Dean chats with author Jaime Green about the multifaceted relationship between science fiction, humanity's fascination with aliens, and the scientific quest for extraterrestrial life. New episodes release every other Friday!
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- On Mars: A Mars Exploration Rover Update (Compilation)
- The Quest For Contact: NASA's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
- CSPAN Freeman Dyson on Dreams of Earth and Sky
- Language And Linguistics (University of Buffalo, 1958)
- 1970s NASA FILM " EXPLORATION OF THE PLANETS " VIKING, PIONEER, MARINER MISSIONS PROBES
- Purple Death From Outer Space (1966)
- Of Stars and Men (1962)
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: [00:00:00] Martians, why is it always Martians? You know, like how come we're never like invaded by creatures from Mercury or Jupiter or something like that? It's always Martians, isn't it?
[Educational Video]: The naked eye extended its vision through instruments that saw the craters on the moon, the changing colors of Mars.
Dean Regas: Well, you know, there's actually a kind of scientific reason behind that.
Mars is the most Earth like planet in our solar system. I mean, any kind of creatures that would be living on Venus. Well, they would have to survive temperatures of 900
Fahrenheit. They'd have to survive pressure that would squish any human flat. Mars, well, you just gotta survive a real lot of cold, not much atmosphere.
Maybe survive underground. Martian fascination started with science fiction writers, who looked at Mars through telescope, talked to scientists. They saw a planet that seemed Earth like, that had... These maybe green areas [00:01:00] where forests might be and straight lines on it where maybe canals might be. It turns out they're way off on those things.
But yet, even though there are no canals, there are no forests on Mars, we're still in this idea of Martian. I'm pretty excited to be talking about aliens and different types of aliens other than Martians. Talking about what ETs might look like, might sound like. How do we even talk to them? From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up,
the show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great. Today, I'll be talking with [00:02:00] Jaime Green, whose book titled The Possibility of Life was released to rave reviews in April of this year.
Astronomers have been studying the universe for thousands and thousands of years. We've got space based telescopes. We're looking back to the earliest parts of the universe. We're finding planets around other stars called exoplanets. We still haven't found life outside of this little blue marble we call Earth.
Not even like microbial life, not even like single celled organisms. We haven't heard a signal. We haven't gotten a postcard. I haven't been abducted. You know, there's, we haven't had no contact. And I know a lot of people are saying, well, yeah, but what about those like alien autopsy videos and all that kind of stuff?
I mean, okay. So we've not had any, any legitimate, verifiable evidence of aliens. And so this leads us to lot of questions because going to build several, the only way we can kind of imagine life outside of this earth is through [00:03:00] science fiction.
[Old Science Fiction Movie]: From the description you gave me of your attackers costume. It must have been Commando Cody in his flying suit.
Dean Regas: Even going back to 17th century, you know, Johannes Kepler kind of theorized about what it might be like to live on the moon. And writers from the 20th century giving us these views of Mars and even Venus and other places that have these aliens that are, you know, decidedly kind of human like.
[Old Science Fiction Movie]: Sarkov's next move will be to land in Phrygia and attempt to secure Polaroid. Your Majesty. We know definitely that only those born in Phrygia stand and survive the death dealing cold there. Ordinary humans. Doctors are often flesh gone and are not ordinary humans.
Dean Regas: But we have no actual evidence of any aliens, of what they would look like.
How are we going to find life? Where are we going to find it? How will we know it even if we see it?
[Educational Video]: Is life a local operation, confined to the surface of this one planet? planet or is it a widespread activity?
Dean Regas: And boy, [00:04:00] these are some tough questions because we have nothing to go on. We have one place in this universe where we know life exists and that's here on Earth.
Earth has a wide, wide, wide variety of life forms. So let's say we go to another planet with a sun like star like we have, what would the life be like? We have no idea. I mean, not even a clue. I think the part of it that fascinates me the most is if there's some alien creature, could we be able to even identify it as an alien?
