighted people. ⁓ so my ability to speak and interact and make deep relationships and bond and form trust and all that kind of thing and understand and do science in this context is unimpaired by the fact that I can't see. There's other barriers, but they're not cognitive, So, ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Everything we are affects everything we do. speaker-0: Yeah. And how this is interesting to me because again, before we start looking at, at aliens, how would we go about even, let's say I put an American person in a room and a Chinese person in a room and both of them are not allowed to use pen and paper. They are just only allowed to, to use their voice. For example. ⁓ and let's just say there are also aren't allowed to, to look at each other. They're only maybe they're having a phone call or something. they're, they're only way of communicating is auditory. it even possible for those two people to, come to an agreement or, to translate one's language or, or is that impossible in that, in that case? speaker-1: That's tricky, but I think we could do it. So if you just put two people with different languages and forbid them to, you know, switch languages, that's doable. People have done that for centuries, Millennia. Learn each other's language from zero. Babies do it, right? You put a baby in a room, like a little tiny baby, put a baby in a room with a stinking human and they get the language. So that's true. But if you start limiting the shared context, because the shared context is everything. Right. And if we, if we share a context, then we can do all kinds of things. So if all we have is voice communication, at least we have a shared temporal context. Like I could maybe, we could maybe start with if, if, if we also share the context that we're trying to communicate. That's important. Right. We both have to agree. Okay. Okay. Heads up. The game that we're playing right now is the communication game. The game they're playing is we're going to teach each other our language. We're going to learn to communicate. ⁓ That's a really important piece of the puzzle. Like if I think I'm trying to teach you language and you think that, you know, I'm not, we're not going to hardly get anywhere. Or if I think we're having a nice phone call and your bedroom is on fire, you know, we're just, that's not shared context, right? ⁓ so I think we could, you know, we could start with numbers. could start with, we can start beeping at each other. We could do words for loud and soft. ⁓ it would be, it would be difficult. I think if all we had was sound communication, ⁓ but I mean, how much time do I have? If I have a lot of time, we can do it. speaker-0: Yeah. And it's interesting what you mentioned there about the context. think it would make a huge difference if you were to instruct both of these people, like, Hey, at the other end of the line is an American man and he's going to try and teach you some, English. even though, this message is, is told to, him in Chinese, ⁓ that both people go in knowing that they'll have to. and try to understand each other. Whereas as you said, if one of them just randomly picks up the phone while his house is on fire, yeah, that won't really ⁓ be a constructive conversation as well. speaker-1: But it also really matters that we don't have contradictory context, right? So if you have a first contact situation and you've got all your sensory apparatus at hand and you're in kind of a neutral place, but you are like an eight foot long centipede with goo dripping out of your mandibles and I'm just a human. Even though we share context, the human is going to be, I'm going to be freaking out because I'm in front of this giant bug. And the bug is going to be like, Ooh, how do I communicate with this nice, interesting new creature? Hello, let's do it. ⁓ So we need to agree on what our context is and it has to be kind of ish the same. speaker-0: Right. So let's say tomorrow, ⁓ an alien ship lands on, on earth and, ⁓ outcome, the aliens, seem pretty friendly and, ⁓ they don't speak English, ⁓ but they do have their own form of communicating. ⁓ is there a playbook? How would we as humans go about this situation? Is there a starting point? And, and did we, ⁓ yeah. come up with something or what happens? speaker-1: That's a really good question. mean, you're assuming that like we clear away the armed dudes and the political, all that, right? We're assuming that I really do get a chance to do what I want to do, right? Like, no. speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah. You get to do whatever you need to do. speaker-1: I mean, that's part of it, right? I mean, we want to, we want to purify our sample and just say, what would we do in an ideal situation? But would we ever have an ideal situation? I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to chase, beat that point into the ground, but, ⁓ but there's a lot that goes into awe. representatives of larger groups of people trying to talk to one another. Right. ⁓ so anyway, so pretend that maybe everyone else is asleep and it's just, you know, a couple of zental linguists and we get to do the thing. So, ⁓ the first thing to do is, is nothing, right? The first thing to do is question all your assumptions. So my instinct is to, ⁓ to. try and greet them. But greeting is a very human thing to do. ⁓ It is extraordinarily rude of me to go up to someone and just start talking to them about business. even in like a trivial interaction, like someone trying to, I go up to someone at a store to buy something, they say, hello. I say, hello. If they don't do that, I'm like, jeez. ⁓ speaker-0: What? speaker-1: So my instinct is to greet or my instinct is to, is to start with some kind of my emotional reaction, trying to manufacture a sense of welcome, right? ⁓ is that a good idea? I don't know. don't know. Like conveying emotions is tricky as heck. Right. I can't even do that to my cat. I can't even necessarily adequately all the time, you know, understand what my cat is feeling or have her understand what I'm feeling. So trying to start with an emotional, we come in peace. That's a big concept. It's way more complicated than six, which is a thing we could maybe start with. Right. So we could, it is, it does make sense to me, ⁓ to start the communication with, ⁓ numbers. I think that, I think that's reasonable. mean, the temp, another temptation is to start. