Marketing Engineer Intelligent Transport Systems
Age: 42
Male
Australian
Not religious and not looking for a meaning to life
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
ET exists? Most definately. However the chances of it being at the same level as us I think are close to zero. The window is too small. If they were only 200 years older then there would be no radio communications. Project 200 years ahead and who knows what we will be using. Given that for over 2000 years we have been working towards today It is reasonable to consider a variance of 10,000 years minimalistic. In Australia the aboriginals have been around much longer and never invented radios. The result is: intelligent life bus only one species has radio communications.
The other thing is what for ET will take. It is unlikely that they will be physically recognisable and I think the same will apply to their communications. We could be looking right at it but not seeing it.
I think it is much more likely that we will end up seeing a transmission from ourselves either from the future or from the past. Given that we know the past then any transmission detected fromt he future could be of great value. So what to include in the message? A bit of history so that we can be sure it is from us and some technology details to help people advance. Imagine if the medical or technological concepts we know today were available just 100 years ago. If we got a similar message from our selves 100 years in the future what a boost.
Running Seti@home gives me a feeling that I am using my computer for good. It is a bonus to society that costs me nothing. I would like to see my user statistics on the screensaver screen and a lot more feedback on anythink that I find - even i it turns out to be terrestial noise.
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.
