Non Terrestrial Extra Terrestrials

for us on alien planets. Discover this and more as we answer the age old question it's the Holy Grail just a pile of Snot joining me today is friend of the show, particle physicist and host of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, Daniel Whitson, Welcome, Thank you very much, happy to be here and happy to join in the blasphemy. There's gonna be a lot of things spitting God's eye on this episode, I believe. And we've actually talked about

this a bit. I've been a guest co host on your show, Daniel and Jorgey Explain the Universe, and we've chatted from time to time about maybe the possibility of alien life. What do you think about that? Do you think that it's plausible that there are aliens out there. Are you a firm believer or are you a skeptic or are you a hoper? I am both a skeptic and a hoper. I think that it's quite plausible that there could be alien life out there, just because of

the mathematics. We know that the universe is huge. I mean, there are trillions of galaxies out there. Each one has hundreds of billions of stars, and we now know that most of those stars have planets, many planets, and frequently they will have earthlike planets. So the sheer number of places that lifelike hours could evolve is overwhelming. On the other hand, we haven't found any of it, and we don't really know what the chances are for life to evolve on some earthlike planet. Is it one in two

is it one in a gazillion. We just don't know. So I'd love for there to be life out there to talk to alien physicists about the secrets of the universe, but we just don't know. Well, here's a gotcha question. If there's life out there, why haven't they called us? I mean, they haven't called you. I've been chatting with them for years, Katie. I knew I wasn't in the intergalactic group chat. But it is a great question, it's a deep question, and it's a famous question. It's basically

the Fermi paradox. Fermi, a physicist from decades ago, said, Look, if there's so many planets and stars out there, and the universe is quite old, billions of years old, plenty of time for civilizations to flourish and explore the galaxy, why has nobody contacted us yet? And of course here we have to put in a corner all the theories of maybe pilots seeing UFOs suggesting that they actually are here, assuming that none of them have contacted us, it's a

great question, why haven't they? And there's a whole variety of theories suggesting that maybe aliens are maybe alien civilization is just sort of short lived, or maybe they're so alien that they're contacting us in a way we can't even imagine. Maybe their messages are washing over us right now, we just don't hear them. I choose to believe that whenever I'm missing a sock and I know I put

it in the washer and it's just gone. It's you know, it's I put two in the washer and one comes out, and I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this. I believe that there is some kind of alien interference there where they are trying to do some sort of you know, flattening of a wavelength to communicate with us, but then all they're getting is a pile of socks, and so they think that we are a very sock based society on Earth. And actually I have a physics

based explanation for your missing socks. Yes. No, I think they've all been sucked up into the hose zone layer in the upper atmosphere. Good. Yes, very good. No. It's a really fun question whether they're aliens and what they're like, and it also sort of reflects what we think about aliens, like we are capable of thinking about aliens and searching for aliens essentially only in the way that we can

think about aliens. But there's a possibility that aliens could be much weirder than we could possibly imagine, biologically, technically, culturally, in every sort of avenue. And I think that some evidence to back that up is that we keep finding stuff on our planet on Earth that is so alien to us that they are like in those sort of common depictions of aliens the most. You know, things that I see are things like basically a humanoid but green, with bigger eyes and maybe a huge head. You know,

there are some more creative portrayals of aliens. One of my favorites actually is in the more recent movie Nope. I don't know if you've seen that. Have you seen that, Daniel, I've not seen. Highly recommend Nope to you because the

depiction of the alien is really fun, I think. I mean, it's scary but also really fun because it is I'm not gonna say too much because I don't want to spoil it, but it's it's all They did somewhat base it in marine biology, but you wouldn't necessarily know that watching the movie, and it's it's it's just a very delightful take on alien life. But yeah, our imagination is often like, well, maybe it's like humans but blue and tall and they ride pterodactyls, and as you know, that's fun.

