Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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ones that you're describing, if they're there.
Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, I worry about it. Yeah.
I mean, just think about us with microbial life, right? Like we used to once be cells. And for most of human history, we didn't even recognize cellular life was there until we built a new technology, microscopes, that allowed us to see them. Right, so it's kind of weird, right?
They're close, they're everywhere.
Yeah, super close, super close. Like, yeah, I mean, everything on this planet is like, it's like pretty much the same thing. Like the space of possibilities is so huge. It's like, we're virtually identical.
Yeah, this is kind of cool. I'll answer the question in a second, but it's just maybe like this idea of flickering lights and intelligence is interesting to me because I, you know, like we have such a human centric view of alien intelligences that a lot of the work that I've been doing with my lab is just trying to take inspiration from non-human life on earth.
And so I have this really talented undergrad student that's basically building a model of alien communication based on fireflies. So one of my colleagues, Orit Peleg, she's totally brilliant, but she goes out with GoPro cameras and films in high resolution, all these firefly flickering. And she has this theory about how their signaling evolved to maximally differentiate the flickering pattern.
So she has a theory basically that predicts this species should flash If this one's flashing like this, this other one's going to do it at a slower rate so that, you know, like they can distinguish each other living in the same environment.
And so this undergrad's building this model where you have like a pulsar background of all these like giant flashing sources in the universe and an alien intelligence, you know, wants to signal it's there. So it's flashing like a firefly. And I just like I like the idea of thinking about non-human aliens. So that was really fun.
That's what... Yeah, well, I think there's some ways we might be able to differentiate that signal. I'm still thinking about this part of it. So one is like if you have pulsars and they all have a certain spectrum to their pulsing patterns... And you have this one signal that's in there that's basically tried to maximally differentiate itself from all the other sources in the universe.
It might stick out in the distribution. Like there might be ways of actually being able to tell if it's an anomalous pulsar, basically. But I don't know if that would really work or not. So still thinking about it.
Like, you know, like, they have ears and things. Like, it's such, like, a weird, grotesque aesthetic. But, like, it's totally bizarre. But what I meant – like, I have a visceral experience when I walk into my closet. I have, like, a lot of –
It's like I do assembly theory every morning when I walk in my closet because I really like a very large, combinatorial, diverse palette, but I never know what I'm going to build in the morning.
Sometimes.
I have trouble getting rid of some stuff. It depends on what it is. If it's vintage, it's hard to get rid of because it's kind of hard to replace. It depends on the piece. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a physical manifestation of my personality.
I think it's an interesting feature of our species that we allow, we get to express ourselves through what we wear, right? Like if you think about all those animals in the jungle you saw, like they're born looking the way they look and then they're stuck with it for life.
Yeah. And it's highly dynamic. I mean, you can be dynamic if you want to. Very few people are, there's a certain bravery, but it's actually more about confidence. willing to play with style and play with aesthetics. And I think it's interesting when you start experimenting with it, how it changes the fluidity of the social spaces and the way that you interact with them.
I know.
Showing 281–300 of 510 · page 15 of 26
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