Van Savage is a professor in the UCLA Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as Computational Medicine. He is also External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, and he serves on our science steering committee. His work covers a broad range of interests. He researches metabolic scaling, consumer-resource interactions, rates of evolution, effects of global warming on diverse ecosystems, tumor growth, and sleep. He heads up the sleep topical track for the James S. McDonnell Foundation- funded "Complex Time" research theme at SFI. This conversation focuses on that sleep work first, then pivots to the alien artifacts (plural!) that Van would hope to discover in the Zone.