Information Theory, Animal Communications, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

 A talk given by Dr. Laurance R. Doyle,
President of PlanetQuest
and
Principal Investigator at the SETI Institute
in Mountain View, California
Friday, March 9th at 7 p.m.

As part of the PlanetQuest project (www.planetquest.org) we have been developing a new way to detect and classify possible radio communications from an extraterrestrial source based on the mathematics of information theory applied to various animal communication systems including humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins, squirrel monkeys, ground squirrels, elephants, hippos, several insect species, and even plants. The "rules" of communication between species that we are discovering should allow us to measure the information content of an extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) signal if and when it is received.

As a result, we are also discovering ways to improve environmental care of endangered species (e.g., humpback whales) through measuring their response to vessel noise, as well. This is but one aspect of PlanetQuest, and we shall just lightly touch on the star classification, planet detection and other discovery techniques and educational aspects of this project, which has the goal of allowing everyone to be a discoverer!

Dr. Doyle attended San Diego State University and after receiving his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees he worked as an engineer with the Voyager spacecrafts in the Space Image Processing Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He thereafter received his PhD from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 1987 on radiative transfer modeling of Saturn’s rings using Voyager imaging data. Since 1987 he has been a Principal Investigator with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California where his main project, animal communications, the ecology of circumstellar habitable zones, and the application of quantum physics to solve certain astronomical problems. He is a visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz teaching classes on Life in the Universe, and Light & Optics, and has about one hundred refereed papers in the scientific literature. He is President of PlanetQuest, a non-profit corporation that brings planet detection capability to the public via an educational screen-saver and browser.
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