Profile: Bill Holland

Personal background
The photo is me on top of Haleakala on the island of Maui. In our free time, my wife Cathy and I go traveling to places like Europe, Nepal, Thailand, and New Zealand, but our cat stays home. //

I'm an electrical engineer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, working on our Indigo commercial digital presses. Fun stuff. To develop new process sensors, I get to carry out experiments on beakers of bubbling inks back in the laboratory. //

Barney Oliver, the fellow who started HP Labs back in 1966, cultivated the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We always figured he was looking for someone intelligent to talk to. If you're listening, Barney, we haven't found any signals yet, but we're still searching.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
There are too many stars in too many galaxies in the visible universe for extraterrestrial life not to exist. The Hubble photographs that show a solid field of galaxies 10 billion light years away in a dark patch of sky in the Big Dipper are awesome. It's not a question of whether we will discover extraterrestrial life, but when. //

Here on Earth, mankind has too narrow a focus in space and time. We are concerned only with which countries are at war, where the disaster of the day is, which stocks are up. Contacting a civilization that is 10,000 or 100,000 years old would shake up our perspective. What would life be like in such a mature culture? Do they still have to go to work every day? //

And I'd like to hear if there are answers to the questions that science can't answer. Why does the universe exist? What created it? Does it have a purpose? What enforces the laws of physics? Can intelligent beings travel among the stars? Will I go to hell just for asking these questions?
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