In fact, that seems more likely than seeing somebody that's like six feet tall, wears glasses and really likes astronomy. How would we communicate with the aliens? Nobody knows. Maybe they can't talk or maybe they don't communicate in the same way we do. Whenever we look at science fiction, we try to extrapolate what these aliens would be like.
But I think the science fiction really tells a lot about what we're like. We're going to be interviewing a author who wrote [00:05:00] a book similar to this. No, not similar. Way better. Way better than what I just said. Well, Jaime, thanks so much for joining me today.
Jaime Green: Sure, thanks so much for having me.
Dean Regas: So, The Possibility of Life, what inspired you to write this book, and how did you prepare to kind of merge these two worlds of science fiction and science fact?
Jaime Green: It's such a tricky question because like in some ways I started writing about these topics when I was in graduate school, getting my degree in writing. In other ways, this book is like my whole life coming. Does it start the first time my dad put on Star Trek The Next Generation or showed me the constellations?
Or like when my grandfather took me to watch a lunar eclipse, you know, it's like my whole life has kind of been. Leading up to this so I never know how to answer that question
Dean Regas: Well, I think that's one of the things about this, the search for aliens and the wanting there to be aliens and ETs out there.
[00:06:00] It does kind of bridge these generational gaps, and so have you always had an interest in that?
Jaime Green: Yeah, I mean, I think it's because I was interested in science and science fiction both growing up. You know, I was watching Star Trek and reading A Wrinkle in Time and... Dune and everything I could get my hands on and even there with Carl Sagan, you know, when I got into his work I was reading Contact and I was reading Cosmos both the science and the science fiction and I was you know my grandfather had a subscription to Scientific American and I would read it or try because I That was like right at the upper level of what I could understand, but it was just all of it was fascinating.
I think it really taps into The same thing in us, which is this really pleasurable kind of imagination of understanding and knowing more than what we see in the world around us. Either that's life on another world or, you know, how invisible atoms are [00:07:00] working. Even though one is factual and one is speculative, they scratch a similar itch to me.
Dean Regas: Well, and that's exactly what I'm gonna ask about. It's about you know, science, you write a lot about science fiction and the creators of science fiction in the book. Do you, did you find these real connections of how science fiction maybe even drove some... science facts or some science exploration, at least.
Jaime Green: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are, you know, some sort of familiar examples in culture, like the communicators in the original Star Trek look a lot like the flip phones that were developed decades later. Or rocket propulsion was first imagined in a sci fi context and then later, you know, worked out in the real world.
But one really interesting to me example that I write about in the book is this idea of Dyson Spheres.
[C-SPAN]: [00:08:00] Freeman Dyson is an iconoclast, a genius, and one of the great minds in physics, mathematics, and popular science.
Jaime Green: Dyson Spheres are named after the scientist Freeman Dyson who popularized the idea, which was that one way that a civilization could Expand and grow and get way more power for its ongoing development and growth would be to build a sphere or more practically a like swarm of satellites all around its star so as to capture all of the energy being put off by the star.
[C-SPAN]: In 1960 you proposed what's now known to others as a Dyson sphere. We proposed it as a possible signature for super civilizations.
Jaime Green: Here on Earth, even if we covered the whole planet in solar panels, we're just getting the solar radiation that hits the Earth and the sun is shooting out in all directions.
So if you surround it, you can capture all of that power. So if we're looking out there for intelligent life The construction is basically a giant sphere at [00:09:00] about the Earth's distance from the sun around a star. Then you increase your livable area by quadrillions. And Freeman Dyson always said that he got the idea for Dyson spheres from a science fiction novel from the 1930s called Star Maker.
And so when I was writing the book, I was writing about Dyson spheres because they're one of the ways that we imagine super advanced They're one of the ways that we think we could possibly detect alien civilizations because Dyson Spheres would give off a particular like energy signature that differentiates them from distant stars.
So I was like, well, I got to read Star Maker and I went and read it and And it was really one of the most wonderful surprises of my research for the book because I was expecting a book about Dyson's fears, but it turns out that Dyson himself had found this like half a sentence of an idea about how a civilization might become very [00:10:00] advanced in the midst of this very, like, most spiritual.
