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Before we can achieve an interspecies scientific mind meld with visiting aliens and crack the secrets of the Universe, we have a few pesky problems to take care of. We are eager to download alien textbooks on deep conceptual questions about energy, time, space, and the origin of the Universe, but how do we know that aliens, even technologically advanced races, have those answers? How certain can we be that aliens even want to talk about physics?
How do we know the aliens want to understand the Universe—that they even do physics, or any kind of science? What if they don’t send out their scientists to talk to us? What if there is no such job on their planet? Where do alien nerds find gainful employ?
Do Aliens Even Do Science?
Certainly, not all aliens have to do science. It’s easy to imagine plenty of nonscientific life scattered across the cold and distant reaches of the Universe. After all, here on Earth, bacteria and ants far outnumber us, and they aren’t doing anything we would call science. But they also aren’t traveling across the stars. Surely, any aliens that find their way to Earth must possess some pretty snazzy navigation technology.
But does having interstellar technology automatically mean they must be scientific? Could there be technological but nonscientific aliens out there, capable of crossing the vast emptiness of space without understanding the physics of their amazing leaps?
Just because aliens arrive with snazzy blasters doesn’t mean they can explain how they work, or that they even care to know.
It’s tempting to think that aliens would have to be scientific to develop that technology. But is that leap of logic founded in insight—or ignorance? Is mathematical, scientific thought actually a requirement for advanced technology, or is it just the only path we can imagine to achieving space travel?
Our own history tells us that the connection between science and technology is not so simple. On Earth, civilization has been technological for thousands of years, well before the recent advent of what we consider modern mathematical, empirical science.
How did the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids? It wasn’t ancient aliens. This would be a much shorter book if it were. To construct their monumental architecture, ancient Egyptians did not rely on physics and material science as we understand them, either. What built the pyramids was a skilled grasp of technology, honed through practice, accident, and cultural memory. A couple of thousand years after he died, the designer of the first pyramid was worshipped as a god, which is sort of like the Nobel Prize of the ancient world.
Similarly, blacksmiths learned to make swords that kept their edge by experimenting with various techniques, making discoveries through happy accidents, and refining their craft over generations. The very precise craft of metallurgy that forms the foundation of a skilled sword maker’s work was explained primarily through the how. The question of why was secondary.
The same is true of beer, bread, yogurt, and cheese. Humanity has a weird alliance with a variety of opportunistically cooperative microorganisms that make some of our favorite treats. Techniques to take advantage of these micro-critters were discovered and developed independently over and over again in many places, well before anyone invented a microscope and figured out what was going on. Until then, it seemed like such a magical process that most places that developed fermentation also had an associated god who was kind enough to make it possible. Even today, one can make an excellent soufflé by following a recipe, without understanding the kitchen chemistry at the heart of the process. A soufflé is not a spaceship, but you get the idea.
To make bread or swords, humans didn’t have to know what was going on at the microscopic level. People all over the globe had fantastically impressive technology long before we had our modern, mathematical, empirical science.
Of course, actually understanding is nice. The why informs the how. Knowing what’s going on with your soufflés or swords gives you more opportunities to fine-tune and innovate, accelerating technological discoveries. Blindly stumbling onto technological tools through unexamined trial and error can also lead down some pretty weird roads. Just think about the horrific medical practices people suffered before we understood the inner workings of the body and the mechanisms for disease and infection. Doctors used to go from touching corpses to delivering babies without washing their hands, then wondered why so many birthing mothers died on their tables. They just didn’t understand what was happening, although they wanted to. So, advanced technology seems more likely to develop in the hands—or tentacles—of a species that understands physical laws and how to manipulate them. But science itself might not be strictly necessary.
Does that mean an alien species could develop interstellar navigational technology without doing science? Are star-hopping and sword making in the same category, just a few millennia apart? We don’t know, but we can’t assume that alien technology would mean alien science. Just because aliens arrive with snazzy blasters doesn’t mean they can explain how they work, or that they even care to know.
Alien Science
For that matter, what exactly are we hoping for when we dream of alien science? Science as we do it today? Science as European nobles or men of leisure did it hundreds of years ago? Science as we might do it a thousand years in the future? What do we mean by “science” anyway? That sequence of letters or sounds is supposed to represent a common idea among us and aliens. But is it even something we humans agree about? Is it a fixed target, or is it something that changes as we develop? If we drop it, will it stain the furniture?
