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| Personal background |
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Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I'm 49, a wayward Web Designer, and an amateur astronomer, having inherited my father's homemade 6 inch Newtonian reflector telescope. I am part of the Baby Boomer experiments that were destined to test the expansion limits of Social Security, but also contribute astronomical bodies and their associated 'puter time to the future of SETI :o) Apparently it's working!
In 1957, after reading "How To Make A Telescope" by french author Jean Texereau, my father, Ross Dunham, built his own Newtonian reflector telescope from scratch. As a child, I remember watching with complete fascination as he melted black pitch on the stove, prepared various grits of powders and rouge, and meticulously ground and polished a 6 inch diameter concave mirror from a glass blank -- all by hand. It took him many "Howdy Doody" shows (a unit of time we kids understood!) to complete.
Then one balmy summer's eve, after our family returned home from a drive-in movie (remember those?!), my Dad debuted his telescope by showing us the rings of Saturn! That one precious moment sparked my lifelong interest in science. In awe, I asked my Dad: "How far away are the planets? What are stars? How big is the universe?!?!" So my parents gave me a colorful children's book on the subject.Twenty five years later, they gave me "COSMOS" by Carl Sagan. Even today, having read "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" by humorist Douglas Adams (1952-2001), I am still pondering the ultimate questions of "life, the universe and EVERYTHING!" |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Do I believe there is extraterrestrial life? In the words of Curly, "Sointenly!" Carl Sagan once described a person from 400 B.C. who wrote something like: "If you sow an acre of land with seeds, what are the odds that only one will sprout?" Extrapolating that to an infinite universe, what are the odds that it's "just us"? Today, the Hubble Telescope is revealing more and more star systems with identifiable planets. So if there are planets with evolved life, there could be civilizations that are even far more advanced than ours!
I run SETI based on that hope. I also loved the movie CONTACT starring Jodi Foster, based on the book by Carl Sagan. It was fun to finally see Arecibo.
One thing is clear: if we don't listen, we may never hear from E.T.! |
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