Profile: Daniel D. Mickle, PhD.

Personal background
     I was born in the mountains in a log cabin with a coal/wood cook stove in the kitchen and a pot-belly stove in the living room for heat.  We had no electricity and used kerosene lamps (what the Brits call parafin, I believe) for light and our water came from a mountain spring.

     I went from that to the highest of technologies in just a decade or two.  In fact, whatever you may feel is the "highest" of technologies, I have probably done a bit of it.  Even made some circuit boards for the Space Shuttles and some of our missiles at a job-shop I worked at years ago.

     What is my favorite technology? Probably a toss-up between computers and quantum physics.

     When my computer is not crunching Seti@home numbers, it also puts a web page up on the internet, that some of you may find of interest.
     [url=http://www.science.sytes.net] My science page [/url]

Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
     Now almost 60, I really hope the SETI program pans out while I am still alive and able to enjoy knowing.  With all the organic or near organic compounds being identified in space, why would life have only occured on this one small world?

     Ignoring multiple realities for the moment, I have felt we were not alone in (this copy of) the universe, ever since as a boy hearing the family tale from my great grandfather's time (late 1800's) of a craft crashing on our mountain, and the skinny 7 to 8-foot tall man they buried there.  They said my great-grandfather did "not want the place turning into a carnival freak-show", so they dug up the rock and buried the machine where it crashed (it was half-buried already, anyway.) and the man was given a "proper" burial in the old family graveyard back in the woods.

     This story was later augmented when I was camping on the mountain and could feel something shaking the Earth, under me, like something running, down there. (It was a regular thump, about 4 to 5 per second)  My boyhood mind was certain it must be the "craft", still in good enough condition that it was running some regular routines to keep itself charged up and ready to go.

     OK, I am sure it was most likely a tale to entertain the children, but then again, who knows?  Maybe those who believe in the so-called Grey-Aliens are on the wrong track?

     Along this (perhaps silly) line, you may also find it of mild interest that there was indeed one grave in the old graveyard, which did not have a professionally-made stone, but a small hand-carved one.  You could tell by the way the dirt settled that is was a grave, but many, many decades old, and it measured about eight feet long, where the rest were only about six, and in that rocky ground on the side of a mountain, they didn't dig a hole any bigger than was needed.
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