I'm going to say that's a bad way to imagine things. But maybe that's not what it's like, and we only need to look at our own animals here on Earth, especially the animals we find in the oceans, because they have had a very different evolutionary path from us, and it results in things that to us terrestrial animals look

very alien. And one I want to start with looks I mean, it looks alien in sort of a like I feel like in the sixties there were a lot of illustrations of alien planets that were just kind of surreal. Sometimes they'd be like covers to some weird book that you'd find at like a used bookstore. And this one kind of gives me that vibe of these just super surreal imaginings of like it's an alien, but it's just

a bunch of weird flanges. And it is called the malibe Veritas, and it well, I've shared an image of it with you, Daniel, how would you describe this thing? It looks like those toys used to throw against the wall that would stick and then sort of roll down the wall bit by. I mean, it just looks like

a sticky blob sticky hands, Yeah, sticky hands exactly. And you know, your comment about it looking like the sixties makes me wonder if our depiction of alien our imagination of aliens, basically just depends on what the artists would drug the artists recently, Yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting, and maybe the drug is somehow stimulating parts of the brain that haven't been active since we ourselves were in the ocean and we were surrounded by things

like this. That's not very scientific, but I like to think that way. But yeah, well, how long ago was this discovered? How long have we been aware of the middlibivorids and it's bizarre alien sticky hands. Now, we have been aware of it since the late eighteen hundreds. I believe that doesn't mean it is something that's well known. So it is a new to brink, which is a

type of sea slug. Now, what I'm seeing here is basically it is this pale green thing that has like a flat, translucent pancake for a head, and then off of that is a long tube, and then coming off the tube are these like little paddles that kind of go down its sides, and there's six seven seven of them on each side. I'm just describing what I'm seeing in this photo. And we're sure this thing is not

actually an alien. I mean, if aliens actually came to Earth and land in the oceans, would marine biologists just be like, look at the weird things our oceans can produce. Yeah, I mean we would probably have no way of knowing unless we could somehow trace any Like It's not like we could necessarily find alien DNA and no, it's alien DNA if they're using the same amino acids that we ease.

So yeah, I mean we wouldn't necessarily know. I'm going to say the fact that they were able to track it to other species of Neoda branks and sea slugs means that it would have to be all or nothing, Like every sea slug would have to be an alien or none of them are, which you know, jury's out on that. But and do we understand the form of this,

like why does it have a transparent pancake head? Can we understand everything that this thing is about in terms of like it's evolution, you know, it has to have this kind of head to survive this kind of experience or this kind of environment. Or is it really just like the random walk that evolution can do through time. Well, we don't know everything about it, but we do know some things, and we do know about it's weird pancake head, So it has this weird disc like protuberance on its

head and it's called the oral veil. So it has actually lost its radula teeth, so ragula or like it's like a little circle teeth that you find on things like snails and slugs, and it does not have a ragula, doesn't have these teeth, and so instead it uses this disc of very thin flesh as a net, so it kind of casts this out searches through the substrate. It actually likes to be on the ocean floor, not the deep ocean, but just like you know, sort of a

medium level ocean floor. It can swim freely, but it spends most of its time snooting around in the substrate, in the sand of the ocean floor, and it'll stick this weird disc out onto the sand, onto the substrate. And can it eat pancakes with its pancake head? That would be a door. I don't know of it eating pancakes. I think they'd have to be very small pancakes, maybe

like miniature crepes. But Communion Wafers commons this is well, it's funny you mentioned this because there is a species of Malibe that gets a little bit religious or at least has a cult like following. So uh, but for for most malibe, this oral veil, they lay it out there, they're searching, and then it has all these papillae. So popila are just sort of sensory buds on something. We have papillae on our tongues. There's popila on a lot

of different things. Um, but these ones are specifically to detect prey. And then once one of these are triggered by, say, like a tiny crustacean, it quickly retracts its oral veil like a big net that you're casting in, and it pulls in its prey like a teeny tiny crustacean, and it eats it. So it is a predator, which I always I find it just a little extra creepy whenever we find something that's weird looking that is a predator. Mm. Yeah,

it's very sneaky. It doesn't look ferocious. No, it looks like you could just sort of step on it and move on. I mean we could. But how big is this thing? Is it like the size of a bathtub or the size of your hand. Gosh, if it was, I would just I would leave Earth. But no, it's this one species very inside, this one, the voritus species is about I think it's a Yeah, it's fifteen centimeters long or around six inches long, so it's not that big, but it's also not like microscopic, so it's it is.

It is a thing, right Like, I feel like six inches is definitely a threshold for me where if I find it crawling on me, I'm up set. Especially if it hunts in packs, right, like, five thousand of these things could probably take you down. Well, I don't know that they hunt in packs, but they do congregate, so especially for mating. Now, there are many species of Malibe that are found throughout the Indo Pacific tropical oceans. One

of them is called Malibe leoneida. It is it can vary from sort of a greenish color to a pinkish color, and they can sometimes be found in these large clusters in kelp forests. And they are probably clustered like this because they are exchanging genetic information with each other and

a big party. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that they have both male and female gonads at the same time, and like other species of malibe, they do mate together and fertilize their eggs internally, which they will lay in long ribbon like strands, so you know they have a fun and free love life. And do biologists speculate that if there are oceans on other planets that life may have formed in that the same sort of structures may arise.

