I live on a rural property near Australia's national capital, Canberra. We have wonderful night skys here: very dark nights with a very clear view of the Milky Way, especially when there is no moon. I and my wife live in a home built of straw. I teach other people how to build with straw. You can look at my straw bale building site at www.wordworks.com.au/strawwalls and you can look at my other business activity at www.wordworks.com.au
I have a background in physics, so that plus the great night sky we have here provide good enough reasons to be very interested in the seti@home project.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I run seti@home because I think it is quite likely that there is life out there and if I have a chance of being part of finding it then why not - and the fact that it does not cost me is a plus.
Should humans transmit a beacon? No I don't think so. There are many more competing priorities like helping the human race to avoid destroying itself before we find that life out there! However if we can use all that idle time on computers arond the World to help the SETI project then that seems fine to me. I expect that uses a tiny amount of extra resources compared with what would be needed to transmit a beacon of reasonable power.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
