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| Personal background |
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| I am a 17 year-old high school student from Toronto, Ontario (that's in the Great White North, aka. Canada). When not obsessing about getting another machine into my s@h empire, I spend most of my time programming in C/CPP and x86 ASM (I want s@h source!), listening to music (electronica, trance mainly), playing games and hanging out with friends. I am pursuing post-secondary education in the field of Computer Science and hope to one day be employed making games. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| My friends often mock my (sometimes, admittedly fanatical) dedication to the seti@home project. They ask me "What's the point?" and "Who will ever care what small contribution you made?". In the context of day-to-day teenage life, of school and similar "more important" concerns, these are indeed hard questions to answer -- but we must not answer them in this context. The advancement of humanity and human knowledge is the responsibility of every single man, woman and child on this planet; most may not have the intellect or talent to make a direct contribution to any field of science but that isn't the only way to assist progress. For me, s@h is an intensely personal pursuit: When, in 20 years, I am sitting in front of my holographic tv, watching man step on Mars for the first time, or a news anchor quiver with excitement as they announce the first evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization, I want to be able to say to myself: "I was a part of that. In some small way, I helped that happen and humanity as a whole is better for it". People don't understand this desire. They tell me that the person walking on Mars will be the one getting the fame and fortune, but they miss entirely that this pursuit is not about fame and fortune. Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, but with how many people behind him? Scientists certainly, but more importantly a whole generation of regular people who lived and worked and dreamed to finance the project. Could he have done it surrounded by raw nature? Could he and his team of scientists and engineers have done it? Humanity's progress occurs in the hearts of people like you and me; people who see their right to feel pride when man walks on Mars or talks to aliens, who see in Neil Armstrong's leap a small step of their own: not because they are American or Russian or Japanese -- but because they're human, and damnit, they're proud of it. |
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