Do they think these things are inevitable? Like do we see multiple convergent forms of evolution getting to this sort of structure on Earth? Or is there just like one

example here and it may be weird? You know, it's interesting because there are I don't think all biologists are agree on this, but I have seen and I personally kind of subscribe to this idea that there are things that happen so frequently that if you have similar circumstances, Right, if you have a planet that has conditions similar to Earth and you're lucky enough to get that primordial soup or like I've probably talked about on the show before,

it's probably more of a primordial baklava, just these layers of mineral or rock in between which these little protein chains kind of hide out and form these chains and then are able to start to create sort of the building blocks of life, the DNA strands. And so once you have that, I think a lot of these structures, given the same pressures, are pretty inevitable. So, for instance, one of the I don't know if you can describe it as alien because it's so familiar to us, but

it is very strange is the octopus. And when we see the octopus, we're like, oh, it's like a little noodly puppy that we found in the seat. Because it's got these big eyes. It's very kind of curious. You can sort of almost feel the octopus's emotions in a

way by watching its body language. There's this idea that maybe they dream because they change their color patterns in their sleep, and it seems to be like maybe they're having a dream about hunting because the color patterns on their skin they're chromatophores that change color, are do sort of a hunting pattern while they're asleep, and then they play. They like will toss objects in water over and over again, which seems pretty indicative that they're doing it for fun.

And they have evolved completely independently from almost all life on sort of the terrestrial part of Earth, Like we diverged from octopuses back from like basically a flat worm stage, like from this little tiny worm. So they evolved all these things independently, like these complex eyeballs. They're complex brains. They evolved that independently from all mammals, all reptiles, birds,

other fish. So this idea that isn't that like a really hopeful sign for those of us who are looking forward to talking to aliens and intelligence sort of evolves in two different environments and ends up sort of similar. Yeah, I think it is, and I think that I think what we have to think about in terms of intelligence is like when we communicate with other animals, it can be really difficult, especially when we try to communicate using

human like communication methods. So there's these famous examples of trying to teach primate sign language and so far really hasn't worked that well. There's the stories of like Coco the gorilla and nim Chimski the chimpanzee, And even though there was a lot of sort of pr about Coco of having the sign language work, it wasn't really clear that it did. The project with nim Chimsky really didn't

work out that well. And I think the deploy on Gnome Chomsky it is because it was actually they named it as sort of a a tse, a little bit of a jape making fun of Noam chompsy because they were trying to, I think, prove Noam Chomsky wrong to say that no chimpanzees could learn a human syntax, whereas g. Noam Chomsky was skeptical of the idea that primate language has some of the necessary characteristics that human language has. And ultimately, I think in their their project wasn't very good.

It wasn't well designed. I mean, neither of these sign language projects with either of these apes were particularly well designed, so it's hard you know they were not. It was not a good study. It was not like a double blind study because like the caretakers really loved the like Coco the gorilla, and so when they would interpret the signs, they would maybe a lot of it would be sort of what they are sort of interpreting in that situation.

So there was not really any evidence that the primates could use sign language in the way that humans could. But I think that it is a little bit of hubris for us to think that we could communicate with something by making them come to us and use like our form of language. And like, Also, it was pretty weird because the all the sign language studies were done sort of without the input of people who actually use sign language. So the death community was not super involved

with these experiments. And sign language is not just like verbal language that's been put on your hands. It's got its whole own unique syntax and like it's a very unique language itself. And so we have this idea that you can just kind of take another either form of language or different type of intelligence and then plaster it over our own or use some kind of translation technique and then kind of just be able to understand it

or communicate by doing that. But I think we have to be more flexible in that, and we would have to figure out how to meet them at least halfway, right, How do you communicate with a primate without forcing it into learning a human language. How do we kind of figure out what their communication style is? Can we actually meet them somewhere in the middle there kind of like I feel like anyone who owns a pet has experienced this where it's like if you try to talk to

your dog using English, like, hey, don't do that. You know, they don't know what you're talking about. You know, they might respond your tone of voice a little bit, but ultimately they don't understand. But if you learn kind of their method of communication, right, Like I've learned sometimes when my dog is upset, if I just sort of comfortingly say like, oh, it's okay, like that doesn't do anything.

