Dante Loretta

So my job was to sit there and think about, OK, you detect radio emissions from a civilization.

and now you've got to answer them or alert them that hey we we hear you we're here you're there let's talk uh and so you know there's been there's been attempts to do that this is the famous uh pioneer uh 10 plaque that kind of tried to show us what you know humans are like uh and uh where we are in our solar system and this is actually a road map to the earth uh relative to a bunch of pulsars in in the milky way galaxy so if you you know you knew what was going on here

And then the thing that I looked at here that kind of got me started on the idea was, this is a hydrogen atom here.

And I was like, hydrogen, that's the most abundant chemical element in the universe.

It makes like 95% of the universe, the baryonic matter of the universe, is hydrogen.

I said, if you could communicate...

The concept of hydrogen, that's the basis for a foundation for our language to start talking to this other intelligence, because if they're looking at the universe, that's what they're seeing, right?

That's all around us, that's what makes up the sun, that's what makes up most of Jupiter and Saturn, so when you're studying the universe, you're studying hydrogen atom,

And I applied the concept of mathematical set theory, where the interesting thing that quantum physics tells you is that the energy levels of the hydrogen atom are very specific energies, and that's how we study it around the universe.

You look for electrons that are transitioning, it's what quantum physics tells you about.

So I built a whole language system that started out just repeating the energy levels of the hydrogen atom,

And then getting a response from them saying, yes, we understand that.

And then you could build the whole periodic table from there.

And then you've got all the chemical elements of the universe and you can start telling them about what you're made out of, what your planet's made out of, and all that kind of stuff.

So the really takeaway message was that somebody paid me to sit there and think about how to talk to aliens.

And I was like, man, that is the coolest job in the world.

I said, I want a job like that.

And, you know, sure enough, they said, well, you know, you're actually, you're not going to go get a career in SETI because it was kind of fringe science at the time.

But it got me thinking about the origin of the solar system, the origin of life, the distribution of life in the universe, kind of the big questions that we ask ourselves as humans.

Are we alone in the universe?