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| Personal background |
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I'll leave the old info up for now, but am 47 years old, nine years since I updated my account, whew! No longer in Germany either!
Hi, I'm Bill, 38 years old stationed in Germany. I've always been interested in space & science, so SETI@Home is a natural avenue for me to travel.
I'd heard about the project before I moved to Germany and was surfing on May 17th of 1999 & just stumbled across the project & joined that very same day. It was only later I discovered that was the "Grand Opening." Since that time I have gone through a myriad of computer systems (I build systems for friends and use STEI@Home to "burn" them in) throughout the two plus years of the project. I get most of my hardware at online auction sights & have some high speed crunchers (Avg WU time ~8.5 hours) that I have less than $200 in. I seem to be continually upgrading my systems & selling off the old ones and at present I have seven systems working on SETI, down from a high of 10 (and three of those were multi-processor systems, bringing the total number of concurrent SETI@Home processes to 13). Even with the cut from thirteen systems to seven I am crunching only about 10 fewer WU's a day since during the "clearance" I upgraded three of the "keepers" to T-Bird 1.2GHz or faster processors. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I certainly believe ETI exists, Not very sure we have much chance of finding it in the near future (within the next 50 years or so). SETI@Home is still needed even if I think it doesn't have much more than a snowball's chance though. Science can only proceed if you do it for it's own sake rather than with a predetermined goal/result in mind, and take whatever you find (or don't find) as a valid result and learn from it.
Even if SETI@Home doesn't find ETI it is already a success, it has proven distributed computer projects are a viable way of doing science and can even be applied to business models for commercial projects. Even though I believe SETI@Home will not find ETI, I do believe it has the capability to spawn the project that will. I liken S@H to searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack, Luckily there are probably thousands of needles to find. Only problem is there ARE Billions of Billions of haystacks to search.
I don't know if I'd like the Beacon Idea. Who knows who'd drop in. At least if we find them, we'd be able to get some idea of "who they are" before we invite them for dinner. I'd hate to be chop sirloin. |
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