But if I do a dog body language thing like do you sort of a play bow or do a little sort of a play bark or something that actually perks her up gets her to calm down more, because I think we have to hear you speak, dog, what's a playbark? Sound like? It sounds like and she loves that, And so you're kind of like, so you're using your and you know she's coming halfway to me, right because she knows when I say sit, stay, you know, so she's trying to understand me. So I owe it to

her to try to understand her. And I think that is a lesson we can learn from our own animals. If we're ever fortunate enough to actually come into contact with aliens, I think we need to really understand that we may have to work very hard to reach a midway point where we can both be understood, and we might still have to pick up their poop, even but alien poop might be nice like smell like flowers or

pancakes or communion wafers or something. What if pancakes has just been alien poops the whole time, But if pancakes are aliens and we've been eating them and they're mad, No, I think the takeaway is that you're saying intelligence may not be that unusual, but even intelligence here on Earth, it's hard to cross that barrier from our sort of mental frame to theirs, which makes me less less enthusiastic or less optimistic that we could learn to communicate with aliens, unless,

of course, we fall in love with them first. I'm still optimistic that we could. I think it would just take a It would take a kind of flexibility, like we can't necessarily just expect to be able to decrypt some kind of alien language. We may have to figure out an entirely new method of communication. But I think it can be done. Now back to this wonderful new to brank. I did promise I was going to talk

about piles of snot and here we go. So Malibe Kolmani, which is one of these weird new to branks, the ones that look like a pancake mixed with one of those like sticky hands that you throw at the wall. They are found near Malaysia, and it is dubbed the Holy Grail of newda Branks because a lot of nature photographers think it is the weirdest looking thing also the hardest to actually spot. It is described as looking like

a pile of strings or snot so. Its body is actually mostly transparent, like really weirdly transparent, almost completely see through, except for this network of tubes visible throughout its ghostly body. It's kind of like do you know the Bodies exhibition where they show like the human circulatory system just kind of like on its own. It kind of looks like that. I've never been to the Body's exhibit because it scares

the pants off at me. I couldn't. But this is like that, Like you see this network of tubes and it just it doesn't look like it has a body because it's so translucent. The tubes that you're seeing are actually digestive glands, and this see through appearance, and then these digestive glands may act as camouflage, making the nutabrinc look like just a pile of debris, nothing interesting. It looks to me like some sort of delicate fungus, like it might be good pizza. It would be a very

interesting mouth feel to eat one of these. I bet what's interesting about this and makes me think of aliens is that when you look at this, what all we're really seeing are its digestive glands, because that's all we can see, and so our understanding of what this creature is is only based on the thing that we can see.

And I know that in astrophysics and particle physics sometimes it's hard to to see something, or our perception of the thing that we're seeing in the universe is made more complex by the fact that we're only seeing a part of the truth. And then the real meat of the thing, whether it's like a black hole or a planetary body, is only really defined by the stuff that we see around it, the stuff that we see that

is visible. Like we can see the outline of this sea slug by its digestive system, but we can't actually see the flesh of the sea slug. It's sort of weird. I always wonder why things become transparent, like evolutionarily, why would you want people to get to see your inner bits. It sort of makes you more vulnerable or like they know like where to bite you to get you. It seems to be like a. It's a nice defense layer to not be transparent. It's an interesting idea because a

lot of times transparency helps as sort of pattern and disruption. Right, So if you are, say neuter brank shaped, something that sees you is going to have an instinct to go after that pattern, like, this is a pattern. I recognize. This slug shape is good. It's like when you see something that is vaguely bagel shaped or spaghetti shaped, you're like,

that's food. I eat that. But then if it's sort of transparent, but you only see the inner workings of it, especially when it's kind of like huddled up somewhere, like with these photos, the photographers are intentionally trying to get it against a more neutral background so that you can actually see what it is. But in the first photo you can see it's kind of just intermingled with a bunch of coral. And so because there's no clear pattern

to this thing, it's not necessarily going to register. So even if you could technically see its inner workings, it has disrupted the typical pattern that predators look for. And so you actually see this also in frogs like glass frogs that are transparent, like to us, it's like, oh, well, you can see all of its little organs going like you would know where to if you were a froggy murderer, you'd know exactly where to stab. But if you're a predator,

