Dante Loretta

I was studying things because I was passionate and curious, but I wasn't defining a career track at the time.

And in 1992, my summer of love, I lived in this van for three months.

and toured around the West, lived at Lake Tahoe for a couple of months and hiked and camped and got a job cooking breakfast at a local cafe there to keep some money flowing.

And so when I came back for my final year of college, 92, 93, I got a job at a local restaurant.

Those of you who've been in Tucson a long time may remember Mike's Place in Main Gate Square, kind of where the Marriott is now.

They knocked it down a while ago, but it was a real dive cafe, famous for nickel pints of Old Milwaukee and 25-cent pitchers.

Just to give you a sense of what their specials were.

They had a 99-cent breakfast special, two eggs, toast, and potatoes.

And I worked Saturday and Sunday morning, so I had to be in at like 5 a.m., and I would cook thousands and thousands of those breakfasts to the people who were out the night before partying, which I couldn't do because I had to get up at 5 a.m.

and go to work to pay for school.

And then in the fall of 1992, this job ad showed up in the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

And it said, if you want to expand your universe and get paid, do we have a job for you?

And that just blew my mind that there were jobs like that out there.

And in fact, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, where I now work, was the one who sponsored that program.

So I applied, and they looked at my background, math, physics, Japanese, and they said, well, what kind of project should we assign this kid?

And sure enough, they put me on to a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

And so what the challenge they gave me was, they said, well, you're kind of a linguist, and we're looking for signs of alien intelligence in the universe.

What are we going to say if we find them?

How are we going to communicate to them?

What are we going to do with it?