| Personal background |
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| Charles Ashbacher is the principal of Charles Ashbacher Technologies, a company specializing in state of the art computer training. For a change of pace, he is an adjunct instructor at Mount Mercy and Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in both the math and computer science departments. Charles is also the author of five books, many research papers and the co-editor of Journal of Recreational Mathematics. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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To think that life does not exist on other worlds is to misunderstand nature. Life evolved very quickly on Earth, less than a billion years after Earth coalesced there are clearly identifiable microbes in rocks of that age. It is an irrefutable premise that molecules spontaneously organize themselves into life and once it exists, it is extremely tenacious, evolving into forms that can survive under amazingly difficult conditions. Therefore, to deny that life exists on other planets is equivalent to believing that the laws of nature are different there.
However, it took billions of years after the origin of life for intelligence capable of creating a technological structure to evolve. Furthermore, that intelligence had to evolve on the surface, as it is difficult to understand how a technology could exist underwater. Therefore, to me, the key question is not whether life exists on other worlds, but whether technology exists on other worlds. That is clearly a debatable point, in that there is no reason to believe that either intelligence or technology are natural consequences of the creation of life.
I donate my computer time to SETI because I believe that the discovery of intelligent life on other planets is second only to proof of the existence of god or life after death in terms of the way it will affect the human race. In fact, the proof of either of the three may have as a consequence the proof of the other two. |
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