| Personal background |
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My real name is Max and I'm a Computer Science student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I've been running SETI@Home since the summer of 2001, although I've known about it for much longer. When you're a computer science major, you're eventually going to run into somebody running the screensaver and go "what's that?" SETI@Home is really just that widespread. Eventually I figured, "Well, I leave my computer on all the time, let's do some distributed computing," and SETI@Home a) was the most interesting project b) was the biggest project -- it makes you feel like you're more likely to be doing something valuable.
I'm also a musician. In fact, that's what I want to do with my life. I have a band called Goodnight Moon, and I've been singing, well, probably since I was about two. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Well, I know that extraterrestrial life exists. I also am pretty sure that any quasi-advanced civilization would not be continuously beaming a somewhat strong signal into space. (Just like the residents of Earth, most people probably think that that would be a waste of resources, especially if they already HAVE contact with ANOTHER civilization.) Still, that's the best chance we've got at passive contact, so let's go for it!
We're really, really far out in the middle of nowhere as far as the universe is concerned, so it's unlikely that any alien civilization is actually going to accidentally make physical contact with us, unless they have some agenda -- that's why I'm always slightly skeptical of alien sightings. Of course, it is possible that there ARE aliens somewhere close right now, and they DO have an agenda, but I certainly don't know!! :-)
As far as sending out a beacon goes, I don't think that it would be such a bad idea. First off, though, you have to assume that you're sending it to a MORE advanced civilization than ours, since they would have to have some way to GET here. We should probably send something using binary -- every advanced civilization understands base-2. I think that a bitmap of what the sky looks like, pointing toward the center of the galaxy, wouldn't be such a bad idea. The message should probably be slightly ternary, so that we could signal the beginning of the message. It should also be broadcast across multiple frequencies starting at, say, 150 MHz, then 1.5 GHz, and so on. The beacon should come from a satellite, most likely. But that's all really getting too technical. :-)
Why do I run SETI@Home? Well, it's a beautiful distributed computing project. It really makes me feel like I'm part of something greater. Also, I keep my computer on 24/7 already: I like to know that it's using it's idle time! I'm using the CLI version & SETISpy, which is great for me since I don't need a screensaver & the CLI is way faster. |
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