| Personal background |
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I worked for 25 years in operations, analysis & programming of computers used to point radars, telescopes, laser beam directors and other electro-optical equipment at aircraft and earth satellites in real-time in support of launch, orbital & re-entry operations. The majority of this work was at the USAF Malabar Transmitter Annex in Palm Bay, FL, where our main telescope was an ITEK 48" mirror. This site was a major contributor to the advanced pointing & tracking technology that is in wide use today.
During these years, I designed, coded, debugged, tested, documented, delivered and field demonstrated real-time pointing & tracking software systems for E-O sites at Malabar, FL, Kaena Point, HI, Anderson Peak, CA, Santa Ynez Peak, CA, Cape Kennedy, FL, and other places that either are no longer in operation or cannot be mentioned.
While I developed most of these systems myself (principal architect?), I did plagarize the astronomical programs from the US Naval Observatory (for calibrating the instrumentation against the stars) and a Gauss-Jackson numerical integrator from Ford Aerospace (for long term satellite position predictions). I also stole (blatantly, but giving credit) methods from anybody who had a better way of doing something that I needed or wanted to do, though these were few. I was almost always the only software person on the several projects, and as such, had to invent ways of doing things that had never been done before, such as a real-time replacement for the Runge-Kutta-Gill method. I had a ball.
I am now semi-retired & living on Treasure Island, near St Petersburg, FL.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I think that other civilizations either have or will exist, but that the odds of detecting those in the past are small because of matching the shortness of the windows in time that they would have broadcast in and then died off, and that we will be listening in before we die off. I think that there are neither benefits nor dangers, as they will be too far away. And, after a while, nobody but the philosophers will care anyway.
We should broadcast, if only to let other civilizations know, assuming that they are listening in an overlapping window of time, that they are not the first and will probably not be the last. Any simple series should suffice.
I run SETI@home because I want to participate in a significant project. I well understand the value of finding and marking all of the blind alleys while searching for the successful path to the big payoff. |
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