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| Personal background |
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| I'm a video editor and aerial photographer in the Washington, DC area (www.cookstudios.com & www.activeaerials.com). I grew up watching the early manned space program, and the richness of it has never left me. In a small Indiana town, my gradeschool teachers used to bring their television sets into school and several classes would crowd into one room to watch the latest launch or splashdown. In a fantastic science class, we built a full-scale model of a space capsule, filled it with blinky lights, some father's ham radio and a Tang supply, and we each had an hour's absence from lessons with a classmate to explore the universe. There I first saw the Moon & planets through a telescope, during an after school astronomy night offered by a few neighborhood dads. I watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing from Canadian motel while on a family vacation, with people stopping we Americans on the street to congratulate us on what 'we' had done. My own father's enthusiasm for space was to cement a lifelong passion for not only the space program and amateur astronomy, but for exploration of all kinds. I'm also a Private Pilot, and in thinking back on why I did it, I've realized that it was not really because of any early interest in aviation. I realized later that being a pilot is as close as I ever expect to get to being an astronaut! (And the object I'm holding in the photo is an Apollo 16 Moon rock. Fantastic.) |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| The SETI searches are something I'm not necessarily confident about as the likely method for our eventual discoveries, but given our ability to easily make these attempts, it would be irresponsible to our children's children to refuse these early efforts. This uncertainty is all very romantic now, both in fairy-tale glee or doom & gloom fears. But someday humans and beings of other worlds will navigate their lives as realistically as have the mixing cultures of our Earth. And like all cultural, intellectual and resource-sharing mixes, discovery will lead to encouragement, then perhaps uncertain conflict, then understanding resolution. That inevitable process will help us, as all maturation does, to know ourselves in fulfilling ways we can't imagine now. Let's get on with it. |
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