Profile: Luke Skywalker

Personal background
I'm 41 years old (spring 2005) and have a PhD in applied physics (but hey, that's what half the people driving cabs in New York also have). I live in Sweden where we can ski in the winter and swim in the lakes in the summer. The nature and climate in northern Sweden is probably the best in the whole universe so I like to go there with my family as often as I can.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. Why I run SETI@home? I'm a scientist and was lured into the field because of my interest in the BIG questions since my childhood years. This is one way to contribute to at least trying to answer one of the BIG ones.
2. The thougths about the project: -well it's a clever idea to use idle computer time. I'm a little sceptical about the possibility to detect signals from very far away. If we hardly can see the light from stars emitting billions and billions of watts with the telescopes, how could we detect the faint noise of radio signals (of maybe 10 kW) from planets near those stars?
After I made an estimation of the intensity we would receive from a 10 kW, 100 MHz radio source placed close to our nearest star (4.2 LY away), I have decided to stop running SETI@home (December 2005). I found out that we can expect a photon count of less than one radio photon every 24 hour on a square meter. I assume this "intensity" is to low to be detected.
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