Profile: PH3-52 (I'm not crazy, I'm an aeroplane!)

Personal background
I don't know when I first heard about Seti@home, it's already some years ago. After a while I became interested and I ran the screensaver version first. This didn't go very fast however, since I actually *use* my computer when it is on. So I switched to the commandline version and had that running in the background all the time. This way I cracked some 300 WU's. I then had to switch my email address, and could start all over again at zero :-( (Btw guys, you really should make it possible to change your email address and still keep your WU's!)

By the time I'm writing this I have over 1000 WU's on my new account, and I hope to reach the 2000 within one year.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I do believe extraterrestrial life exists, although it will be rather sparse. From the planets where life exists, only relatively few will have intelligent life. And from the few with intelligent life, I doubt if they're close enough to us to be within radio-range. Still, we should give it a try.

Even if we hear signals from them, or they from us, I don't believe we will ever have physical contact, at least not with ET himself. The distances in space are vast, and I don't believe we can fool Einstein (yeah right, I don't believe in things like hyperspace or warp drive). The time and resources it would cost to physically bridge this gap for a living being, make it in my eyes impossible, even for a technology far beyond ours. Robots are a different story, though. They (or maybe one day: we) might be able to send robots across the gap. What kind of robots that would be? I don't know.

Communication would be extremely difficult, too. The time it takes for radio waves to reach "the other end of the line" would probably make it a rather boring converstation. Let alone the difficulties we may have to understand eachother. An alien race might have an entirely different psyche, maybe completely impossible to understand by humans (and vice versa). On the other hand, they might be quite human, who knows? It would be rather interesting to know anyway.

Should we ever discover that we are indeed not the only intelligent race in the universe, I would prefer that *we* are the ones who discover *them*, and not the other way round, so that we have the choice to let them know we're here or not. After carefull study and deliberation, of course.

But, after having said all this, I once more emphasize that I think the chance that we ever discover anything is near nill. But as the local saying over here sais, "if you never shoot, you'll always miss", so let's go crunching!
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