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The big implication, of course, is in the title.

But there are a lot of facts that people don’t know, and your book is an attempt to take facts that people do know or think they know and to ask us to dwell on the implications of these things. And I’ve always heard that dogs have good noses, and all of that stuff. One may start reading it and say, I’ve always heard that bats have echolocation. It’s a melding of imagination and technology that gets us to a place where we can really start to think about and appreciate the experiences of other creatures. There’s a feeling of wonder and awe that you get when you look at the images from the James Webb Space Telescope. And it’s one that we have used to understand the umwelt of all the other creatures around us. The ability to technologically extend our umwelt is actually a remarkable human skill. Technology can detect x-rays and radio waves and gravitational waves and can extend our umwelt, our sensory bubble, to almost the very beginning of the universe. The tools of astronomy capture stimuli that other animals can’t sense. He said that through gigantic optical aids, this unique creature has eyes that are capable of penetrating outer space as far as the most distant stars.

He also wrote about the umwelt of the astronomer. He wrote beautifully about the sensory worlds of ticks and dogs and other creatures. This idea of a sensory bubble, the fact that we perceive just a thin sliver of reality’s fullness, was popularized and pioneered by a German scientist named Jakob von Uexküll in the early 20th century. The umwelt is the specific set of sights and sounds and textures and smells and all the rest that we can perceive and that other creatures might not. We are trapped in our own little sensory bubble, or what is called the umwelt. The core idea of the book is that every animal, including humans, is limited in what we can perceive about the world around us.

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I wrote about this at the very end of the book, bringing things full circle to the start. What they’re doing with the telescope by putting these images together is expanding the senses in a way similar to what you’re doing in your book. I started thinking about some of the same things that come across in your book, which is that there is so much more to the universe than the human eye can see. I was reading about how they put the images together. When I was looking at those images, I was also preparing to interview you. It’s difficult to truly capture the scale of them in both space and time. My colleague Marina Koren at the Atlantic has written beautifully about it and her work really captures the momentousness of the images. Looking at those, I felt emotions that I hadn’t felt in a while. The amount of information that we can get going back to almost the beginning of the universe is a literal galaxy brain moment. Did you see the pictures from the James Webb telescope? And what did you think? Yong I want to start with a question that doesn’t seem like it’s related to your book, but I think it is. This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity. Yong came on the Current Affairs podcast to talk with editor-in-chief Nathan J. He is the author of I Contain Multitudes, which is about the world of microbes and, most recently, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is about all of the fascinating ways in which animal senses differ from our own, and how they show the immense amount of information in the universe that is inaccessible to human beings. Ed Yong is a science writer who writes for the Atlantic and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his writing on COVID.

Naked into the wilderness