Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the Universe of Lindsay Ellis' novel "Axiom's End"
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Hey Daniel, I've got an idea for a new movie genre.
Who I'm excited and a little terrified.
Well you should be, because first of all, you've got aliens in this movie.
Okay, I'm loving it so far.
Okay. And now you add a romance connection and you get an alien rom com.
Know you might have something there. Miscommunication is the basis for basically every rom com.
Yeah, and can you imagine the meet cute giant spaceships first looks, love it first landing.
It gives the phrase first contact a whole New Spin that might be inapproviate, Daniel, it'll be PG. I'm sure.
I am or Hey am a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I want to have some relationship with aliens, but maybe not that kind of.
Relationship, just the intellectual kind, right.
Yeah, I want a platonic conversation with the aliens.
You don't want to be friends with them, you just want to be like colleagues.
No, I definitely want to physics zone them, all right. I don't want to give them the wrong impression and say, you know, have other intentions.
Right, But what if they're really cool you want to hang out with them?
You know, I don't really know what those social cues are. You know, how do you read the signs an alien is throwing you?
Right? If you put a tentacle in a certain you know shape, who knows how to interpret that?
Yeah? Exactly? If you cross off something in my equation, what does that mean?
Usually that you're the professor and the other person as the crowd student. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we think about all the crazy and hilarious stuff that's going on in our universe, all the weird stuff that's happening here on Earth, all the stuff that might be happening on an alien planet somewhere where they are also trying to figure out the universe. We squish it all up and we try to stuff it into your brain in just forty short minutes.
That's right, because it's a big universe, and who knows what's out there or who is out there?
And hopefully we are not alone in trying to figure out the secrets of the universe. Hopefully there's a whole community of physicists than mathematicians and scientists out there trying to puzzle over the nature of this beautiful and bonkers universe. And one day we could all get together and share notes and maybe even meet cute Do.
You think it'd be collegial, Daniel, Like, wouldn't you feel competitive with the aliens? Like, wouldn't they put you out of a job if they come here with all the answers to particle physics.
I don't think i'd feel more competitive with the aliens than I do with my other physics colleagues.
Already, That's what I mean. Like, you know only one person can get the intergalactic noble price.
Yeah, well, I already have tenures though I don't have to worry about my job too much.
You don't care, like let dealing comes, let them do my job for me, so I can work less even less.
But if the aliens come and then they take over all the good jobs. You're saying so like human grad students can't become professors anymore.
No, I mean like they come with all the answers, so there's nothing for you to do.
There's always going to be something to do. Even if they come with answer to our current questions, there are always more questions. You know that every answer just leads to more questions.
M maybe they have tenure two and they are slacking off too, that's one thing to hope for. But anyway, there is a lot of a space out there in the universe, and it might be filled with other species, and who knows what kinds of wonders are out there, and so that's a big part of physics, is to wonder about this and to think about what could be out there and for us to discover.
That's right, and also to do some thinking in advance about how we might talk to those aliens if they did come and visit. Could we communicate with them mathematically? Would we be able to figure out their language? Would there be some really awkward moments when we don't know what to say or they say the wrong thing. It's actually useful to think these things through because then the day that aliens do arrive, we will have figured out maybe a few strategies.
Yeah, and so some advanced thinkers in this area of science and research are science fiction authors.
Absolutely their job is.
To think of interesting possibilities for what could happen or what could be out there, or what would happen if we ever meet or discover these things.
That's right. Even though science fiction authors are not always living in our actual, factual universe, they are on the cutting edge of thought, because.
Wait, where are they living, Daniel? If not in our universe? Are you saying authors are aliens too? Interdimensional aliens?
They're living in a fictional universe, which amazingly is stored inside their brain, which is inside our universe. So that's sort of cool, Like our universe contains in it models of other universes inside people's brains.
Mm sounds like the next Christopher Nolan movie.
Yeah, I'm going to get a credit for that one. Christopher called me up. But the cool thing is that that's exactly what physicists do.
Right.
I have in my mind several possible universes that I'm wondering about. Is this one our universe? Is that one our universe? So it's a pretty important job to be creative and come up with other universes that might actually relate to reality, that might give us inside into how ours work. So we on the podcast are always champions of science fiction authors on the cutting edge of thought.
Yeah, and so today on the program, we'll be tackling the science fiction universe of Lindsey Ellis.
That's right. Lindsay Ellis is the author of a really fun book called axioms End, which explores a lot of these topics in some pretty interesting ways.
Yeah, and this is part of our series of science fiction author interviews and discussions about their work. We have a bunch of them in the podcast archive, right, Daniel.
That's right. We've talked to a huge number of really fun and creative authors who've been really generous and told us about how they created the universe of their novel. This is in the literary podcast. We're digging into the physics of their universe. Is it plausible, how does it work, how do they put it together? And what can we learn about our universe from their created fictional universe?
Yeah, to science literary podcasts on occasion. So if you're interested in discovering new authors or hearing interviews with well known authors of so, I can't check out our archive.
Do you think if you wrote a science fiction novel you'd be up for being interrogated about the physics of it by a physicists.