Here on Earth, humans have spent a great deal of time investigating how and why things work, but in ways that we would not label as science today. Philosophers the world round have been wondering about the underlying rules of everything ever since philosophers have been wondering about anything. (Aside from mooching off your parents, it’s pretty much the job description for a philosopher.) But that’s not the same as doing science. Despite all the big ideas, they weren’t as focused on testing their theories, refining them with experiments in a way that might be recognizable to modern scientists. For thousands of years, many philosophers derived their ideas about the world just by thinking about things, looking for concepts that made sense to them. And arguing. Arguing a lot.
To us it seems like an odd divide. On the one hand, as we’ve seen, everyday artisans were experimenting with the how of swords and soufflés, despite not understanding the why. And on the other hand, philosophers were in their libraries generating answers to the why, rarely bothering to see how their answers worked in the real world. That’s not true of all ancient people, of course—many were convinced that the best way to gain knowledge was by experiencing the world. But the ancient mainstream view was that it was possible to simply think your way into understanding. Rational thought could discover knowledge, they insisted, without data. For example, the ancient genius Aristotle sought to understand why things fell down and why anything moved at all. His idea was that everything was made of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—and objects moved according to their mixtures. Things with earth in them fell down and things with air in them rose. That was a pretty good theory, but it glossed over some important details that experiments centuries later would reveal.
Bringing the how and the why together, requiring that ideas survive contact with the world—that is, they have to actually work—has become such a basic part of the way we think that it’s hard to imagine people skipping this step. Imagine designing recipes for amazing-sounding desserts, publishing a book about them that sits on the bestseller list for a thousand years, and yet nobody ever tries to bake one of your soufflés to see if the recipe actually works.
But for thousands of years, most people investigating the nature of the world felt testing was unnecessary. Instead of favoring theories that were most accurate, philosophers were more subjective, supporting ideas that felt natural or harmonious or that had come from ancient thinkers like Aristotle, who later folks assumed had special insight because the classical Greeks were kicking around when the world was younger. Only after thousands of years of philosophical musing did observations and experiments gradually begin to take the central role that is more familiar to us.
When did this more familiar way of building our knowledge—what we might call “modern science”—begin? The notion that doing actual experiments to see if your ideas survived testing is often presented as a radical new idea, conceived by Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and a handful of others in the 1500s and 1600s. For example, Galileo was curious about Aristotle’s idea that rocks naturally fall downward. What happens, asked Galileo, if you are moving sideways when you drop something? Does it stop all sideways motion and fall straight down, or does it move sideways and down? And down according to whom? He thought up a simple but powerful experiment to force the Universe to reveal the answer: just try it. Drop a rock on a fast-moving boat and see where it lands. Does it fall “straight down” according to the person on the boat, landing at their feet? Or will it fall “straight down” according to a person on the shore, falling behind the rock dropper?
Galileo’s experiment was genius because it revealed the flaw in Aristotle’s idea: “falling down” means something different if you’re on the boat or on the shore. The rock can’t fall straight down for everyone. The best part is how simple it is to get the answer. You can spend a thousand years arguing about it, or you can get the answer in ten minutes using no special equipment besides a rock and a rowboat. That’s what Galileo did, revealing a fatal flaw in Aristotle’s vibes-based physics more than a millennium after Aristotle died. Imagine if modern physics could be overthrown with household items! You’d win three Nobel Prizes before dinner. For his trouble, Galileo got sentenced to house arrest by the Inquisition.
This anecdote about Galileo has taken on an outsize role in the story of how humanity went from exploring the Universe through pure thought to learning by experiment. It’s more complex. Rather than the work of a few solitary geniuses who sparked a scientific revolution, the scientific process evolved from a nuanced gathering of strands from traditions around the world. Some of the earliest respect for the power of observation comes from the ancient Indus Valley, where close astronomical observations and unit measurements were required for ritual, and these traditions bore fruit in early treatises on astronomy, linguistics, and logic. The idea of using perception and inference spread across South Asia. In medieval Kerala, Madhava of Sangamagrama founded a school for mathematicians that developed infinite series and elements of calculus centuries before Newton or Leibniz. Other threads come from the Islamic Golden Age, where the Abbasid mathematician Ibn al-Haytham wrote about optics and actually showed his work—how he figured out his theories.