you're not really looking for a frog heart. You are looking for frog shape. And if that's not pattern matching to what you imagine a frog to look like, you are less likely to have your predator instinct triggered, and then you are not going to go after it. So tell me about this weird thing? What about this makes you feel like aliens? One gives you an alien vibe? About this just because it's weird? Or is there something specifically about it that if you saw it, you think like,

is this extraterrestrial? I think what makes me think about aliens is if we ever find an alien, there may be parts of the alien that are not visible to us or detectable to us, and only other only certain other parts of the aliens. Like what if we are only able to see certain aspects of the alien when we think that we either don't recognize it as alien life or don't recognize that, hey, this is just its digestive system, whereas the rest of it is either not visible,

or some other kind of weird thing going on. I mean, like, you know, there's a lot of weird stuff in the universe like that I barely understand in terms of matter. Now, in terms of biology, I find it difficult to believe that an animal could exist on some other dimension than just one. But you know, there's so much I don't know about the universe, and especially like how life could be presented in the universe, that I could believe that

we might if we ever see an alien. We might only see sort of traces of it or evidence that it's there, But then we can't actually see the alien itself because it is not It exists in a way that is not perceivable by our eyes or by our instruments. And maybe even these weird little guys have aspects to them that we can't see. Who knows. I mean, we are always discovering new things about animals that we even

know about that are not visible to us. There are animals that biofluoress that we are just discovering, not because we lacked the technology to see it before, but because we lacked the creativity to collect a bunch of roadkill and then flash UV lights on it to see if they glowed. And now that we're doing that, we're finding a lot of animals biofluoress that we didn't realize that they did, and we had no way of knowing until we actually looked for it. What kind of roadkill? What

kind of road kill glues in the dark? Well, I mean platypuses glow in the dark. I think wombats glow in the dark. I think Tasmanian devils, sharks, some issues of shark, some species of frog. So yeah, there's a lot. It's a great lesson that even critters here on Earth can do things that we can't imagine, and so of course aliens might be doing even stranger things out there. Right exactly, Well, we are going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we're gonna look at a

pretty fishy alien. So we are talking now about anomalops ketop tron. In the light of the day or in a flashlight, this looks like a pretty normal fish. It's not that exciting. So why am I bringing it up. I don't know. I want to bore you. So it grows to be about fourteen inches long or thirty five centimeters. It has brownish scales, black fins, and other than having pretty large eyes, it's really not that interesting looking. But

it doesn't really live in the sunlight. It is actually found in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean at depths up to one thousand, three hundred feet or around four hundred meters, and it lives mostly in sort of dark caves, and in the dark they look really spooky. They look like fishy aliens with evil glowing eyes. It is also known as the split fin flashlight fish, which shows you

that scientists aren't exactly always wordsmiths. We know scientists are terrible at coming up with names for things, but this one does look like a really creepy fish. It looks like a fish somebody stepped on and it got mad. Yeah, I mean. The thing that strikes me about the eyes is, you know, sort of like our perception of what an alien looks like the cartoon alien, it's like maybe a gray head and then two sort of mean green glowing eyes.

They kind of have the spider Man mask look on them, where it's like, you know, just these angry green eyes and they're glowing and they're big, and this looks exactly like that. This just looks like the angry alien eyes that I see sort of in cartoonish depictions of aliens, and that tells you something about like our whole vision

of aliens. You know, when people reach for the concept of an alien, maybe they're really just thinking about the weirdest kind of critter they've ever seen, which means we haven't even really done the job imaginationally of coming up with an idea that is truly beyond our planet. I have a completely unverified theory about glowing alien, big glowing alien eyes, and that I think it taps into maybe a fear we had going way back of eyes that we could see at dust or at night that would glow.

Have that it eyes that glow at night that belong to like mammals, usually big cats. They glow because they have something called the tepetum lucidum, and it's light kind of enters the eye and it does this double refraction so that you get more light in the eye so they can see better, but also that light is reflected

back out and that's why the light glows. But a lot of predators have this so they can see at night, and so us as either early humans or human ancestors like when you see big glowing eyes at night, that's a predator probably looking at you. Especially if they're front facing glowing eyes, that's probably from some kind of predator that's, you know, stalking you. And so I think that big glowing eyes probably inspire a bit of fear in us that might go back way way before we ever even

had a concept of aliens. And so are you saying if we meet the aliens and their eyes glow, they're more likely to be predators. If their eyes face forward, they're also more likely to be predators. So anything that looks like us we should be afraid of. If humans get off that ship, then run run. So these glowing eyes are actually not eyes at all. These are glowing