I get interrogated by physicists every week, twice a week.
Actually, to be that hard, you'd be especially experienced.
Yeah. Yeah, I have a special degree on that.
Then you should write a science fiction novel that sounds like something to add to your list.
Write horror. It's more like horror or you know, period drama.
Your horror novel is called being on a podcast with a physicist.
Scream. Let's right, Misery Part two. But anyway, So we're talking today about Lindsay Ellis's work, and she's a pretty interesting author. I mean, she's pretty multifaceted, and she does a lot of things online, right.
Yeah, she has a pretty big presence online. She has a YouTube channel, and she does literary criticism, and so this is the beginning of her career as an author. She's like cracking into the science fiction community. It's pretty cool to see that the community is open this way, that people can still come in with a new idea and a debut novel and make the bestseller list.
Yeah, it's a pretty big splash. I mean, she made the New York Times bestseller list in her first try.
Yeah. Exactly one hundred percent of her novels have been bestsellers.
Yeah, that's a pretty good right there. But congratulations to her. And today we're going to talk about her book, Axioms End, meaning like the end of axioms, or like the end of an axiom.
It's the end of an axiom. Yeah, And I don't want to spoil exactly what the title means because you only find out about two thirds of the way through the book. But a lot of the book is about questioning your axioms. It's about questioning your thoughts about how the universe worked, and also questioning your thoughts about how aliens operate and how to communicate. With them.
Mmmm, it's sort of like a paradigm shift. It's kind of what it's about.
Yeah, exactly, all right.
Well, maybe step us through. What is the basic premise of the book.
Well, in the universe that she created, it's like a slightly alternative history goes back to two thousand and seven, all.
The way back to two thousand and seven.
I know exactly if you can cast your mind back before twenty twenties, your fuzzy memories of how the world used to work.
Does feel like a different world, doesn't it.
Well, she literally has a different world. And in her world, aliens have arrived on Earth. But they arrived like decades ago, you know, in the sixties, and the government covered it up. So it's sort of like the Roswell scenario where there are aliens in Area fifty one, but only the government knows about them.
Wow, So in the fifties they landed like in flying saucers or.
So, they've landed decades ago and they sort of crash landed, but then the governments are like swept it up and kept it under wraps until more aliens arrive. So now here we are in two thousand and seven, more aliens are landing and the secret is getting out. They have like a Julian Assange like character that's trying to blow the whistle on the government and leak the fact that the government has been keeping aliens a secret for decades and then it's all blown up when more aliens arrive.
Wow.
You know, I've always wondered why in all these science fiction movies and shows do you always sort of portray the government as wanting to cover this up? Do you know where that comes from? It would be the rationale for government to cover it up.
I don't think there is any rationale. I think it's one hundred percent born of conspiracy theories, Like it just doesn't make any sense, doesn't make any sense from an individual point of view, like why would an individual scientist or government worker not want to share this information? And it doesn't make sense from the sort of government policy point of view, Like I never believe the argument that, like people are going to go crazy if they find out, like you got to deal with it. There's plenty of bad news out there, you know, just let us know and we'll figure out a policy. So I never really made sense to me. I think it just comes from people who think the government is lying to us about everything, because the government has lied to us about stuff before.
Mmmm. Just a general sort of suspicion of government.
Yeah, exactly. And also, if you want to believe that aliens exist and the government is not telling us that they do, then the only way for you to believe that the government has aliens is to assume that they're lying. Right.
Well, So, anyways, in the book, the aliens landed a long time ago and then they just started landing again. Meant that she explained why they came.
Back, Yeah, she does. The aliens that have landed now are sort of coming after the ones that landed forty years ago. But one of the really fascinating things about the aliens that landed forty years ago is that they didn't die. It's not like they crash landed and we have corpses. The government has custody of living aliens. But the fascinating thing is that those aliens have been refusing to communicate. They've ignored every effort to make contact or talk to them.
Wow, because we imprisoned them, or they're just being shy, or they're just giving us the cold shouldern.
Well, that's a great question, right, And It goes to the heart of like why are the aliens doing something? To answer that question, you have to understand like what do the aliens want? Why are they here? What's important to them? And that's really the heart of the book is trying to make sense of could you ever understand what the aliens want and why they do things? Can you even do basic communication with the aliens? Could you develop a language to talk to them? And even if you had that, could you ever really understand them and empathy with them?
Right?
Right? Because who knows nor what conditions they evolved, right, they could have evolved on their totally different conditions, and there are a sort of way we see the world could be totally different than the way they see the world.
Absolutely, it's very tempting to think about aliens and sort of star tricky with They're like us, but just a tiny little bit different. So talking to aliens is sort of like talking to somebody from the other side of the world that each stuff that feels weird to you, but you're capable of sort of extending and extrapolating from your experience to theirs. Yeah, do you hear? It's like aliens will be pretty alien and so it might even be that they're so puzzling that they just ignore you for forty years for reasons of their own. I like that element of it. It's a realistic sense of frustration and difficulty in the same sense that like remember that movie Arrival, aliens show up, it's just sort of like, what's your deal? What are you doing here? It's hard to even know how to begin communicating with them. They're so weird, right.