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: indicating objects and get names for objects. And with another human, that's what I would do, right? That'd be a good place to start. But do they understand pointing? Okay, fine. Maybe not. Maybe we don't want to point at things. Maybe we want to touch things. So maybe I want to give them the word for a ramp. They're walking down the ramp. I thought, okay, we're both on this ramp coming down from the spaceship. I'll give them the word for ramp. So I can point at the ramp and give a word. And we have the classic Gavagai problem, which is What do I mean by the thing I said? Do I mean, this is the shape of my, I'm showing you the shape of my hand and that's the word for that. Do we mean our feet? Do we mean gravity? Do we mean, uh, there's something dangerous down there and we should all jump in the air? Like the, the, the idea of putting a word to a concept, uh, speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: is really tricky because we have to first agree on what concept it is and it would be nice if I had words to tell you what concept to go for. speaker-0: Right. So it's chicken and egg problem. speaker-1: Right. mean, and the magic is it happens with baby humans, but it also happens. You also have these situations where little kids misunderstand words in big ways, even though we share all the context in the world. So my eldest child, when they were a weensie little adorable thing. ⁓ speaker-0: Mm. speaker-1: in a sobbing voice and that meant to them, they understood that almost meant no, you can't do it. And so if I was trying to get them to take a bath and they were mad about that, they would yell almost, almost, It took me a minute to figure it out. But I mean, that's a communication between the same species. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: And there are thousands of examples like that. speaker-0: Yeah, but you mentioned numbers there. that because mathematics is supposedly universal? is that something that in order for an alien civilization to build a spaceship and travel through space and safely land on earth, they must understand mathematics somehow, because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to make the necessary calculations in order to safely reach her. speaker-1: That's the story. That's the story we tell. But every time we tell a story, we pack it with assumptions, right? So is it polite to talk about numbers? You know how it's impolite to talk about money? speaker-0: Yep. speaker-1: It's in play, right? So to me, numbers are a nicely abstract, useful thing. And counting doesn't mean anything dangerous. And I'm allowed to do it. It's not dirty. It's not forbidden. And it's not sacred either. It's just numbers. Is that true for everybody? I mean, I think it's a good thing to try. I'm willing to put that at the top of my stack of things to go to, but I'm also willing to admit that my stack could be absolutely completely wrong in a thousand ways, in ways that I haven't even thought of. speaker-0: So numbers is a starting point, but would we show the number as how we depict it? But that again, assumes visual context, or maybe they can feel it. If we have the, the Braille representation of certain numbers, or maybe we, again, it would, would need vision, but have amounts of objects like What about numbers? How would we proceed from just numbers? speaker-1: Well, you know, the visual or tactile, the writing down of language is always secondary to the actual language. I mean, they did that in Arrival because no one was going to be able to make those sounds, right? So that's part of it. ⁓ We have to figure out what medium we're using. So are we both using spoken language or, and are we both using spoken language in the same speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: frequency range that we can hear. There was that, ⁓ what was the name of the author? can't remember, but the Little Fuzzies. It was a fun old, old, old, like 1950s, maybe 1960s science fiction book about this planet where there was these creatures that everyone thought were just in the way and kind of not very smart. And it turned out they had this really complicated language, but it was ultrasonic. speaker-0: Mmm. speaker-1: So we have to figure out, we using the right medium? Can we agree on that? If not, that's gonna be a problem. ⁓ We have to agree on, we have to make sure that we share the same kind of time sense so that, you know, one word to me is not very long, but do I share that with other people? There'll be other species. So there's a lot to... ⁓ There's a lot to unpack before we can know that we're exchanging quote a word. My instinct would be to try, ⁓ would be to try my most natural way of doing things and hope that that works. Cause wouldn't that be nice? That would work. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: So my instinct would be because it's a change that I can make, can present two objects and say two, and then I can add one and say three, and I can add one and say four. It's that cognitively we're drawn to difference. So if I'm changing the number of objects and then changing what I say, that might be helpful. That might work. Maybe not. There's never a happy guarantee, right? We've never done this before. speaker-0: No, no. And that's what makes it so interesting. You mentioned Arrival there. It's one of my favorite movies. ⁓ Do you think it's ⁓ the way communication is represented in that movie? The communication part, not the time travel part. ⁓ Is that something that is realistic, ⁓ the approach? speaker-1: think so, but then I have to say that what do I know about realistic? speaker-0: True. speaker-1: I mean, think, I think it's tiresome. ⁓ it's tiresome to do, but every time I say something like, yeah, I think so. Then the other part of me has to say, yeah, but you could be wrong. And not because I'm just not because I just want to cast doubt on things, but because the cognitive flexibility to go, Hey, that thing, that thing that I assumed three years ago when we were talking, ⁓ shoot, that was wrong. I got a. I got to undo that. That's not right. The reason that we're not understanding one another now is that, you know, I made this assumption earlier. And so I've just got to be ready to figure out what all my assumptions are and put them all on my cognitive table and be ready to push them off when they're, if they're bad. speaker-0: Right. But let me maybe, maybe if I go more, more to the, to the basis, do you think that language forming language as a means of communication is inevitable when intelligent species emerge? So can a species be really intelligent if it doesn't have a language? speaker-1: Wait, those are two different questions. Because I think you can be intelligent without language. speaker-0: Okay, well... speaker-1: we have layers of intelligences in like the prime other primates, right? And they have intelligence and sentience and they know that they they know they have a theory of mind some of them, right? They know they're there. But ⁓ if you mean technology that's not instinctive, like we're not talking about cockroaches building whatever cockroaches building, I don't know what they built. ⁓ ⁓ Then you have the need, if you have the need for separate intelligent creatures to cooperate in complex ways, then it seems to me, evolutionarily, that language is a good way to make that happen. ⁓ More than, I don't understand the physics of how you'd have a shared mind across, I mean, maybe you can, right? But maybe. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: It seems to me that language is an easier solution and language, language is kind of a simple way to achieve mind to mind transfer of info. It seems elegant to me. Like I can say duck to you and you'd be like, yeah, duck. Yeah. we know that we, because we share the language, right? I don't have to like, I want to figure out your conception of duck or what your experiences with ducks have been. I can just say duck at you. speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: a reasonable enough thing comes to your head that's reasonably similar to my thing so that we can proceed. speaker-0: Exactly. So that's exactly what I, what I mean or, or I'm thinking about is in order for a species to let's say, travel through space or at least send messages from their planet to earth. I think they would need some sort of language or yeah, means of communication to reach. that level of intelligence or that the level of intelligence must come with with complex communication. And that it's something that just arises at a certain level because it just works if we want to preserve information and go beyond what just what we do based on our instincts. ⁓ Yeah, communicating every when we figured out how to save Our knowledge in by writing books. That's when we started making huge progress as a civilization and as a species. ⁓ I think intellectually, w would you agree or. speaker-1: Yeah, some way of passing some effective, some kind of time effective way of passing information from generation to generation or from person to person, right? ⁓ And a way that we don't have to rely on instincts. It's never anybody's instinct, for example, to make me coffee in the morning, right? If I want that, I got to go ask for it. You know, that'd be a nice end up taking. People should just have that instinct to bring me coffee. ⁓ But, but, but if we're going to, if we're going to organize technology, if we're going to organize activity there, we can do that by instinct, but if we're going to do something more complex, ⁓ then I think it would be helpful to have language so that we don't have to wait to evolve each thing that we want to be able to accomplish because you can't want, you can't want things for evolution, right? Evolution just happens. ⁓ and this idea that, ⁓ I need you to know what I'm thinking. I need you to know what I want you to do. And I need to, I need it to be flexible. As far as I know, that's language. speaker-0: Yes. And I think that would be if, if you are advanced enough that you're able to build spaceships or at least advanced enough to, to transfer messages or make some sort of technology advancements in technology, you'll need to be able to communicate because I mean, that's again, it's an assumption, but presumably some beings. people in this case are better at, ⁓ we're working together and nobody makes ⁓ a computer, for example, from scratch. There's a company that makes the screen and there's a company that makes the buttons and then there's a company that makes the chips and then there's a company that does