Profile: Rob Picton

Personal background
I live in Durham, north-eastern England, with my wife & 3 children. Originally from the south east, I spent the first half of my life in Africa and before settling back in the UK worked and travelled in the Netherlands, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.

S@H is run at home on two Macs and my son's PC. I have a long standing interest in astronomy, using a Meade 8" SCT, and Minolta 10x50W binos. With no formal science background, I'm doing now what I should have done 30 years ago, catching up by studying for a BSc with the Open University as time and especially finances allow, and would like to continue on beyond this degree. My ideal would be to join research in astronomy in the physics department at Durham University just up the road.

To Sir Patrick Moore, respect, to Dr. Chris Done, thanks for your encouragement, and to my tutor last year, Dr Mel Kilner, thanks for your patience.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Given the infinite number of galaxies in the universe, the chances of life existing beyond our solar system seem far greater than being unique to ours, especially now that extra solar planets have been discovered. So yes to the Drake equation, estimating the number of inhabitable planets, and to Professor Colin Pillinger of the OU (Beagle2) who said "It would be arrogant to believe we are alone. I think life elswhere in the solar system is a possibility. Beyond the solar system I think it's an inevitability."

Hopefully a species that has evolved for longer than ours and is intelligent enough to contact us would be peaceful. The chances of humanity destroying this world through aggression and stupidity are pretty high at this stage of our existence. For anyone/thing to evolve through that without anihalating themselves, and come out of the other side with a technology capable of interstellar communication and/or travel would have to take greater harmony than we seem able to achieve.

The appeal of SETI@home is to be part of a team contributing to scientific interpretation of data, that hopefully, one day, will lead to the discovery of a signal out of the scope of natural explainable phenomena.
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