But I guess I have questions about the practicality of it, like how do you keep aliens hitting somewhere? Do you have to like put them in a cage habitat? And how do you feed them? What do they eat and poop?
Yeah? Right, so these aliens, they keep them under wraps. And the aliens are actually like self powered. So these aliens have pretty cool biological technology. They're actually post biological. They're like part nervous system, but the rest of them is sort of like advanced cyborgs. And they come with some internal power source, so I guess they don't need to eat for decades.
They have some sort of magical like nuclear something source inside of them, and then they're they're like in a cage or a dome or are they kept.
Yeah, so the government keeps them basically in the equivalent of Area fifty one, and it's been constantly trying to communicate with them, but they just sort of sit there, ignoring the scientists until the new Aliens arrive, and then everything changes.
What happens when the new Aliens arrive.
So the new Aliens arrive and they meet the main character, the protagonist, and then they try to rescue the original Aliens. They try to save the original aliens. So then the Protagon is the person that we get to know best, as the character actually ends up trying to serve as an interpreter between this new alien and the rest of humanity on this new Aliens mission to rescue the original Aliens from a third batch of Aliens that are coming to take them out.
WHOA, maybe we should have given a spoiler aler that sounds like a big part of the plot. So the new Aliens can communicate and do communicate with the main character.
They can and they have decided to, and so a lot of the book is about learning, like what's that like for the aliens? How to communicate with the aliens? Why haven't the original ones communicated and it's really fun and fascinating. And if you've read the book, I would love to hang out and have coffee and talk to you about it, but I don't want to give too much away about the sort of intellectual ideas behind the book, right right?
And so what do they look like? Are they humanoid? Do they look like a cube? What do the alien bodies look like?
They're sort of humanoid in my mind's eye, they look a little bit like the alien in the movie Alien. They have like a big long head and really really large eye, but roughly humanoid. But they're not like, you know, a big gaseous cloud or like a gelatinous cube or anything too weird.
So is that part of the conspiracy that the movie Alien actually came from the real aliens?
You just birth that conspiracy theory right here today. Man, good job, all right, but it spread disinformation.
I've done my duty for today.
So the whole character arc and the arc of the book is really about this character getting to know this one alien that's coming to rescue the others, and learning also sort of the larger context of the galaxy. How many species are out there, how many intelligent species there are? This kind of stuff so you know, from the point of view with somebody who's really curious about whether this is true in reality, it's fascinating for this character at least to get some answers.
Mmm.
Oh, I see that the new aliens that come and talk to our main character sort of give them the scoop on what's going on in the galaxy.
Yeah, a little bit, and sort of grudgingly.
What does that mean?
Those aliens are not here to educate us and share, you know, their intellectual wealth. They're here too save their brothers and sisters. So, you know, only when absolutely necessary do they give away a tidbit of information that we are desperate to learn.
I see the humans are like the annoying kid who keeps asking.
Questions, yes, yes, exactly.
How many of you are there? How do you achieve a faster than lightfouvel that kind of thing?
Exactly?
So does she paint a friendly universe out there or does she paint less sort of like a warring kind of hostile universe.
It's a complicated question. The picture she paints is that communication with aliens is complicated, is difficult, is maybe impossible, and potentially dangerous because meeting these aliens and talk to them could begin a conflict between humans and those aliens, and so it's not necessarily seen as like a good thing to establish communication with these aliens. It's a tricky topic.
I say it's tricky because you might say the wrong thing and the next thing you know, you're in a star war.
That's right, you say, Hey, didn't I see you guys in that movie? And then boom, humanity is eradicated.
The worst thing you can say to an alien, aren't you? The ones based on that movie Alien by Ridley's Cock, How dare you?
And that's why we don't send cartoonists to be ambassadorsy or anything.
Just keep them at home in Area fifty.
One, pencil and paper and that's it, all right.
Well, let's get into some of the signs that she talks about in her novel Lindcy Ellis's Axioms End, and then let's get to your interview with her. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the science fiction universe of author Lindsey Ellis and her book Axioms And, which is about aliens coming to visit us and giving us a cult shoulder exactly.
And it's about how to develop communication with aliens, you know, how you actually would get to talk to them and ask them questions and use them as a way to learn about the universe, and whether that's at all possible.
All right, so maybe step us through what are some of the interesting science bits that she uses or imagines or talks about in her book.
So the main character in the book is actually a linguist who went to UC Irvine.
No way, Why how did.
You get her degree? Totally? Yes? Absolutely nice to see UCI like appear in culture somewhere.
That's crazy. Why I'm not saying anything against your university, but it does seem like an unlike the university to pick. Does she have roots in California or something? How did she arrive at that? Did you ask her?
Yeah, she lives in Long Beach, and so I think she just wanted sort of like a nearby university, and the story takes place in LA I also suspect she didn't want it to be too glamorous, and the character is actually the kind of student we get at UCI, you know, first in her family to go to college, not very wealthy, and so I think it actually puts UCI in a good light. You know, it offers an opportunity for lots of folks to get an education.
