| Personal background |
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Well, to start with I live in Santa Rosa, I'm 44 years old and I'm a Systems Programmer. I was "into" computers from the start; I can remember using the first IBM PC 20 years ago. (Has it been that long?) Anyway, I've done hardware repair, technical support (loved it!) and now I write buggy programs so the tech support staff has something to complain about.
I'm lucky enough to be an assistant coach for my son's youth (7-9 years old) football team. It's very gratifying to see the kids learn something about for which you have a passion and hope they will too.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I started using Seti@Home as my screen saver at work just about 2 years ago. It's a great way to put those unproductive CPU cycles to work. I remember being in a competition with one of my co-workers to see which one of us was able to crunch more work units than the other. He downloaded the command-line version and was gaining on me quickly because I was using the standard graphical version. So I got the command-line version but I wanted it to run all the time so I created a user-defined NT service. (I don't remember if the instructions were on the Seti@Home site. I just used the technotes from Microsoft.) I had the crunch time down under 12 hours and never noticed any performance degradation. Two work units a day from a desktop PC! I've got my 500 work unit certification and I'm only about 40 units away from 1000.
Is there extraterrestrial life? Common sense tells me we're not alone in a universe this large. I think we'll discover "other life" by doing what we're doing now; searching the sky for signals. When? It's a big sky and we can only search a tiny piece of it at a time. I'm hoping within the next 100 years. Dangers? Possibly. If they are sending radio signals then they must be at least as advanced as us. If they are more advanced then we only have to look at our own history. Self-righteous, technically advanced, civilizations have been a danger to the native people. However, there are many benefits to numerous to list. Sometimes life is a crapshoot. Finally, no, we should NOT send a beacon for others to find. Not yet. Let's wait and listen for a while. I'm sure someone will say I'm "whistling while walking through the cemetery". Sometimes there really IS danger out there. We've waited this long; we can wait a while longer.
With all that said, I run Seti@Home because I believe in the "benefit" side of finding extraterrestrial life. I think every Seti user will agree. We have to be optimistic about who's out there and not dig a hole and pull it in over us.
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