What If Reality Holds More Information Than We Know How to Read? Nearly nine billion years ago, when the universe was about five billion years old, neutral hydrogen emitted a faint radio glow. It wasn't a message addressed to anyone. There was no sender trying to communicate with humanity. Yet in research publicized in 2026, scientists using the CHIME radio telescope showed that they could recover this ancient signal from their own observations, without relying on separate galaxy surveys. The observations themselves had been collected in 2019. The breakthrough wasn't that the universe had suddenly started broadcasting. It was that we had learned another way to read a physical trace of its distant past. And that raises a question I find difficult to ignore: How much of the physical world might remain unreadable to us simply because we haven't developed the right ways to detect or interpret it? Consider two very different experiments. In 2012, researchers at Fermilab demonstrated communication using neutrinos, particles that interact so weakly with matter that they can pass through substantial amounts of rock. They transmitted encoded information across 1.035 kilometers, including 240 meters of earth. The data rate was only about 0.1 bits per second. Slow, certainly. But the remarkable part was that information could travel through a medium we rarely associate with everyday communication. Then, in 2015, researchers demonstrated something stranger. Their system, called BitWhisper, allowed two nearby, network-isolated computers, each running specially deployed software, to communicate through changes in temperature. By deliberately generating heat and measuring the resulting fluctuations, they exchanged between one and eight bits per hour. Not exactly a replacement for Wi-Fi. But it was a working communication channel built from something as ordinary as computer heat. Neither experiment discovered a mysterious intelligence hidden in nature. Both relied on deliberate engineering and known physical mechanisms. And that distinction matters. A physical trace, a measurable signal, and an intentionally encoded message are not the same thing. Information isn't simply another name for energy, either. Yet these experiments show something fascinating: the ways physical systems can carry or reveal information are much more varied than everyday intuition might suggest. And our ability to recognize that information depends on how we observe it. Biology offers another surprising example. Consider the mantis shrimp. In one studied species, researchers identified twelve classes of color-sensitive photoreceptors, compared with the three cone types typical of human color vision. You might expect the shrimp to be extraordinarily good at distinguishing similar colors. But experiments found that it performed surprisingly poorly at certain fine color-discrimination tasks. More receptor types do not automatically mean finer discrimination. Its visual system appears to process color differently from ours, although the details of that mechanism remain an open research question. The lesson isn't that the mantis shrimp sees reality more accurately, or that humans see it less accurately. It's that sensing the world and interpreting sensory information are not the same thing. Different biological systems can extract different kinds of information from the same physical environment. Now consider ourselves. We see only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We hear only a limited range of vibrations. And our experience of the world depends on biological systems shaped by evolution, along with the ways our brains process sensory signals. Scientific instruments have extended those boundaries enormously. But every instrument still has a particular range, sensitivity, and method of interpretation. So I wonder: What kinds of physical information might our current methods still be missing? Could future discoveries reveal unfamiliar ways that physical systems exchange or process information? And might those discoveries change how we understand perception, intelligence, or consciousness? At this point, imagination can easily run ahead of evidence. One could speculate that consciousness involves some unknown external information source, or that the universe itself is a simulation. But none of the experiments above demonstrates either possibility. In fact, there's a stronger objection to the entire direction of my argument. These examples do not reveal unknown laws of physics. They show us learning to use known physical interactions in unfamiliar ways. That gives us no reason, by itself, to conclude that undiscovered information channels exist. I think that's exactly right. We cannot turn the limits of our knowledge into evidence for whichever extraordinary explanation we happen to prefer. But I don't think this objection tells us to stop asking questions. It tells us what the next question should be. Not: What hidden signal would I like to believe exists? But: What new observation would give us a reason to believe one exists? Could we detect a reproducible effect that our existing explanations fail to account for? Could we distinguish a proposed new information channel from noise, measurement error, or an overlooked interaction we already understand? And if someone proposed that consciousness receives information from outside the brain, what would that hypothesis predict that established neuroscience does not? Without questions like these, speculation remains speculation. That's not a failure of imagination. It's the difference between imagining a possibility and discovering something about the world. Still, there's something humbling about the history of scientific observation. Radio waves existed before radio telescopes. Neutrinos existed before neutrino detectors. And ancient hydrogen was emitting its faint radio signature billions of years before a species on Earth developed the technology to recover it. None of this proves that some extraordinary new signal is waiting to be found. But it reminds us that reality does not have to wait for us to understand it. Perhaps future discoveries will reveal entirely unexpected ways of measuring, transmitting, or processing information. Perhaps some of them will reshape our understanding of intelligence and consciousness. Or perhaps the most surprising discoveries will come from seeing familiar physical processes in unfamiliar ways. I don't know which. But I think two principles are worth holding together: We shouldn't mistake speculation for discovery. But we also shouldn't mistake the limits of our receivers for the limits of reality. I write about AI, identity, and the future of human connection. If these questions interest you, follow along.❤️