Nice. So I guess maybe the main kind of science topic here is about communication with alien and I guess she pausites the question of whether it's even possible to talk to an alien, like, maybe they're so alien we can't even have a common basis on which to talk or communicate.
Yeah, And she uses the sort of linguistic knowledge of this main character to talk about how human knowledge is put together and trying to speculate about how an alien language might work and how you might sort of build the basic primitives you would need to learn to communicate with them. And so I give her kudos for like thinking it through. You know, it's not just like you start pointing it stuff and saying the words and then five minutes later you're having a deep conversation about philosophy. She does take us on that tour, and there's lots of you know, things that are misunderstood and subtle cultural references that aren't included in words. You know, there's a lot of that good stuff. But also she assumes that these aliens, the ones that arrived in her book, can have their language sort of cracked by this sort of linguistic analysis, that it's even possible to communicate with them.
Right, because I guess you have to assume, since there are a space faring civilization or species, that they do have communication at least between them. There must be some way, assuming there are sort of separate you know, consciousness and minds and things like that. It's not a hive mind or the borg, they must have some way to communicate themselves. So, you know, there must be something there that we can maybe decode or you know, figure out.
I think it's a pretty good assumption that aliens will communicate with each other, but whether we could decode it and figure it out. I think that assumes a lot about the way alien brains work and the way they think, and you know, the conditions under which they evolved. I think we want to be real about it. I think it would be really extraordinarily difficult. We'd be very, very lucky. I mean, there are still human languages that we have not decoded. Remember how difficult it was to decode like Egyptian hieroglyphics. If we didn't have the Rosetta Stone, we might not have ever figured it out. And so there's lots of difficulties there. Just because you have a speaker of that language doesn't mean you can decoded, right.
But you know, I guess the Rosetta Stone was hard because we didn't have anyone who knew those languages to talk to. But do you think maybe, you know, if somebody was alive, that you could maybe have a conversation and then start to figure it out. I imagine, if there is life out there in the universe, it must have some sort of commonalities to our life, what it means to be alive and not alive, and also physics and math and things like that, Right, wouldn't that give us some common basis to start.
With perhaps, But that's sort of the exciting thing about this question. We're hoping if we do meet alien life, it will surprise us that it will exist in ways we hadn't imagined were possible. It will communicate or think in ways that we never even thought of. That's the purpose of exploration, right to go out and beat the prized by reality to see when it disagrees with your preconceptions. And so it's sort of easy to imagine, Yeah, life could be sort of similar to us in these basic ways. We assume that these foundational things have to exist. But I'm hoping to be surprised, so I don't think it would make for a very fun book, though, you know, if aliens showed up and we just like couldn't talk to them for one hundred years, like not a great story, you know. So I get as a sort of literary device how she had to sort of assume aliens were similar enough for us to talk to them. But I think in the broader sense of our actual universe, it's much more likely to be much more difficult, if not impossible.
Right, And I guess it doesn't help if they're giving you the silent treatment like they do in her book.
Yeah, and it's much easier if aliens come here, which I think is less likely, right because of the distances involved. What if we get a message from aliens on another planet, really really far away, and then our communication is like takes twenty years to send a message. Imagine learning to speak a language across that kind of distance in time when you only get to like ask three questions and get three answers and then you're dead and like, you know, the next generation of scientists have to take it up.
Mmm, yeah, that would be pretty slow. All right, Well, let's talk about some of the other science bits here. So in her universe there are aliens all over the galaxy and how do they get around?
So in her universe, she tried really hard to make realistics, so she tries to stick to the physics of our universe. In her universe, there is life all over the galaxy, but intelligent life is very very rare. There's only a couple of species that are intelligent that have the capability to even eventually develop like spacefaring technology. And here I think she's trying to make a comment on this question about you know, like how common is life and how common is intelligent life. But these aliens don't have life faster than light travel, so they fly through the universe, you know, close to the speed of light on their awesome ships. But they're also limited in the same way we are by the vast distances between stars.
So how do these civilizations interact and stay cohesive?
Yes, so these civilizations these aliens are not actually very broad. It's like there's one alien planet and there's another alien planet. And something that she talks about in the book a lot which I thought was really interesting, is the possibility of like interstellar war. You know, would an alien species want to wipe out another one? Like if there were aliens found in a star ten light years from here, which is very very close cosmologically, why would they ever want to kill us? Right? What does Earth have that they need? There's plenty of like platinum and iron and oxygen and water in Jupiter and in Neptune. They wouldn't need to come to Earth to kill us to take it unless they actually wanted us as slaves. There's no reason in my mind they would actually need to have a conflict with us.
M does she cover that in her book, Like what's the reason behind this war?
Yeah, she does talk about that, and she takes this sense essentially all species are born in conflict. And it's very similar to another book we talked about once, Max Berry's book Providence, about discovering an alien species that's sort of weird and sort of feels a need to fight. The idea is that, like when you grow up on a planet, there are limited resources, and so you sort of learn to see threats. If somebody is so far from you that you don't see them as your in group, then they're in your outgroup, and that makes them a threat. So even if two communities, two aliens in different star systems, could actually live independently and not bother each other, there's sort of this natural tendency to see each other as a threat and then start pulling triggers.
