334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm presuming that a lot of Mindscape listeners are fans of, or at least have seen, Star Trek and Star Wars and various other TV shows and movie franchises where human beings have to interact with aliens, and there are obvious cinematic constraints which make it much easier to portray the aliens as more or less humanoid than as completely different kinds of organic beings. Even when you are allowing yourself some fraction of your aliens to be completely different than humans, you usually have some humanoid-looking aliens.

We all know that's not supposed to be a prediction, right? They're Making it easy for human actors to play the aliens as characters, as storytelling, as narrative devices, it makes perfect sense, even if we all know that the real world probably isn't like that. If there are aliens out there, they will probably look and biologically act completely different than us human beings. We don't have a good idea of what completely different means in this context.

but it means something very different, that much we can say. At least we can say that it probably is something very different. There are arguments that maybe there should also be similarities, but the differences can be large. But that's about what the aliens look like and how they biologically are put together. What about how aliens think?

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