Then what was your background
that got you combining
astrophysics and this research?
Well, I was always interested
in my astronomy career in
extraterrestrial life.
And my dad gave me a map of
the solar system when I was six
and there's stars in the background
and he said, "The stars
are other people's suns."
What!?
I remember the shock of that,
and it never quite left me, it's amazing.
I was always interested
in life in the universe.
So, I naturally migrated to SETI,
but
it seemed to me that
when the astrobiology program started
and everybody is using
Mars as a proxy for, sorry,
Antarctica as a proxy for Mars.
That we could use non-human
communication as a proxy
for an extraterrestrial signals.
So,
I got in touch with
some of the animal communications people
working specifically with dolphins,
Diana Reiss, Lori Marino, and
eventually Brenda McCowan
who's now my colleague.
And went up to see the
dolphins at Marine world.
And there's this vague notion
that there's something
helpful from dolphins
that could be applied to SETI,
but it had been in the
original SETI meeting
that Frank Drake organized
there was a dolphin person,
but nobody connected it.
And then one day I had
this idea of plotting
to see if dolphins obeyed Zipf's Law
and Brenda had sent me a paper
and I took I think it was
column three from table four
or something like that.
And I plotted it and it
gave a minus one slope.
And so I went and had a
cup of tea and did it again
and it was still minus
one when I got back.
So, I called her and ever since then,
we took off.
There's one of those moments
where you'd take off in a new direction.
That was the first combination I think
of animal communications and SETI.