People are jerks, basically.
Yeah, people are jerks, and I hope aliens aren't jerks, you know, But in her novel, they basically.
Are all right. So the aliens are there, they're at war, and they have cyborg bodies. They're sort of like super advanced or they just kind of evolved into this kind of cyborg mixed technology existence.
No, they are constructed, right, they build these bodies and they have really awesome capabilities. And I don't want to get too much into the detail because I don't want to spoil it. But it's this sort of host biological system and because if it, they can live for hundreds of years and they can repair themselves. You can do all sorts of cool engineering to these bodies that you could imagine. You could like replace your arm or get a new one or upgrade it or with all this kind of stuff.
All right, So it sounds like in general the books stays pretty close to science and ideas about linguistics. It's not like they're inventing a new kind of energy or particle or misconsidering any sort of dark matter notions or anything.
Right, No, there's no pin particle or anything crazy like that. You know. The science of the book is pretty well done, and she's made some choices about how aliens might be, which to my mind I think makes them a little more human than they're likely to be. But I also get why for a literary point of view, she sort of needed to do that.
Cool all right, And then so you got to talk to her.
I did. She was really nice and spend like a half an hour talking to me about aliens and what they might be like and what it's like to write a science fiction book where one of the main characters is really truly deeply alien. So we had a lot of fun. Awesome.
All right, Well here is Daniel's interview with Lindsey Ellis, author of the book Axioms, and.
All right, so I'm very happy to welcome to our program Lindsay Ellis, author of Axioms, and lindsay, why didn't you introduce yourself and tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
So, I mostly for the last ten years or so have been working in new media online video and to a lesser degree, podcasting, And like the whole time, I had been secretly plotting to be a science fiction author, but that only really came to fruition last year. Stickle a really a long time because getting published is really hard, especially in the sort of like weird nebulous world of commercial sci fi. But yeah, I after doing YouTube for about ten years and I still do it, like it's still kind of my main bread and butter. I published my first novel last July, and the second one on series comes out in October, and then we'll just take it from there.
Well, congratulations, I'm glad to see that science fiction is open to newcomers and makes the rest of us aspiring science fiction authors have a little bit of hope. Yeah, it difficult.
Yeah, I feel like I've noticed that a lot of like sort of the prestige novels lately, not mine, but like the last year's all the big winners of the awards were all debut novels. So yeah, it's pretty opening to new blood I think that, you know, science fiction lately has been a lot less reactionary than it has been historically.
Well that's great. So before we dig into the details of your book, we have a few questions. We ask every science fiction author to sort of orient them in the space. So here's some questions about science fiction in general. First question is sort of philosophical. Do you think that star trek transporters kill you and then clone you on the other side, or actually transport your atoms to your destination they kill you? No hesitation on that one, huh, Yeah.
I mean, sorry, science it is what it is. That's an easy one, guys. So I bet it's one of those things where it's like, just don't think about it.
Okay, So given that, would you use a teleporter? Would you use it to like get to go to the surface of Pluto or whatever?
No, especially since it'll work short range anyway. It's like, come on, guys, Like I feel like I'd be like that doctor in the second season of The Next Generation, the replacement doctor, who was like, no, I won't do the thing, Like yeah, it literally kills you.
All right. Well, in that case, what technology and science fiction would you most like to see become reality?
The one that cures is like cancer, and just like Parkinson's, I would really like to not have Alzheimer's, you know, I think that's my biggie. It's like I think for us, I assume you're like a millennial, is like, I think our generation is going to be one of the last generations that like doesn't really benefit from technology that can protect us from like Alzheimer's and demension, Parkinson's and stuff like that.
So that kind of sucks.
I feel like, you know, assuming civilization doesn't fall, which I you know, I'm not convinced that it won't. I feel like in the future there will be like really good preventative measures for certain diseases that we are just really commonplace now, and it would be nice to you know, be of you of a sound mind when you die. But like dementia runs really bad in my family. So that's something I think about a lot.
It'd be nice to live in a time when people look back and said, really that still happened to people, that's crazy. Yeah, last general question is what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Given the huge number of planets out there that seem to have earthlike conditions, why isn't that we haven't seen aliens or been visited by aliens or observed aliens on another planet yet?
I guess honestly, my answer is basically the answer that I gave in the book, although the answer in the book comes with a pretty huge asterisk that comes in the second book. Basically, I think that intelligent life is the is the extreme rarity. I think also people don't really take it to consideration how young the universe is, and you know, just the sheer number of stars that had to like go through life cycles in order to get to the complex elements that comprise our solar system. Now, you know, like a lot of stars had to go supernova for us to get things like you know, platinum and you know, carbon, all sorts of fun things. So I think it is very likely considering that, you know, intelligent life only popped about on Earth as a you know, result of a cavalcadive mass extinctions, and also kind of close to the end of the Earth's life cycle. You know, we're about like eighty percent of the way through. And what are the odds that would happen over and over, especially in a fairly young universe, you know, because I think we got like a few trillion years before heat death starts in earnest. So like, I think it's you know, I think it's a combination of the universe is still pretty young, and intelligent life is the filter.