the design and it's all being put together and that requires communication. ⁓ It's, it's, it's we, yeah, we've surpassed being a civilization where every Everyone does everything, right? speaker-1: I mean, you can communicate a lot without language. mean, you can gesture, you can pat one another, you can push and pull one another, you can hurt one another. There's a lot of things you can communicate. But boy, language is an elegant solution to being able to get more of that done faster. speaker-0: Yeah. If we, if we look at the animal kingdom closer to home, ⁓ what can we learn from, how animals communicate and trying to understand how they communicate, ⁓ order to potentially communicate with extra terrestrial life one day. speaker-1: Yeah, that's a really good question. we like to think that because we can't speak to them, they don't speak. And I'm not here to claim that chimpanzees are writing sonnets or anything like that. ⁓ But we don't know enough yet, especially dolphins. We don't know enough about what they've all got going on. So that kind of research, that kind of... how do we understand their cognition and therefore their communication system is really important. But I think the most immediately accessible thing we can learn from them is what are the various media of communication they have. ⁓ So there's that ⁓ Ed Young book, An Immense World, where he talks about animal communication systems and how some communicate, there's electric eels and then there's animals that communicate all kinds of information by scent, and they are sensitive to vibrations and they perceive the world and all these, myriad of amazing, incredible, beautiful, complicated ways that we weren't even thinking about. ⁓ So one of the things that's super useful about animal communication is it helps us take a step back from, we just look at things and when we talk, And when we use language, it's ⁓ audible. ⁓ Because we know, for example, that you have ⁓ full languages that are made with the hands, right? There are signed languages. ⁓ That's kind of what we've got. We've got audio and we've got ⁓ visual, right? But there are other media that are worth thinking about ⁓ that other animals use. studying the complexity of those systems and how that could evolve eventually into, ⁓ with sufficient complexity to become a language, it would be really cool to keep doing. speaker-0: Yeah, I'm going to speak to someone soon who is working on designing an artificial intelligence system in order to decipher what whales are potentially communicating to one another, which is interesting. ⁓ But I do believe whales have names for each other. ⁓ that's what we we do know it seems that they and even have accents speaker-1: Yeah, I read that too. Isn't it fantastic? I had to think. You know, we kill and eat those things. We kill and eat those beings that have names for one another. speaker-0: Yeah, it's something that's, that's very sad, but do we, what is your, ⁓ because you've also worked, ⁓ together with, ⁓ SETI and also Maddie, right? Can you maybe, ⁓ explain, ⁓ to, people that don't know, ⁓ what, what those are and, maybe what your role is with those, ⁓ programs. speaker-1: So ⁓ SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and METI is Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So the question before the people of Earth, I think, is this. If we can send a message to a potential or just send a message out there into the void to be picked up by whoever or whatever is out there, is that a thing we want to do? And that's maybe the first question to be asked and answered ⁓ is, that a choice we want to make? Who has the ethical authority to speak for an entire planet? Or is that not a thing? Maybe everybody could just say what they want to say. ⁓ And ⁓ some people have a very strong feeling that that would be dangerous. And some people have a very strong feeling that sitting in a corner and not saying anything is not a good way to make friends and start relationships. So ⁓ there are very strong opinions on both sides of that. speaker-0: Which side do you lean on? Oh! F***! Um... speaker-1: You know, I really have gone back and forth. began as a let's everybody build a radio telescope and let's go. We've got to say hello. ⁓ Because we are, we are adventurers. We are seekers. are questers after, after new experiences and ⁓ we explore. so part of exploring part of honest part of honest exploring is to become part of what you're exploring and to and to say that you're there. ⁓ I don't know what it feels. It feels deceptive to me to lurk and to observe without indicating that you're there. ⁓ But on the other hand, ⁓ people who are worried that this is a bad move, either because one group of people is being very presumptuous and speaking for another, or people who don't want to communicate because they're genuinely afraid that that might be the trigger for the bad guys to come and get us and eat us. I don't want to be disrespectful of those points of view. So ⁓ I think where I end up is this. It's really important that we work hard on decoding messages and on encoding messages so that we are ready when ⁓ we get one or when somebody stops by. speaker-0: We have sent messages into space, speaker-1: Yes, we have. speaker-0: The our our SIBO message. hope I don't butcher the pronunciation, but ⁓ can you maybe explain what what the our SIBO message was potentially problematic? speaker-1: know if that one was especially problematic because it wasn't aimed particularly at any place and it's sort of hard to decode. We've done, people have given the ROC will message to ⁓ all kinds of folks on earth and said, Hey, what does this mean? And people like, I got