sacks of bioluminescent bacteria. Yuck. Yeah, I mean, you know, like a kombucha that kind of got out of hand, am I. Let's say, yuck the kombucha also not on the kombucha train. Look, I'm very sensitive to like strong flavors, especially strong sour flavors. I can't deal with yogurt. I think that I think it has I have some instinctive response to something that taste spoiled, and I get a

kind of gag reflex, So now I get it. But the weird thing about this, right, I just told you that these aren't eyes, But if you look at that gift that I sent you, I'll also make all of these available in the show notes. It is blinking. It's blinking that big glowing not an eyeball. So it actually has a flap of skin and muscle that can contract

and blink. So you look at this and you're like, oh, maybe this is just a bioluminescent patch, but then it blinks at you and it really looks like an eyeball. Now it is. It has puzzled researchers for a long time as to why they can blink these eyes. There are currently a few theories. But Daniel, do you have any ideas for why they might want to blink this bioluminescent patch. Yeah, I think they're charging up their laser

beams to fry you. I mean they do. I think it's a fully I think it's a fully operational death fish. I mean it looks that way. And also the eyes look angry. They look not just angry, they look malevolent. They look like little demon fish that are plotting our downfall. Well, so this blinking is not done like how we blink our eyes. So we blink our eyes mainly to sort of remoisturize them to clean them so that we don't go around and just get sticky dust and junk in

our very delicate, sensitive eyes all the time. This blinking seems to be a mysterious morse code that changes depending on what they are looking at, So it seems to be both a form of communication, camouflage, and also to be able to hunt their prey. Fortunately for us, they hunt zooplankton at this time and not people. What if

some of your listeners are zooplankton, Now they're freaked out. Oh, I apologize to all my zooplankton listeners, but they're so small they can't rate my podcasts, so I'm not too worried about that. They look downloads are downloads, all right. So researchers have found that these fish blink at different rates when presented with prey, with predators, and in the company of their school, their group of fish. So these blinking rates seem to have an impact on the behavior

of their school. So like they seem to blink at different rates and that changes which direction the school goes whether they stay or whether they kind of dart off in another direction. And we haven't really decoded what the flashlight fish is Morse code is, but we suspect it has some kind of communication with its school. And it's also blinked when a predators around to sort of put it off its track, like blinking at a rate that

confuses the predator. And then it also blinks when it is around it's prey, so that it can see the prey but also doesn't scare off the prey. Well, I'm glad there's some explanation for this creeping is. I love the angle on these eyes, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, classic, like classic bad guy, you know, glowing evil eyes. I just I do love that we know they have a Morse code, and we suspect that they are communicating with it,

but we don't know what it is yet. And I really wonder what we will find out if we ever decode this blinking language that these fish have and what they've been saying about us behind our backs. Maybe we should show it to gnom Chimski. Maybe the chimp can decoded, right, Maybe all these other creatures on Earth has language that we don't understand we're all talking about us. I do love the idea of Nim Chimsky becoming a linguist but also a chimpanzee at the same time. I want to

I want to see Chomsky versus Chimsky. I mean, if Nim Chimsky wasn't I believe dead at this point, that would be no contest that chimp would definitely win. I mean, Chomsky, are you talking about? Chomsky is still sharp. We've had him on our podcast in a debate maybe Noam Chomsky, and when if it was a wrestling match, Chomsky would be torn to shreds. That's terrible. I don't even want to imagine wrestling a chimp. Oh my god. I know if you've seen Noam Chomsky recently, he looks like a

very ancient Santa Clause, and I feel very protective. I will protect him from chimps. I'm gonna go have a communion way for to cleanse my mental power after that image. Didn't you you got didn't you get a statement from Nom Chomsky at one point for one of your books. Yeah? Absolutely. He was on our podcast and we were talking to him about how to communicate with aliens and whether they are likely to speak our language or use mathematics. He's

a surprisingly responsive guy. You could just email him and he writes back, Oh, that's so nice. He's such a sweet guy. I feel bad that I even imagined chimpanzee harming Nom Chomsky. You've offended me and all the Zooplankton listeners, and really, who else is left? Please don't tell Noam Chomsky that I had talked about no Chimsky tearing him limb from limb. I don't think he would appreciate that. We wish him nothing but the best, exactly. So now