Like it's hard, it's hard to cross that threshold.
I don't like, I don't I don't honestly buy the whole, Like, you know, we're going to kill ourselves argument and that's what that's where all the other aliens are because we would have to work pretty damn hard to wipe ourselves into extinction.
Well, I'm glad to hear you have faith in the survival of the species.
I mean, I don't have faith in the survival civilization. I'm just saying, if we like we're like cockroaches, it would.
Be really hard to wipe this out altogether. All right, So that's a lot of fun. I have a lot more questions for our author, but first, let's take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and process around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient deentse dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, we're back and I'm talking to Lindsay Ellis, author of Axioms, and let's talk about your book, which I really enjoyed. Congratulations on it. Thank you. Your story really talks a lot about sort of species conflict and the difficulties and dangers of communication and contact between different species. So tell me what drew you to these themes. What made you decide to make this the focus of your book.
Well, I think the thing about first contact fiction in general is it always is about some form of other capital O. Basically, it's always kind of dealing with a sort of anxiety slash curiosity about something that you yourself, as a reader or as an author, or as a culture I feel kind of disconnected from. And that's why, like invasion fiction is really common and you kind of have Like hgu Well's War of the World is a really good example of something that is both aware of the destruction that his culture is reeking but also really anxious about the idea of being invaded. You know, this coming on the heels of the Franco Prussian War and right before World War One. But I think, to me, because some people kind of like this sort of military science fiction thing where just like good versus evil, the tension comes from how do we defeat the bad invading thing? I just find narratives that are about trying to understand something strange and foreign more interesting, Like, just as a reader, I think, you know, I think those those kind of narratives are more satisfying. I think, you know, that's why people really liked A Rival, because like the entire book is not just about figuring out their language, but it's also figuring out what their deal is, you know, like what do they want? And those kinds of narratives to me, are just a lot more interesting than the you know, invasion narratives. But I enjoy invasion narratives too. Like I don't know if you follow me on Twitter or my YouTube channel, but like I tweet about Independence Day constantly because Independence Day is one of my favorite movies. So yeah, so it's like I love certain invasion narratives. I just don't think i'd ever write one, or well at least not a conventional one.
In the book, it seems like you're a little bit ambivalent about whether communication is something to aspire to, like we could understand these aliens, or whether it just sort of brings on danger. And so I wanted to ask you, in your universe, some of the folks see aliens as threats, you know, sort of despite the near infinite set of resources out there in the universe. So do you think that we pose like a threat to an alien civilization? Or are aliens only in danger if we see them as a threat? You know, why can't we just all share the vast amounts of platinum and water in the.
Universe, you mean, hypothetically or in the.
Book in reality, like in our universe.
Well, I think that really depends on like the situation, because like see people making like these really kind of wild speculation, like well, if really aliens really showed up, this is definitely what would happen. And it's like, you don't know how, you don't know, you don't know that. So I think people kind of get in their heads a little too much about what is logical. Whenever, when the reality is like if aliens showed up, they'd be coming with their own set of reasons and politics and culture and rationality, and we have no idea what that would be. I think in general, the idea that aliens would come for our resources is kind of silly unless that resource is specific to life on Earth, because obviously, like elements are you know, really common, like water is everywhere, you know, things that are common on Earth are common everywhere. You know. It's just like there are any number of reasons why they could show up and possibly be hostile or possibly you know, be not hostile. And I think that that's sort of like why it's kind of hard to make real speculation of like why can't we just get along as like, well, we don't know what their deal is, we don't know what their politics are, and we don't know what our politics would be when they showed up. You know. I think it's interesting to say, like, well, what would have happened if they showed up like in nineteen sixty, like at the height, like the most dangerous height of the Cold War, as opposed to like nineteen ninety five, when not a lot's going on, you know, and everyone's pretty chill, and you know, there's not any you know, rise in fascism yet that we would see in the two thousands. So yeah, it's just like it's it's a sort of conflation of scenarios. But I think the main thing, as far as human nature goes is we are very fearful and we humans have a very deep rooted instinctive in group out group mentality, and that I think would be the hardest thing for us to overcome.
So I hear that you're saying that these aliens are essentially by definition alien and maybe impossible to understand their motives and to communicate with them in reality like in our universe. In the book, it feels to me like maybe you wrote it sort of as a bridge, like I'm bringing aliens to make them a little bit more understandable, because true alien is this sort of hard to relate to.
Yeah?
Is that true? Is there a gap there between what you think is actually happening in our universe and what you wrote about in the book? Oh?