nothing. speaker-0: So what was it though? speaker-1: It was a grid. if you, if you take, is a strategy for making pictures with dots, right? If I give you, let's see, let me, let me quickly come up with, okay. So if I give you, ⁓ if I give you, ⁓ 49 dots, ⁓ you'll think, why did she just send me 49 dots? What, what's it with 49 dots? You arrange them. They don't look like anything. They look like 49 dots. No one can understand a list like that. speaker-0: Mm-hmm speaker-1: But it might occur to you that 49, the number 49 is a seven times seven. And so you might think, Hey, I got an idea. I'll make seven rows of seven dots. And then I'll see if that means it makes anything in that. And if you arrange them that way, then you might see that the erosive of message, which was not seven by seven, but much, bigger, um, that there's like a, like an outline of what could be a person. could be a planet, could be lots of different things, right? ⁓ And so it was just this little grid, just like pixels on the screen, if you arrange them in the right way, you can get a picture. ⁓ And then go ahead and try to understand what that picture was because that's hard. speaker-0: And it again assumes that they have vision. speaker-1: No, it assumes that they have grids. I can take that message of beeps and I can make a dot and a not dot. Right. So I could, I could, I, the great thing about radio signals and, ⁓ lots of scientific equipment is they're looking at things that are invisible anyway, like a radio, a radio signal is invisible. ⁓ so you might decide that, ⁓ you want to look at that. I'm or you might decide that you want to listen to it or you might decide that you want to feel it or you might decide that whatever other sensory modality you've got, you want to express it that way. ⁓ it does also along with assuming that you knew that you do grids, it also sort of, it also sort of assumes that, ⁓ like a line drawing of a thing will make any sense to you or that you will take dots and draw lines between them. So there's some. There's some cognitive stuff that has to go on about connecting dots and arranging dots that is medium agnostic. Right? So what do do with that signal when you get it? I mean, I might make dots with it. You might make visual dots with it. Somebody else might do something else with it. speaker-0: So, that was a receivable message. What did we do later on the second time around? speaker-1: We've done crazy things. Like there was a Doritos commercial that was blasted into space. ⁓ There are some, there are, there are, ⁓ we are emitting all kinds of signals that are very strong that probably won't get anywhere. We're also emitting pulses of military ⁓ radar. That again, theoretically, depending on who's listening and how they're listening could get through. ⁓ we talk a lot about our old television signals that are expanding in a, in a globe outside of earth. And again, they're pretty faint by time they get anywhere. I don't know, but also we don't know who's listening and with what ability. ⁓ and, and whether we message or not, if you look at our planet, we have a biosignature and a technosignature, right? If you, if you have the right equipment and you're looking at earth, ⁓ and you look at it at the right time. and from the right distance, ⁓ you can tell something's up here. speaker-0: Yeah, so we might as well send messages into space. speaker-1: That's one philosophy, speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, it would probably, um, whether we're like actively sending messages into space in the hope that one alien civilization will decode them one day. Um, yeah, like you say, there's a lot going on on earth as it is. have satellites, we have radio, we have all sorts of other waves that are being emitted from, from earth, probably. So. yeah, it's probably if we want to, ⁓ play, ⁓ if we want to hide from the aliens, we're not doing a very good job. speaker-1: No, we're not. And then you have to decide what it is to say hello. Is it impudence? Is it foolishness? Is it graciousness? Is it kindness? ⁓ What that is varies from person to person, how they interpret that initiative. speaker-0: Right. And what about receiving signals? I know about the wow signal. What was that all about? speaker-1: ⁓ golly, nobody really knows. ⁓ probably not aliens. speaker-0: Why? ⁓ speaker-1: Well, okay, first off, well, because it wasn't repeated, right? So if they meant to say hello, they didn't try very hard. She's like, hey, if you ever shouted a friend's name across the room, like you try more than once, don't you? Like if they don't turn around. But then again, that's my human assumption. So I could be wrong. ⁓ I can always, always, always be wrong. ⁓ But it might have been, probably. speaker-0: But why was it, why did the person write down wow in the first place? Because that's why it was named the wow signal, right? It was, were listening to space and then there was a signal that was received and the signal looked remarkable. And that's why the ⁓ scientists who found the signal wrote down wow. And that's how it was named the wow signal. But I'm not a scientist. I want to understand like what. made this person say wow. speaker-1: I couldn't tell you exactly why, if you're just listening, quote listening, if you've got your recorders on, ⁓ tuned to various radio signals in space, mostly what you see is sort of random noise. And if you try to make it into sound, you hear white noise. And so there was some kind of momentary orderliness about that signal that struck the person as artificial. ⁓ Because natural noise is kind chaotic, right? speaker-0: Yeah. No, that makes, that makes sense. and yeah, more, more recently