| Personal background |
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I'm an architect and PC hobbiest born in Nurmberg, Germany but raised and living in the San Francisco bay area. Unfortunately for the last ten years I have been unable to work due to neurological problems. I am pretty old, though. I remember the Beatles, Sly And The Family Stone, Big Brother And The Holding Company, the day John F. Kennedy was asassinated, the shootings at Kent State, when men walked and drove on our moon, the Vietnam War and so on. Science Fiction is something I have enjoyed all my life (back to the stories by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs and more!). I do have some other interests although I can't participate as often or as much as I want to. I like old cars (have a couple, the "newer" one is a 1967 Chevelle), postage stamps (U.S., German and european colonials). I became interest in computers long ago when my dad took me to where he worked at the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and showed me their humongous IBM mainframe setup. Probably all fits in my current PC now. My first PC was one of Bill Godbout's 8086 CompuPros with 8" floppy drives and a CP/M O.S. Jeez, the memories...
Anyway, NO PICTURE of me - too ugly!
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Sometimes when I feel too much weltschmertz or my ego gets out of whack I try to grapple with comprehending the universe and the nature of time. I don't get very far of course but this does have a "grounding" effect on me. However, by doing this it usually strikes me that, what with all that stuff out there, something else has got to be going on. Consider the diversity of life past and present on our planet. I suspect, from my layman's viewpoint, that 99.9999% or more of the bodies in the universe are sterile, but the total numbers are so great that even 0.0001% of the total representing the possible number of candidates out in space for something like or unlike our world giving rise to "life" is rather large. Of all those possible candidates, maybe some of them are able to beam stuff we can detect - that is, if us and them are on "the same page" (as we say) beam-wise. The possible benefits and dangers of making a ET life discovery are simply beyond the scope of this paragraph. All I can say here is it would be both exciting and terrifying.
We have been increasingly broadcasting all kinds of signals out into space for a very long time. The unremarkable movie "Independence Day" implied the space traveling ETs found earth by homing in on our emissions originating more that 40 years before - the distance factor. A different version of this fiction without the violence could happen, one involving just communications.
I like the notion of helping the SETI@home project:
1. It's appealing because it values the contributions of each individual, cutting across racial, religious, political and international boundaries.
2. It fosters world wide team cooperation directed towards a universal goal.
3. It allows both technical and nontechnical persons to participate in an important project.
4. It has "game" reward appeal, a little like a lottery. It's fun to think one's nname just might be associated with "discovering" an ET source.
5. The home software can be tailored to run in background. |
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