Absolutely, yeah, because that's sort of like a narrative function, like what is the story you want to write? And I think the thing about Arrival is the aliens aren't really characters like they don't really have personalities, and like I did want to have aliens with personalities and like you know, motivations and relationships and stuff like that. So it's like it had to kind of figure out where the line was to where it is like you know, looks alien and feels alien, but is still understandable. And that's part of why the actual work of decoding human language happens before the narrative even starts, because like that just I didn't want to tell the story of how we learned the language, Like that just wasn't the book I wanted to write. So yeah, I think that like the understandableness of of the aliens Amber stated in particular, it was a narrative function, but it was also just kind of like the story I wanted to write. I wanted the narrative to be like center on the relationship between these two.
Yeah, it's not that exciting a story. If the aliens show up and we just never figure out how to communicate with them, it's just like a big shrug for a thousand.
Years, right, Yeah, Or it'll be like an Enders game scenario where it's like we fight and then they just kind of stop one day and everyone's like, well, they'll be back, you know, and not actually know why they stopped fighting.
So in your book there's a lot of linguistic theory and discussion of the structure of the alien language. Do you think that in reality linguists would be like on the front lines of real life alien contact. No, No, absolutely not.
I think the thing people tend to forget about linguistics is it is a very tune to not just human syntax, but also the human mouth and sounds that we make, and like a full half of linguistics is just about the sounds, the phonemes, but also at the same time, there's just so much about like language acquisition that we haven't figured out yet. And the thing is, like, I think the easiest way, like there's a chompskin way to understand language acquisition, which was the one I ascribed to or at least in the in the in the context of the book, which is why in the book, human language is almost kind of described as algorithmic and basically if you kind of figure out the algorithm, you can decode any human language with enough context.
I wish I had that algorithm.
Basically, the idea being if the human brain is the hardware, language.
Is the software.
So if you don't have that hardware, then the software is completely meaningless. And this I think would work in reverse too. I think, you know, I'm not saying linguists would be completely useless, but I think like the study of human linguistics probably is not going to apply to a hypothetical alien language. I think that the most useful thing in that context would probably be like, you know, pattern recognition software, that sort of thing, because you know, it's like if you you look at people trying to figure out dolphin language, they're not human linguists, you know, So that that is why I think linguist wouldn't be terribly useful in this scenario.
Isn't any human attempt to understand the alien language going to be constrained in the same way like we could argue that mathematics is universal, but we don't actually know that. It could just be like a product of the way that our hardware works really no sense to alien mathematicians. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's hard to say because it's just like you're you're dealing with like incredible speculatives with also fundamentally like a line of thinking that you yourself are not capable of, which was kind of a weird thing with me, because it's one thing like where it's a book and you have to describe the sounds being made. You don't have like the fun luxury of like you know, a sound department making up sounds. But also like the you know, the alien language and how it operates as opposed to human language, like there would be overlaps, like it's a spoken language, like so it's not like through colors or smells or whatever. So it's like an oral spoken language, you know, and so therefore it uses phonemes, it uses sounds, but like the similarities kind of in't there, Like they don't really have words, they don't. It's more like a sort of cluster of phonemes that create a lump of meaning and you know, describing that in a way that you understand what it is. But at the same time you can't speak it and you can't think it because you don't, you know, you're a human brain that understands human language.
So then thinking about the bodies of the aliens, I thought there were a lot of really cool ideas in your story about how a species might like move beyond their biological origins. Do you think that's the future of humanity? Do you want to have an artificial body in the future?
Oh?
Man, that's what I don't like to think about, because it's going to be class based. You know, it's going to be you know, speaking of HG.
Wells.
You know in the Time Machine, when the time traveler goes into the future, he's like, oh, weird, two different species and it turns out like one of them is the rich people in one of them are the underclass. So I think that's sort of the thing that scares me a little bit about, like genetic engineering and transition humanism is like, oh good, another way we can really put into sharp relief the class divide. So it's sort of one of those things that I do kind of think. I think it's inevitable, but I don't think it's inevitable in a good way.
Right, Yeah. Well, down here in Orange County, I see a lot of folks with botox spaces, and I wonder if I really am the same species as some of the people around here. Anyway, next question I want to ask you is about the political question that you raised earlier about how we would respond in your book, there's a lot of information about the Aliens that's kept secret by the government. This is a key plot device you use. Do you think that's happening now that the government like has secret information about aliens or do you think it would happen if aliens did visit?
Uh? No, no, and no, cause I kind of put like why I think they couldn't keep this a secret in the book, like Nils, who's one of like sort of this chillian Asaundi character as a little polemic somewhere like halfway through the book where he talks about information sharing between agencies after nine to eleven made keeping a secret of this magnitude that involved this many people of like essentially impossible. But I think like whenever you see like the stuff that like the Pentagon released lately, people are like, oh, they proved its aliens, And it's like, no, you do understand that an unidentified flying object just means it's a flying object that the TETs unidentified, like they don't know what it is. So I'm very leary of that conspiratorial thinking where it's like you don't use evidence to come to a conclusion. You have a conclusion and use the thing as evidence and ignore anything else to the contrary. So I think it's it depends. I think like in this case, they genuinely don't know what it is, so of course they kept it secret, and I think historically.
That would have been the case.
But I think if they knew something definite, like no, you can't keep that a secret. That's way too big and it would cause a scandal like that, because that's what happens in the book, is like, if they like were deliberately keeping this thing a secret for such a long time, it would just cause such a massive scandal when it inevitably gets out. So that that's my take on the whole government conspiracy.
