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| Personal background |
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I am a grey-haired (and bearded) old physicist with a very broad range of interests and experience, but with an especially consuming interest in the universe. I have a web page at http://www.vision.irl.cri.nz/~davidb if you want to learn more.
I am the Chief Scientist of KiwiStar Optics (http://www.kiwistar.com), a specialist design and fabrication company for telescopes, cameras, and the like. KiwiStar itself is an invention of mine that enables the design of exceptionally high information-throughput imaging optics, especially medium-scale telescopes. If anyone wants an f/0.75 telescope, any size up to around 4m pupil diameter (or down to around 250mm), with a larger-than-you-would-believe field angle and a spectral passband of 400-1000nm, pixel-limited over the whole field - I have the design for you!
My email address is d.beach@irl.cri.nz
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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SETI is a challenge between two large numbers, as shown in the Drake equation. The product of all the improbabilities of life arriving at our level of sophistication (or above) is a very, very small number, but is compensated by the very, very large number of possible locations. This gives a hopelessly incalculable result, as an error in either number leads to a huge uncertainty, and our estimates of the error factor are intrinsically hopelessly in error!
So maybe we are alone in the Universe (one extreme), or a member of a vast cosmic community (the other extreme), or somewhere in between (I believe the most probable). Any of those outcomes is mind-bogglingly fascinating, and the reason why we are all SETI-ites.
We should look, listen and talk to anyone out there. What fools we would be if we ignored the chance of communication with extra-terrestrial life - or even the knowledge that it existed. The intellectual change-of-state that would result might be the only way forward for the human race. |
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