| Personal background |
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| I live in New Jersey, at the shore. I am 1/3 owner in an IT outsourcing/security company. I am also a licensed Amateur Radio operator, General Class, callsign KB2MMR. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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If one accepts the existance of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe that has evolved to the point of communication via modulated RF emission, one is still left with some rather daunting obstacles... If a beacon were not set up by said intelligent life forms, and instead, radio transmissions were just used for planetary communications, the probability of detecting and deciphering such a signal is small. The other problem seems to be that things for which one looks only appear when one is not looking As a final point, looking at recent events, if we do indeed detect, and at some point contact, extraterrestrial life, there is a pretty good chance that they won't be very fond of us... Oh well. I guess we had better just look harder, and polish our manners a bit. We should probably be stiing up our own beacon, but it needs to be designed for a rather wide audience. It would be a good idea to provide signaling that is noticable to various attention spans.... A signal containing a succession of numbers that repeats over a time period of hours would be useless in contacting a being who might have a slow, but advanced thought process, and for whom the formation of a single thought spans hundreds of Earth years. Some life may enjoy a life cycle of only milliseconds, and therefore, may have a significantly shorter attention span. As for what message we should send, That's quite a different story. Sending an actual message, in words, would decrease the chance of reception... (distortion, decoding errors, etc...) But if a message MUST be sent, how about "Hi. We're here. Don't kill us please."
I run SETI@home to be part of a larger, concerted effort with truly laudable goals. Even if a signal is never discovered, the project cannot be deemed a failure. It is a demonstration of the collective effort for a collective goal. |
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