Book about imagining all the different ways that life might develop and attain not just technological power, but also really deep, powerful kinds of connection across the cosmos in this book Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton. I think that's what is important about science fiction is that it's about human people.
[Freeman Dyson]: It's about emotions, about The real problems of human life, it's not about science.
Jaime Green: But sure enough, you know, Dyson found that little half a sentence about technology that he needed in order to expand and advance the scientific conversations of his time.
Dean Regas: It's always fun to think about aliens doing things that, you know, we would like to do or dream to do, [00:11:00] but there's this preponderance of science fiction stories and creations where the aliens are all about between five feet and seven feet tall could wear human clothes. You know, are, are there some surprising, really wild out there theories of, of aliens like that are completely different from us that, that you've read out there?
Jaime Green: Yeah, I mean, those very human like aliens, I think, show up a lot for two reasons. One, in movies and TV, it's practical, you know special effects are expensive and challenging and if you can slap some pointy ears on a human actor... It's a lot easier and a lot less time in the makeup chair,
but there is evolutionary logic behind it. You could say that we are the size that we are because that's what [00:12:00] is not too small, not too big. You know, sort of Goldilocks for gravity and air pressure. And so on a similar planet, you might see life looking similar. Having uh, you know, hands with grasping fingers.
You might expect other intelligent life to have that so that they can also build tools and manipulate their environment. But then there are other ways of thinking that like this is just one solution to the challenges of evolution in the environment and there's no reason to expect life to look similar at all.
So when I was researching the book, I astronomers and astrobiologists about their research and one thing I liked to ask at the end of every interview was if they had a favorite alien from sci fi, and far and away, the most common answer I got was the aliens from the movie Arrival.[00:13:00]
Scientists love those aliens because they are really, really alien.
tHey're called heptapods, which is, I guess, Greek for seven feet, because they have seven legs, which is like, not a number you see on Earth, maybe at all. It was probably like some squid, you know, with seven arms or something.
Life on Earth almost entirely tends to be bilaterally symmetrical, which means mirror image on your right and left, even a starfish which has five limbs can be folded in half to be symmetrical. But the heptapods in Arrival, they have seven limbs, they have a top and a bottom, but they don't have a front and a back.
They have eyes all the way around their sort of bowling pin shaped body, so they don't have to turn around to walk forwards and [00:14:00] backwards. And their experience of the world and of time turns out to be very alien as well. And so I think that that's just one of the examples from sci fi that is both richly described, it's not just like mysterious behind a veil and very, very different.
Not just different, like truly alien to life that we see on Earth.
Dean Regas: Well, and then the, of course, the other thing when you have, you know, human actors playing aliens, you also have to figure out their language. And so, alien language what's, what's your kind of thoughts on that? You know, what are some wild non human language ideas out there? This is the first program in a series about what I consider the most important thing in your life.[00:15:00]
Jaime Green: This is one of my favorites. I've, I've, something I've been asked a couple of times is like, if you could know anything about an alien, or if we encountered aliens, what would you want to know about them? And knowing what their language is like is probably top of the line for me.
We have lots of examples of biology and physiology on earth. We only have one kind of. Language. Like, there are lots of human languages, but they all come from the same kind of brain. And so we don't know what is fundamental to language as language and what seems fundamental, but is only fundamental on Earth.
It might be totally different elsewhere.
[Educational Video]: Now we're going to continue with our definition and I want to add these terms. I want to say language is an arbitrary system of vocal symbols through which human beings
Jaime Green: Like when we're speaking, the linearity of one word at a time [00:16:00] is really one of the fundamental limits of language.
And so it turns out that some of the most interesting imagined alien languages break that. The heptapods have a non linear written language. And in China Mieville's novel, Embassy Town, he imagines aliens that have two mouths essentially. And so they speak two words at the same time. Which isn't just a matter of chorus there end up in that novel being other, like, really fundamental differences in how the aliens experience language and think, and how language functions in their minds that make it almost unspeakable by humans.