on to our last alien looking animal. I'm actually not sure. I feel like I'm between this looking like an alien or looking more like a galaxy or a quasar. This is the Lion's main jellyfish, and it is one of the largest jellyfish in the world and one of the longest animals in the world. How big is it? I can see from the picture that it's like long and beautiful, but I can't tell if it's like three inches long

or like thirty feet long. Yeah. So there's a whole range of these jellyfish, and a lot of the jellyfish that will be found will be smaller, but there are ones that can grow to gargantuan sizes. So the bell, which is that cuplike shape on the top of the jellyfish, grows up to two point one meters or seven feet in diameter, and it's tentacles can grow to be around thirty seven meters or one hundred and twenty feet long. Oh my gosh, wow. And they have over a thousand tentacles.

So it just looks like this forest of things. It looks like I mean when you look when we look at the colorized photos of other galaxies or you know, just these like clouds of material in the universe. To me, it kind of looks a little bit like this thing. But if this thing is like meters and meters long and there's thousands of them, then you're telling me it's like tens of thousands of total tentacle for a single

for a single critter. So if each tentacle is like thirty seven meters and there's thousands of them, then you have like thirty seven thousand total meters. Yeah. Yeah, you could probably wrap one of these guys around like the moon. Not that I'm saying you should. That would be animal cruelty. But yeah, and they do contain stinging cells, which sounds like a super bad time. Fortunately, the lion Maine jelly's sting is not that potent, so it's not that dangerous

to humans. In fact, in small amounts, it may just feel kind of like a tingling, warm sensation maybe followed by a bit of discomfort with a lot of contact. Like if you just dive put your whole body into the forest of its tentacles, then you're probably going to have a bad time. You're probably going to experience a good amount of pain, and you'll probably want to go to a hospital, if not just to check in on why you are diving into a forest of tentacles. But

these actually don't really kill people. It's really rare that it hurts people that badly because they just really aren't that potent. But they are so huge they can have a number of victims that they annoy. A single Lion's main jellyfish is so large. One specimen that kind of disintegrated, it broke up, ended up stinging over one hundred and

fifty people at a beach in Rye, New Hampshire. So this thing just kind of like broke up and all of its stinging tentacles and everything started floating around, and just one hundred and fifty people ended up in this dead jellyfish soup and got stunned. Yeah. See, I'm telling you it's kilometers of pain. Kilometers of pain. That sounds like a really moody book by like by a jellyfish alien exactly. Yeah. And when it's out of the water. In the water, it just looks like this weird spectral

floaty ectoplasmic thing. And out of the water it kind of loses its form. It's so gelatinous and so sticky, it just kind of turns into what looks like a pile of liquid jelly and it is. It's just very it's a very strange looking thing. Now, if you google Lion's main jellyfish, you might see a photo of it that it's actually photoshopped, where like it's this tiny scuba diver next to this giant jellyfish. I think that jellyfish itself is a real photo. They've just like made the

scale make it look more impressive. But that photo is fake. However, like I said before, they can get to be huge. So I don't know why people put out fake stuff

about animals that are really actually extremely cool. Yeah, exactly, the reality is weird enough people, exactly exactly, But like, do you think, because like this thing makes me think of just a an entire galaxy or quaisar if there is an animal or an intelligence that arises out of like a massive amount of material out there in the galaxy, if they have some kind of communication or relationship in terms of like physics, what like I think there's this

idea of like, well, what if you could have some kind of consciousness that's like this big thing that arises from these maybe planetary bodies or stars in space that are responding to each other and communicating via these sort

of like the just the laws of astrophysics. Well, if that's the case, it would be thinking extremely slowly because remember there's a speed limit to how fast information can move through the universe, the speed of light, And so if something is really really big, it'd have to think basically really really slow because like a thought would take you know, a thousand years to cross from one side of its brain to another if it's a thousand light

years wide. So it would be pretty hard to have a conversation with like a galaxy sized jellyfish be like talking to a tree in or something. I mean, that's really interesting to be because you know, if that is the case, you know, that would explain why we don't have a galaxy talking to us like hey humans, yeah we're over here. But it's also reminds me of in animals, there is this concept of sort of a different way

that different animals experience time. So it's something called flicker fusion rate, which is like the amount of information you can receive before it all starts to kind of blend together, so the amount of frames per second you can experience. So something like a fly, one of the reasons you can't catch it like smack it is that it can experience a lot of frames per second, which actually slows things down for it, and then having fewer frames of