Well, I hope that's true. So then last question I have for you is about sort of constructing your universe. When you went out to write this novel. How important was it for you that the science of your universe be sort of the same as the science of our universe, That everything that happens there, you know, limitations on fast and light travel, et cetera, be the same as the ones in our universe.
Oll. I guess the funny thing is, like I wanted to write something that wasn't technically in contradiction to certain theories. I guess is the thing because, as I'm sure you know, you know, we haven't figured out the theory of everything yet, and there's just like a lot we don't know about, like the physics of the universe, And so I guess my thing was I actually I had a nuclear physicist is a German guy named Wolfgang, and he lives in Frankfurt, or he did. Whenever I talked to him about this, I was thinking, like, you know, whenever I figured out, like, well, what are the laws of physics of this universe? Do I pick one of the many potential theory of everything theories or do I just make one up? And I asked him, I was like, what do you think is the right one? And he's like, I like quantum loop gravity. I'm like, okay, well, when do you think ballpark? When do you think we're gonna nail it down? He's like, I don't know, two hundred three hundred years. I'm like, cool, So it doesn't matter. So basically I did. I went with a version of string theory, and so I tried to keep everything under the umbrella of things that would be theoretically possible. Let me put it that way, if this version of string theory is true, which we're probably not going to figure out in our lifetimes anyway.
Unfortunately, there are ten to the five hundred string theories which could be true. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and then the funny thing is like, since it's aliens, I don't need to say which one because they have a different name for it, see, and we don't know. So yeah, it was something that I thought a lot about, but also like I kept intentionally vague because you know, it's like they wouldn't have the same term for things that we do, so like some things would line up, like you know, I don't know gravity or light speed or stuff like that, but then other things, you know, they would have different terminology for it, like you know, dimensions or strings or stuff like that. Yeah, I guess it was just like I wanted to keep it vague, but also like technically theoretically possible, you know, like with idea of like telekinesis and stuff like that, and you know this basically just being a sophisticated form of manipulating electromagnetic fields and you know, condensing electrons and stuff like that. They're like, well, Okay, sure, you know that would take a lot of energy, so they just have a lot of energy.
Boom done. Like so yeah, awesome. Well I thought that was really fun and I was really appreciated that you sort of picked the set of rules and stuck to them. To me, that's a critical element of science fiction.
Oh, thank you thinking about it for a long time.
Appreciate it. Thanks very much for coming on and telling us all about your book. Why don't you tell our listeners about upcoming projects or things you have coming out soon?
Right? Well, Sequel to x TEMs In comes out in October. It is done, so it's in production as they call it at the publisher, And that one I think will probably be more relevant to the discussion of this podcast because it delves a lot more into like the science of the universe and like actually addresses the Fermi paradox and the origin of life and stuff like that.
Again, like just it's a fictitious.
Universe, but it's like, you know, it's fun to play with hypotheticals based on like, well, here is what we know, so how could it play out in other scenarios? And so that comes out in October. And other than that, I'm still doing long form stuff on YouTube that just comes out once every couple months or so because videos are really really long. I got one coming out in a couple of weeks about JK Rowling again.
So yeah, great, Well, looking forward to the sequel to your book. I'll definitely pick it up. Thank you, and thanks again for joining us and talk to us about all these crazy ideas.
Well.
Thanks a lot for having me, and I hope you guys have a good rest.
Of your plague.
All Right, that was a pretty cool chat. I love her thoughts about alieness and how she had to make the aliens alien, but you also kind of want to make them relatable so that you, as a reader, can identify with them.
Yeah, it's a tricky line to balance. I totally respect that, and I like that she separated sort of the idea she put into her novel, which is, you know, important for telling a fun story, with her ideas about like how the universe actually works. So that's pretty cool.
Oh, it sounds like she was a little conflicted, maybe like she thinks the universe might work this way, but for the writing of the novel, she had to portray a certain way.
Yeah, this is not like a scientific paper. Right, This is not like her idea for how she thinks the universe actually is. This is like, hey, here'd be a cool universe in which I could tell a fun story that would be enjoyable to read, you know, which is not the kind of constraint I usually have in my science papers.
You know, but do you do write science fiction? Daniel? Did this burry to write any science fiction stories or feature any more professors from UC Irvine.
I'd love to see more of UCI appearing in culture somewhere. And I think it's inspirational that somebody had a cool idea and tried writing and then was successful and was able to break into the industry. I always think it's a healthy community when a novice can break in and do a good enough job that they could actually be successful. So that's awesome to hear. And I think that everybody out there who's aspiring to write a science fiction novel is encouraged by it.
Cool. Well, if you are interested, please check out Lindsey Ellis's book axioms n you can, I'm sure find it everywhere, was a New York Times bestseller, and get to see her thoughts and her ideas and her stories about aliens coming to visit us and ignoring us.
It was a lot of fun, and she has a sequel coming out later this year, which I'm confident will also be fun.
All right, well, please check out her work and we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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