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| Personal background |
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I have had as many lives as the story lines I can draw – all are true and all unfold in front of my eyes only. From an outsider’s point of view, I am one single story, an opaque object with a shape that one can recognize only for its resemblance to his/her own.
I have studied biochemistry and theatre arts; have worked as a cabinet maker and short order cook; have written poetry and directed four short films and a feature; have gone from sheer bliss to utter depression and back… Depending on days, I am born on Mars or Venus; my resume may start when I was only six months old when I stole my first car, to the age of 43 when I realized that I was ready for the trip back to my mother planet, and that I would need a little better than one of these terrestrial cars to get home.
I have spent most of my childhood reading. Reading everything, from cereal boxes to novels and poetry to list of ingredients on chocolate cake mixes (anything with the word potassium in it turns me on). At age 16, I discovered A.E. Van Voght and his Null-A trilogy. I was seduced by his vision of how we could come to use our human brains, not only to think differently, but to travel differently. The Map is Not the Territory. I realized then that far distance traveling would always be a problem (for us as well as for extra-terrestrials) because of our bodies – how can we make matter travel at the speed of light (and preferably beyond) without destroying it?
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I don’t think we will make contact with extra-terrestrials. We might find signs of their existence but I doubt a contact can be made – and the reason is simple: how long for a radio signal to reach us amidst the universe’s background noise? How long for a response to reach (maybe!) its destination? Our solar system is far from the center of our Milky Way alone – imagine also how far apart in evolution any other life form might be. We have the funny habit of imagining extra-terrestrials more advanced than we are. But what if we were ahead of any of them? Five billion years is nothing – merely the time for the just made apple pie to cool down a bit. We were just born on Earth; now Stephen Hawkins gives us a mere three thousand years to last. Time does not really matter, but one thing does: however small, fragile, and possibly short lived our species may be, in this immensity, our fate may very well pass unseen.
The only good reason I see for being part of SETI is the childlike fun of pursuing a rather odd dream, developing tools to reach it, and having (some) fun in the meantime. Einstein used to say (with a devil in the eye) that his pencil was his lab. It is great fun to dream of the universe – it is as good a way to create it as the Big Bang itself. It’s fun to hope that we are not alone – although it shows how alone we are, we feel.
I am really impressed with the guys who thought of distributed computing to pick up where the lack of vision of a government had left the project. This is a grand idea – children shaping up a still rudimentary tool to take us towards this dream that we are not alone. Maybe, in a distant future, before our species passes away, or evolves towards another form, will we have refined this tool towards distributed “something that is not necessarily computing as we know it†– a still unknown activity using a network of human brains rather than computers – and then, without having to go very far from home isn’t it? maybe will we have materialized this dream that we are not alone. |
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