Profile: Brad Bales

Personal background
At this point in time (Tue Nov 6 15:52:23 CST 2001) I'm 35 years old. I'm a software engineer. My hobbies include: writing software, goofing around with linux, and slamming Microsoft whenever possible.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Does extraterrestrial life exist? Of course. Think of the "million monkeys with a million typewriters" scenario; space is very big and there are many possibilities. There's probably a planet out there whose population consists of 200 billion William Shakespeares who communicate in nothing but iambic pentameter, but only in EBCDIC. The possibilities are endless!

Will we discover it? I don't know. Would it be dangerous or beneficial? I don't know. I hope we have the chance to find out!

Should we transmit a beacon? On first thought I'd say yes; but where would we point it? If we did do it I think we should use the simplest modulation. On that carrier, maybe we should send a repeating signal that covers the first 1000 prime numbers, or ascending powers of 2, or whatever. We just need to send something that isn't too hard to recognize as man-made.

Why do I run seti@home? Because I love the distributed computing model. It's fascinating to see it work and be a part of it.
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