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| Personal background |
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| I was born and grew up in County Durham, England. At the age of 50 I am now married with three grown up daughters and one grand daughter. Having lived in the south of England and more recently, central England, we have now moved back to the county of my birth in the north of England. I am employed by an electronics manufacturing company and my occupation is now in Molecular Beam Epitaxy, although I am, by profession, a physicist. I have, since childhood, been very interested in anything to do with aerospace, aviation, manned spaceflight, astronomy etc. I bought a 6" Newtonian telescope for one of our daughters some time ago so get to use this from time to time. I also have a keen interest in pot plants e.g. Bonsai. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I feel that it is extremely unlikely that there is not some other harbour of life elsewhere in the universe. The universe is just too vast for life to have occurred in one place alone. The conditions necessary for life must occur over and over again. It is rather less likely that such life will be at such an advanced level that communication is possible and, at present, it is even more difficult for us to see how we could contemplate ever meeting with another species like ourselves but I hope this is possible.
If there are other civilisations out there I think we should try to communicate with them. It is likely that they will have evolved in a similar way to ourselves and will have the same aggresive but cooperative nature. Even if we try to hide ourselves away it is most likely that our presence will be noticed and it would be much better to show that we wish to establish freindly, cooperative communication with anyone else rather than appearing to be a paranoid, closed society.
I feel very glad that the SETI@home project has made it possible for so many people to share in this endeavour. I am a little concerned that the present attempts to "hear" signals from outside are very limited. We could so easily miss something. I realise that it difficult to carry out an all encompassing search but I believe that every effort should be made to look for alternative methods of communicating. For example UV or X-ray lasers or the power of a star may be used in such a way as to allow far more power for communication in some other part of the spectrum. Would they find some means of using a form of signal that is so distinct from background noise that it would be unmistakably un-natural. I hope that such possibilities are being considered for future projects. |
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