And the whole business that makes human societies possible, so human beings can interact, is this amazing business of language.
Dean Regas: Wait a second. So you're saying those colleagues that I know of that can speak out of both sides [00:17:00] of their mouth and say two different things at the same time. They're they're part alien. Is that what you're trying to say? Could be. Whoa. All right. I'm going to have to look at them differently from now on.
So what do you think all this means for, you know, for humans? Why, why do the fascination that humans have for this, you know, this quest just to find alien life? Where do you think that comes from? I think there are two things. One is about really wanting to know if anyone else is out there, which is about understanding how we fit into the world.
Jaime Green: YOu know, science doesn't tell us what things mean. It just tells us what is. And so we have this gap in our world view, in our understanding of why we're here and what it means that we're here. And one way to try to understand that better is to understand Are we rare?
Are we common? Does the universe exist as a home for life, or are we some beautiful fluke?
The other thing that I think alien [00:18:00] stories do for us is they give us a way of stretching our imaginations and understanding more deeply. Expansively, what it means to be a person. Imagine very different kinds of aliens. We're imagining different ways for a person to be, and I don't mean a person like a human being, I mean a person like whatever it is that we are.
You know, in Star Trek we see this with all of the alien species that are, It's a, it's a, it's a heightened representations of some sort of characteristic. You know, the Vulcans are very logical. Klingons are very emotional and, you know, aggressive. How do we then understand what humans are?
It's this expansion of our imagination and then also an expansion of our empathy. And I think both of those aren't really in the end about. Knowing who might be [00:19:00] out there, but changing how we relate to ourselves and other people on earth.
Dean Regas: Well, this has just given us a ton to think about. Yeah, that's what I kind of think of with aliens is it's more, you know, when you're writing about them, it's more introspective than outrospective. You're writing how you think aliens are, but it does say so much about how you are. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jaime, this has been a lot of fun talking with you about your new book. It's a great read called The Possibility of Life. Thanks so much for talking with us today.
Jaime Green: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Dean Regas: Awesome. Thank you so much. All righty. Bye. Bye. Have a good one. Bye. So Jaime mentioned the idea of Dyson spheres, the kind of the picture we see is the artist rendering is like aliens build a whole like shell around their star and harvest it like it's pure energy and so they're so advanced because they can build a shell around their star, you know, like I can't even get a solar panel on my roof, but they [00:20:00] can do this whole thing.
So. That's one of the actual things that scientists kind of look for. And I say kind of because when astronomers mentioned Dyson spheres, newspaper reporters and the media think, this is so awesome. Oh my gosh, we're going to see this someday. These astronomers are really saying this is like possible. And here's the fun part is that there's a star that seems to exhibit.
A very weird, unexplainable phenomenon out there. It's dimming, and it's dimming pretty good. In a way that our astronomy doesn't explain fully. Well, at least that's the old story. The old story is, yeah, the star is getting slowly dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And then the speculation is... That's because an alien civilization is slowly constructing the Dyson Sphere and little by little, panel by panel, I don't know if they have panels, but I guess whatever they're putting in front of the star to [00:21:00] harvest it is dimming the light that's reaching us.
Now, before you get super excited that Dyson Spheres are out there and we're finding them, we are not. Now, is it fiction or is it fact? We don't know, although it's Pretty unlikely that this is dimming this fast, but maybe these aliens are really, you know, like, you know, busy, you know They're really putting up the panels really fast and and dimming this down, but it's most likely not that that's explaining this But that's still the fun thing to think about is that we may see something like that in the future Man, I'll put the panels up there.
It's gonna be pretty cool Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Ella Rowen is our show producer, audio engineer, and Star Trek fangirl. And Ella, I think you could probably communicate with aliens. Just, yeah. Yeah, just lift your eyebrows. They'll know what that means. It means speed up, Dean.
Hurry up. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran. [00:22:00] I'm Dean Regas, and keep looking up.[00:23:00] [00:24:00]
