| Personal background |
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Greetings. I am from the capital city of Australia, Canberra. I am currently studying a Bachelor of Science and will major in Astrophysics. I then hope to go onto honours and hopefully a PhD in the field.
I enjoy music, tennis and computer games.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program aims to answer the age-old question: Is there intelligent life out there? We know that there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe that we can see with our telescopes. It would therefore seem that life should be abundant given the enormous size of the universe and endless possible places for intelligent life to arise. However, some believe that the conditions for life are so specific that there is a one in 10E40 chance that life will spontaneously arise and evolve to an intelligible species. We know from experience that this has occurred at least in one place in the universe, Earth (presuming that humans classify as an intelligent species). It must be noted, however, that this is only the probability for life to occur on Earth, and that only relates to life as we know it. There could be countless different types of life forms that we do not know of.
Interstellar travel is enormously difficult, and some would say, forever impractical. Therefore we use radio telescopes to detect signals emanating from other stars. Some would argue that due to the difficulty of space travel that even if we received a signal, we would never be able to make contact face-to-face and a conversation would take endless years considering the distance to even the closest stars.
However, to know once and for all, that there are other intelligent life forms out there, would be the greatest discovery in the history of humankind. Even if the probabilities are small, even if there is the slightest chance that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, it is for this reason that the human race should be spending more money on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life.
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