a second actually speeds things up. So something like a fly is experiencing things really slowly, so when you try to slap it down, it sees your hand moving towards it, you know, really slowly. This this is the theory behind like flicker fusion rate, whereas something like an elephant actually uh is seeing you know, potentially has a sees things

happening much faster. Around it, So, uh, it is maybe seeing like smaller animals just kind of like you know, going high speed around it, whereas it's moving very slowly and it's got a lower frame rate and uh, and it maybe is experiencing all the world around it going really fast, um, whereas it's going at its own pace. So it's that's an interesting idea for me to be

applied to. Like what if there are aliens out there or some kind of alien intelligence that spans over some large area in a in a non conventional way that we we don't think of. Intelligence is something that could happen outside of just like an animal or organic creature, but there could be some huge intelligence. It's just thinking so slowly and on such a slower rate we can't really communicate with it. Yeah, exactly. I feel that way as I get older, Like younger kids just like flipped

by me and I'm just like, what was that? Oh that was my toddler. Yeah, Now that's that's how I feel like with language, Like I used to be able to catch on to slang a lot faster, but now it's like, wait, we're not saying fleek anymore. Really, by the time you and I are saying it. It's definitely it's gone not cool anymore. In fact, it might be because we're saying it that it's no longer cool. That's

how you know it's jumped the shark. Well, before we go, we do have to play a little game called the Mystery Animal Sound Game or Guess Who squawk in So every week I play a mystery animal sound and you, the guest and the listener try to guess who is making that sound. It could be any animal on Earth or outside of Earth. I'm not I'm just saying if we ever hear aliens, they're fair game for this game. So last week's mystery animal sound hint was this. This

is one peeved, pissed, particularly provoked pond paddler. Did you hear that? I did? It sounds like some kind of bird in distress. I'm gonna say it's a heron. You're weirdly close but also weirdly far away because this is the platypus. So congratulations to Antib and Joey P who I think are the rating champions of the animal gissing game. So the platypus is a monotrem found in Australia, like a heron. It lays eggs, and it actually has a bill, but unlike the heron, it is a mammal. These are

warm blooded mammals that lay eggs. This is the same thing that other monotreams do. So montreams include platypuses and a kidnas and in a lot of ways they are like the rust of mammals, but in some ways they are very strange, such as laying their eggs, and also they do not have nipples, but they do provide their young with milk, and they do that by releasing the

milk through pores in their skin. Another weird platypus thing is that males have venomous spurs on their hind legs that are incredibly painful, probably worse than the lion maine jellies. So you have more to worry about in terms of getting stung from a cute little platypus than you do from a gargantuan jellyfish. So the best thing about platypuses,

in my opinion, is that they have electoral reception. They can actually sense small electrical impulses through the water with an organ in its bill, and it can locate prey such as worms or other invertebrates, even in muddy water, by detecting the electrical pulses of their muscle movements. So that is an incredible thing with these platypuses, and it makes me wonder if like there are aliens out there that have senses that humans don't have that makes it

easier for them to see us, but we can't see them. Wow, exactly. Yeah, there might be parts of the universe that they can see that we can't, and so we might like weirdly glow in their senses. I just I wonder if there's like a corner of the universe where all other life is and they're having a big old party they have, like you know, an interplanetary convention, and we're just not invited because we're too far away, I know, or maybe we're just not cool. We're not saying you aren't kind

of sling. That's that is planetary levels of fomo. I cannot handle that well. I do know from a physics perspective that every time we look deep into the universe, we find something weird and new and totally surprising that nobody on Earth anticipated. So I expect that if we ever do get to see the surface of alien planets. The same thing will happen so onto this week's since thory animals sound the hint is this a tiny wolf or something else? So, Daniel, do you have any guesses

as to what that sounds like? A koala bear taking communion as it gets on a ufore, maybe no idea. You may be right, but you'll only find out on next week's Creature Feature. Danielle, thank you so much for joining me today, listeners. If you think you know what this week's mystery animals sound is, you can write to me at Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com. Daniel. Where can people find out more about you and about

the universe? You can come check out our podcast at Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe of production of iHeartRadio wherever you get your podcast. And thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, I read all of them, I print them out, I plaster my walls with them, and it is making my husband very nervous as to how it's gone with me. And thanks, so be nice, y'all.

Be nice when you leave a rating. There's real people out there reading the and thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts like the one you just heard. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or Hey gus what wherever you listen to your favorite shows. See you next Wednesday.