we've spoken about arrival, course, amazing movie, which everyone should go see if they haven't. ⁓ but more recent, a movie came out project Hill Mary, ⁓ which is, ⁓ from the book with, with the same name from Andy where, ⁓ it's one of my favorite books of all time. I think it's an incredible book. And where I think the book is better or at least more interesting than the movie is that the movie kind of brushes over the communication part. ⁓ The alien Rocky and the protagonist kind of immediately figure out how to communicate with each other. Whereas in the book, ⁓ they spend a bit more time trying to explain how they go about communicating. with them, maybe for people who haven't read the book, Sherry, would you mind explaining how they go about it and whether you think this was a smart way of going about it from from anywhere? speaker-1: So also same love the book. I'm also recommending the audio book because the official audio book has some really nice ⁓ effects for the alien, for his communication, especially for us, it's really fun. ⁓ And the reader is a genius. This is a beautifully, beautifully done piece of art that recording. ⁓ So yes. The movie was fine. I liked the movie. It was a little more funny than the book. Like it was a movie, which is never as good as a book, if you're asking me. ⁓ With maybe the possible exception of Arrival, I did love that more than the source story. But ⁓ let's see. ⁓ So the thing that was done really brilliantly, I think, by the protagonist is maximizing the shared context. introducing just small changes one after another, ⁓ taking a lot of time. ⁓ There's a lot of metacognition detailed in the book. He was thinking, well, I'll do this. Well, what if that happens? Well, how come that isn't working? Da-da-da-da. And you could feel the ⁓ protagonist setting up an assumption. questioning it and knocking it down. It was how a scientist would do that work. ⁓ And there was a lot of, ⁓ I don't understand this, therefore I will think about it. I don't understand this, therefore it's stupid. Or I don't understand this, therefore it's carelessly done. Or it doesn't matter. I think that for a lot of us, our reaction, no, let me say that differently. I think it's really important to think about our reaction to things that we don't understand. ⁓ And are those moments that invite curiosity and the joy of questing for answers, or are they things that make us feel inferior or make us feel impatient or that make us cast accusations at the center of that? of that information, right? I don't understand it, therefore it's stupid. So there was a lot of really ⁓ gracious and open-minded ⁓ reflection and some very self-aware reflection. So one of my favorite quotes from the book is he's talking through his emotional reaction of seeing Rocky for the first time. And he said, well, it reached out. It's, it's, it's hand. Okay. I'm going to call it a hand because that feels better than tentacle. ⁓ and, and you could see a lot of assumptions like being made there. Like I'm going to call it a hand. It's not really, it's not really a hand, but it serves the same purpose. So I'm going to recast that in my brain in a way that makes me feel less afraid. But, but the fact is he know, he knew that he did that. And so later, if it turned out that he needed. to go back to the idea that this was more of a tentacle than a hand than he could, because he consciously made that assumption, and I thought that was great. And then there was just a lot of time taken, ⁓ and a lot ⁓ of, could be wrong, I could be wrong, I could be wrong, this is really cool, let me go with this for a minute and a half, wait, maybe I could be wrong, I could be wrong, I could be wrong. And that, ⁓ It's a joyful and a terrible thing, right? To be faced with something that interesting and that important. ⁓ And the ⁓ humility and the hubris that combine in trying to make that happen in a logical way, I just loved it. I'm not sure if I answered your question. speaker-0: No you did yeah no very much and i i liked it as well and i think what they did well ⁓ or at least what what's interesting to me also as i started researching our conversation for today is that they ⁓ do start with what they have in common so they'll use numbers they use the periodic table if i'm not mistaken they use a clock or time. if you will, so they also seem to, to start out with what they have in common and then build from there. speaker-1: But think deeper than that, was things they needed, like things in their context that were going to be useful for them. they knew that there was a barrier between, know, in the airlock. They knew that they had a barrier, right? ⁓ So they both knew the barrier was there. And so you could start thinking about why the barrier is there. Well, maybe there's a barrier there because our atmospheres are different. that's something that's an immediate context thing. And in the book, he touched the barrier and he knew it was really hot. So he knew that the conditions on the other side were different. it's, it's, the clever thing that Rocky did was send him a representation of oxygen, ⁓ in a, a quantity. And then also send him a representation of, of, of another element. in a quantity, ⁓ ammonia in a quantity, right? ⁓ So that they could use those, like, what is this weird symbol? What's this weird symbol? ⁓ this is oxygen. ⁓ this has got to be ⁓ his atmosphere. And there's 29 of those and only two oxygens. So he's trying to tell me that that's the air pressure. ⁓ Reasonable assumptions. He could be flat wrong, right? He could be so wrong. He could be a hundred percent wrong. ⁓ but he's got that information. He's going to go with it for a while. speaker-0: