I'm 18 and a student. In the coming fall I am planning to begin studing physics. I'm also an Eagle Scout. As far as hobbies I enjoy basically any type of science. I particularly enjoy the physical sciences opposed to biology and social sciences however. I star gaze regularly and am the president of our high school science club (Junior Engineering Technilogical Society) and the local observatory. I also have been experimenting with Tesla coils for about 2 years now and am interested in various other areas of electronics.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. Yes I certainly think that extraterrestrial life exists. When I look at the sky and just try to fathom how large the universe is that it seems absurd to assume that we are the only source of intellegent life. I am guessing that humans will discover it through SETI or a simmiliar project. I don't really see any possible dangers to discovering other life forms, if anything had the ability to trave light years it would only come because it was curious what was out there and not to destroy or run a muck like in the movie Independence Day.
2. Yes I certainly think that we should send a beacon. The information it should contain seems obvious: we should send fractions that are equal to pi. To be frank any society that has the ability to detect radio waves will certainly know what pi is. Makes me wonder if SETI looks for fractions that equal pi?
3. I run SETI primarily because I know that my computer is going to be on much of the time and there is no reason not to do something constructive with it. As a whole I like the project although I wish that they still let you see what kinds of spkies and things you have detected on your computer. My only suggestion is to make the SETI open source code. The program could be seriously reworked to process more data faster and could be optimized for different Operating systems, processors ect.
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.