Imperial China’s literate and well-read bureaucracy encouraged detailed record-keeping and historical inquiry. When Charles Darwin was formulating his ideas about evolution and speciation, he used translated Chinese essays on the history of pig and goldfish domestication as a source. Isaac Newton’s personal investment in the East India Company gave him access to scientific observations made by sailors venturing as far as the Bay of Bengal. Some of these helped him develop his theory of gravity, which provided the credible mechanism for the pattern of the tides that emerged from the data. Trade, exploration, empire, and capital forged an increasingly connected world, forcing these scientific traditions to encounter one another and ultimately sparking what we now call the scientific revolution.
History shows that there wasn’t one moment in time when science was born, ushered into the world by a few brilliant white dudes. Instead, what we call science is a gradual evolution, a braiding together of strands from many cultures. It’s a nice bit of storytelling to look backward and label some point in history as the dramatic moment that human tinkering became “science,” but that’s more about how we frame our own story than about an intelligent species reaching some inevitable, universal method of knowledge building. All this history isn’t to take away from any individual’s contribution, but to point out that the scientific method is not some final, fixed point in our intellectual development, but a feature of our culture that changes with us.
The word “scientist” wasn’t even in use until the 1830s, and many of the geniuses you think of as great scientists would never have described themselves that way. It’s not hard to imagine that we could have ended up organizing things differently, so that we might not even have a special word for it or for the buildings and people dedicated to it. It’s also tempting to theorize that it might even be possible to do science without coffee, but that may be taking our theorizing too far.
The real question is not whether we have technology or one particular version of the scientific method in common with aliens; it’s whether we share the desire to grok nature.
On an alien planet, history could be wildly different, the strands coming together in a different order to weave something very similar or very different from what humanity calls science. It might not be as crucial to their story to mark any moment as a scientific revolution, to call out one set of methods and give them a special name. For aliens, it could be all part of a gradual evolution of how they understand the world.
Is Science Inevitable?
Regardless of how it came to be, or what they call it, or if they even call it anything, would aliens eventually develop some kind of evidence-based process to understand the world? Is even that inevitable?
Performing experiments and gathering data transformed how we learn about the world, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it. Even the core principles and methods of human science are still being refined and understood. Philosophers still debate what makes an idea scientific. Is the theory of the unobservable multiverse science or mere speculation? Should mathematics be considered a science, when there are no physical experiments to do? If it is impossible to devise an experiment to falsify a theory, can it be considered science, or is it philosophy? Arguments between philosophers about what science is doesn’t stop scientists from going to work every day and actually doing it. But if science is a fractious idea to humans, how could it be simple and pure enough to unify us with aliens?
It could be that aliens once did science as we now do, but have left it behind for some better method, something that is hard to conceive of today but that future generations will think is obvious. If there is something better, our own history indicates there are probably multiple paths toward it. Since nobody went to the trouble of installing proper highway signage around the Universe, we have no idea which path aliens might be on, even if they have the same scientific process as we do.
But we can keep stripping away window dressing until we arrive at the pure heart of the scientific method. No matter what their process, Ibn al-Haytham, Galileo, today’s toiling graduate students, and tomorrow’s scientists have something in common: a desire to understand the Universe. Through thought or experiment or some combination, they’ve wanted to tell a story about how and why things worked. The need for an explanation dates back to prehistory. It’s part of what it means to be human.
In different times and places, humans have had different techniques for finding answers, scientific or not, but have always had questions and always told stories. The sword makers didn’t understand solid-state physics, and the bakers had no idea of the job yeast were performing in their doughs, but they still told stories about it. They found the how through trial and error, but they naturally wondered about the why. Their explanations may have been wildly off the mark, but they had—needed—explanations. Humans rarely shrug their shoulders and say, “There’s no reason why it works, just do it.” They make up a nice little story about it, perhaps involving yeast gods.
The real question is not whether we have technology or one particular version of the scientific method in common with aliens; it’s whether we share the desire to grok nature. Whether that need to understand is rare or widespread is what really determines whether f-science is close to zero or close to 1.
If aliens have the same deep need to understand the Universe, they will also look for stories that explain. That’s the crucial thing we hope to have in common with our alien visitors—because that’s what we really want their help with. Is this desire to figure out the puzzles of the Universe something that’s just human, or is it a basic feature of intelligence, an extension of the method by which we have always explored and manipulated our environment?
That’s something we can’t know, or assume, until we meet them.
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From Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality by Daniel Whiteson and Andy Warner. Copyright © 2025. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
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