I am a professor at St. Petersburg College in the Technology and Management
department. Most of my working life I have been a software developer
and/or engineering manager; generally in the telecommunications field.
When I finished my Ph.D 25 years ago, I went into industry for the money and
frankly was never sorry but now at the age of 55 I have returned to academics.
I am running seti@home because I hate to waste
computer time and I hope to find something out there.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
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I do believe that extra terrestrial civilizations exist but I do not know if
we will contact them in the near future because I suspect that they are few and
far between.
I wonder sometimes if the term of the Drake equation that we have a poor
estimate for is the term for how long a "technical" civilization
lasts. This term essentially is how long will we be using radio and will
we ever use it for interstellar communication. We humans have not been
capable of using this 1.4 ghz frequency that SETI is currently searching
for very long (two decades?) and will radio be a long term player? I don't know.
I do not think we should be transmitting into space right now. Radio
operators are always taught to listen before they transmit and we don't know who
or what might be out there listening. They may not be friendly!
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
