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| Personal background |
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Hi! My name is Morgan D'Antonio. I'm 31 years old and from St. Catharines, ON, Canada. I'm currently living and working in Holland as an RF (Radio Frequency) Engineer for a small consultancy company.
My job keeps me constantly changing positions, which have included radio-network design/engineering, RF-network optimization, radio/electronics technician, business advisor, project manager, teacher/instructor, and in interference detection and reduction...oh and as the webmaster.
I last attended school at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), graduating in 1995 with a B.Eng in Engineering Physics. I specialized in Solid-State Electronics and Nuclear Physics and worked for a couple of years in nuclear before switching to radios.
Computers have been a life-long hobby... well, for at least 20 years now. I'm currently running SETI@home on a WinXP PC with a 1.0 GHz AMD CPU and 256 MB of PC133 RAM. I'm very impressed by the way the program runs in the background. It eats huge portions of CPU (for the good of the SETI program) but barely slows down the computer at all. DVDs, MP3s, etc. all run just fine. The couple of times I have noticed a decrease in speed due to SETI@home program running (it doesn't wait for the screensaver) it has filled me with warm-fuzzy because I think that CPU time finally went to something truly useful. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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We can actually peer out into space through a radio telescope! We are helping! Okay, not looking through the lense (figuratively) but together we form a network capable of some very cool things.
I think that having my home computer as a piece in perhaps the world's most powerful calculating "machine" is worth doing just for the "geek" factor.
Do I think ET life exists? If the Universe is infinite, then life exists else where. The question is more, does it exist everywhere or only a few places? And how intelligent is it? I don't know.
Will we find ET? Well, I think this project might be a building block to show even larger efforts how it should be done; or it might work. I doubt we will find much, today, but eventually I think we will.
Is finding ETI a good thing? I'm a bit of a pesimist, but I think that the human race may need a few generations to come to terms with proof of ETI. So perhaps the sooner we find hints/proof, the better.
Do I discount that we have already been contacted? No.
Have we? I don't know.
Do I think beaming a signal to outer-space is a good idea? I think it is unwise. Would you go downtown and yell out you are carrying large amounts of cash? Hopefully not. Even at 5am with no one in "site" it is still a pretty dumb idea.
Do I mind if someone else beams a signal to space inviting aliens to lunch? Go nuts. 50,000 years is a long time in terms of human evolution. And that's how long the radio signal will take to the "close" stars. So that number is only good if the universe is "full" of intelligent life.
Of course there's the "where to beam it" question too. Good luck.
Do I think someone will do it? As stated, I think it is an essentially stupid idea. So I'm pretty sure people are lining up for it. In fact, I'll do it just for the "geek" factor. Sign me up. |
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