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| Personal background |
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- I have been married for 10 years.
- I have two children.
- I am, to my everlasting regret, just a few years too young to remember men landing on the moon.
- I am, to my everlasting regret, old enough to remember what I was doing when the "Challenger" blew up.
- I work as a software engineer.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Life "out there" is possible, but certainly not guaranteed. Even if there is, the distances are so great we may or may not ever find evidence of them.
But there is strong evidence of spirit beings right here on earth. Thornton Wilder said it very well in "Our Town":
". . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being."
And if humans have some eternal component beyond our physical bodies, isn't it likely that there are other spirit beings with which we can interact? I saw another Seti@Home profile today in which a woman stated that it is arrogant to assume we are the only life in the universe. It would be just as arrogant to assume that we are the only beings in the universe of spirits.
Take as an example the question "does God exist." Various religions make various claims as to what (or who) God is, what he is like, or what he does. But one thing they (mostly) have in common is the assumption that, since we don't see him walking around on the street, God must be a spirit being rather than a physical being. So the debate over whether God exists is, in effect, a debate over whether spirit beings exist outside ourselves (without necessarily conceding that we ourselves have a spiritual component).
I have friend who teaches philosophy at a major US university, and from time to time he sends me articles about various philosophical debates, and the points made by either side. In recent philosophical debates, proponents of the existence of God have seriously eroded the position of those who dogmatically hold that no God exists, or can exists. For example, one prominent atheist recently conceded that Atheists have to make the same "leap of faith" to believe there there is no spirit world, as religious people make to believe that there is. It's an interesting debate to follow, and by no means a closed issue.
So the search for intelligent life goes on, both "out there" and right here at home. Of which is it easier to find evidence? Which is the more profitable search? If we find life on other planets, or other spirit being here on earth, with which can we have more meaningful interactions?
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