Yeah. And do you, mean, for the people who haven't seen the movie again, the movie really brushes over the communication part. feel like they, ⁓ all of a sudden they are able to communicate. He's built this translator tool and everything is smooth sailing from there. ⁓ but if we go from how it was depicted in a book in that scenario where they slowly, but surely they find common ground, they find to, ⁓ Yeah. Have, have similar context to make sure that they're talking about the same thing. And then from there, they slowly, they build up their vocabulary until they have a full fledged translator system, basically, which allows them to communicate basically like they, the protagonist would with, with any human at some point. Do you think that is possible in that context if we just have enough ⁓ common ground ⁓ like the situation in the book, it, if we given that we have enough time, would it be possible to create a live translator like that in such a scenario? speaker-1: who it's tricky, right? I don't know. We could certainly do it with words. The one thing that they did that I thought was really smart was that they arrived at this agreement between the two of them that if they said a word three times, it meant a lot of this. Like they would, it's bad, it was bad, bad, Sad, sad, sad. And, know, Rocky would say, amaze, amaze, amaze, which was really. But I think that a system that arose speaker-0: I speaker-1: ⁓ would have more of that stuff in it. Things that were not necessarily true to either language, but were established by the participants as a meaningful way of doing business. Right? So I think there would have been more, I think there will be, when we get to do this, I think there will be more of those. And I think that we see this even on earth when people are learning each other's languages, right? ⁓ You develop, and even between people who speak the same language, you develop words or ways of talking to one another, people that you know well, that mean things to you but are not reflected in the wider linguistic system. ⁓ So I think that a final result, at least initially, would be more idiosyncratic. ⁓ and more reflective of the union of the two languages, something maybe more like a pigeon and eventually a creole ⁓ than one language only. And that's true about the structure. mean, know we had, there was ⁓ issues between, like the human could not make the sounds of the alien language and Andraki couldn't make the sounds of English, right? Presumably. speaker-0: Yeah, no, that was a. Yeah, that was an issue. Finally, there's something I wanted to to talk to you about as well. ⁓ I believe when doing my research, I came across it was a thought experiment that you came up with ⁓ from a civilization called the crickets, if I'm not mistaken, which is a civilization that has, you know, ⁓ speaker-1: There's the interface. speaker-0: ⁓ sensory inputs basically, and it was a thought experiment into what would their world and what would their language look like? ⁓ Could you maybe explain that what you what that what that was about? speaker-1: So this is a civilization of all blind creatures without any sighted person input at all. And really there would be no word for blind because sight isn't a thing. were just out there and there's blind aliens doing their thing. ⁓ And the question is how they would develop science. by the way, the name for the species has changed over time because when I told my friend Josh Mealy about these guys, ⁓ about the blind aliens, he said that obviously the name for that species is Braillean, which I think is brilliant. But it makes everybody laugh, so I didn't want to have it, because I think it's too funny and I want it to be a serious thing, but I can't help it. That is obviously their name. So the question is, using the resources without going all the way to Rocky. ⁓ I just did this. I just did a bad spoiler, didn't I? I'm sorry. ⁓ speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: But guess maybe that's inevitable that ⁓ Rocky's a blind alien. Okay. But without going all the way to super amazing acoustic skills that humans don't have, right? Where it almost doesn't matter if you have visual input or not because your sonar is so good that it just makes up the difference. Without going without wiping away the differences, what would the differences genuinely be? What is the beauty of having ⁓ speaker-0: It's fine. speaker-1: having auditory and tactile perception be the dominant characteristics of your social and your social interactions and also your science. ⁓ And so my quest was, would their, how would they do it? Like what impact would that have on language ⁓ and on science? So we know that blind people can be scientists. There's a whole academy of blind scientists, That it's a thing. You can do it. You just need, you need different tools and you need people to get out of your way and let you alone, let you do things and, you know, be welcoming, but you can do science in a sighted world as a blind person. But if we just, if we get rid of, with permission, with all due respect, if we get rid of all you interfering sighted people who run things here, how would blind creatures evolve a scientific method and what would their scientific progress be like? earth science started out with astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. It's kind of our early sciences, right? So mathematics, no problem. Everyone can do that. ⁓ Medicine, probably not much problem. Everyone can do herbs, figure out what the herbs are, do some observations of the body. ⁓ you know, that's, that's quite doable. ⁓ but astronomy, no, probably not. Right. There's the stars make no perceptual