Sara Imari Walker

You have like a story of a set of hypotheses and you can test individual parts of it and then try to validate it.

So it'd be kind of cool if, you know, like you wanted to try to do that.

But also why?

Because where would they put the power?

They didn't have any electric grids or anywhere to put it.

And yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of interesting questions you can ask about that kind of stuff, even in like deep time.

So, you know, like one of my colleagues, Adam Frank, had this paper on like the Silurian hypothesis, which is like the idea that there was like intelligent beings around the time of dinosaurs, like a dinosaur race.

And like, how would you actually look in the geological record for it?

And so like people can work out the mathematics of like, you know, what would be the traces of these, you know, like if if the Egyptians had this capability or if, you know, there were intelligent species that emerged on the planet long before humans and had enough technology, say, to like have radioactive waste or anything like you can you can actually like bound, you know, like what would we actually see in the record?

So it is possible still to constrain this stuff.

Even the most radical hypotheses.

So I've been raised in a tradition scientifically of entertaining any idea as long as it's something that we can actually test and measure.

And so I guess for me, I think some of the most creative ideas in science are things that people completely didn't expect.

Like what?

Well, I mean, I think I think Einstein's a great example.

You know, like he was one of the few people that took seriously that the speed of light, you know, is constant.

Like we take that for granted now.

But everybody thought that was kind of ridiculous.

And the experiments must be wrong because there's no way that the speed of light could be constant.

And he was like, no, the laws of nature are invariant.