impact beyond vision. Right. So we based a lot of our early science on the paths of objects in the sky. ⁓ and that was really important to us in our development. So if you subtract that out, if you tease that away, ⁓ and you give them all the other abilities they need, including a lot of time to goof around and figure stuff out. ⁓ Where and how would they grow? what would be, would they reach a point in their evolution, their technological evolution where you couldn't tell the difference? Would it all be the same? Or would there always be lingering flavors of their original sensory source? So that's the thought experiment, right? So how would they grow? How would they... What would they invent in what order? Probably ⁓ thermodynamics would become more important than the physics of moving objects, that kind of thing. speaker-0: Super interesting and what where so I mean, obviously it's difficult to draw conclusions from a thought experiment and maybe people have their own intuition about what would happen. ⁓ But it's your thought experiment. So what do you think would happen? speaker-1: Some things would be sped up and some things would be slowed down, right? So ⁓ the study of acoustics, for example, would obviously be more advanced. There would be in their vocabulary more words for different kinds of sonic experiences. You know, we just say timbre and then we're like, you know, like a flute or like an oboe, but ⁓ we would have words describing what those differences are like, and we would have words, for example, to ⁓ describe the difference in that you've, when you, when you, when there's a sound and you feel its vibration, a deep sound makes a different kind of vibration than a high pitched sound does, right? We'd have words, I wouldn't have to say all that, that I just said, it would be like a character sound and a north work sound. ⁓ There'd be a lot more of that. ⁓ There would be a lot more. that more words describing spatial relationships because that's not, ⁓ because you couldn't just point at things and go, know, like, you know, that thing where you're moving a couch and you're trying to move the couch through a door and your language totally abandons you. You're like, no, take your end and go like that way up. No, not that much like over, yeah, like that. well, wouldn't it be nice if you just had a set of words to describe how objects were moving? That'd be better. like a couch mover. Think about a ⁓ nice couch mover language. speaker-0: Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. I haven't, I have never, I mean, it's so interesting to think about this ⁓ thought experiment because, ⁓ yeah, it doesn't, ⁓ it hadn't entered my, ⁓ my mind, but it's super, super interesting. Is, is there anything, ⁓ yeah, you would like to emphasize or, ⁓ discuss before, ⁓ before we wrap it up today, Sherry. speaker-1: The other thing that struck me about Project Hail Mary ⁓ was the use of tools to accomplish tasks and how ⁓ we think of some tools as just, yeah, they're just things you do. That's all fine. Like if you put shoes on, this comes from my friend ⁓ Andrew Leland, who wrote a brilliant book. ⁓ And he was talking about tools that we... think of as ordinary tools and tools that are stigmatized because they're disability related. So ⁓ if you put on your glasses and put on your shoes and walk across the street, that's nothing, right? Nobody's like what, no one even looks at you. If you've got a quaint cane in your hand and you cross the street, then that's like, ⁓ my gosh, that's because you have a problem. So think about the technology that they used in Hail Mary to accomplish their communication. ⁓ It was a full on voice replacement thing, right? And he full on used a computer to analyze incoming speech and ⁓ put, and he used a lot of adaptive tech to be able to understand what was going on with his friend. ⁓ And those tools were, ⁓ were used without stigma and without, golly, we're going to use these special tools. Ooh. ⁓ They were just tools of the trade. And that is one of the reasons that I think a lot about what disability studies and disability culture in particular has to offer, ⁓ wherever things get tricky and difficult, ⁓ because disabled people are always doing things that are tricky and interesting and always conspiring to get our business done. And sometimes we use tools and sometimes we do other things, but in ways that are unexpected, but kind of genius. Right. And so I think a lot of this alien communication stuff is going to require unexpected tools used in ways that are kind of genius. ⁓ and I loved, I loved all the adaptive tech, ⁓ that was used between the two species, ⁓ to facilitate a simple communication, ⁓ cause they're disabled people that use a lot of adaptive tech for communication. Right. And so it's a genius coming together of those two worlds. And I think it's beneficial for us to acknowledge that a lot of the adaptive genius tech ⁓ and that approach to technology that the disability world already has is going to be super useful in astrobiology. speaker-0: Wow, yeah, that's that was that was awesome. And yeah, this this conversation was was so good. Sherry, I really, really appreciate you. Thank you. I think you have an extremely interesting field of work. Where should people go if they want to keep up with everything you're doing? speaker-1: I have a LinkedIn profile, ⁓ a website, sherrywellsjensen.com and .org, I think, that I try desperately to keep up. ⁓ And if you can uncover my email address at Bowling Green State University, I'm always happy for people to be in touch. speaker-0: Awesome. Well, Sherry, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And this this was awesome.