| Personal background |
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| I'm just another computer dude who figures himself a bit of philosopher on some days, and never ever did bother to learn to spell. Maybe that's just typical of a computer guy. Maybe not. I've never bothered to find out. I'm from the Lower Mainland in British Columbia Canada... and enjoy... gee.... you'll never guess... programming. My current project is www.WhereHaveIBeen.com It's a nifty little website to track money. Try it... it's more addicting than Pogo.com. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I do not think that there is extraterrestrial life. Not as we understand it, anyhow. If we were to "find" ETI, it would likely be from signals that are over 100 light years away... So, let's consider the scenario... a signal is sent, hundreds of years later, we get it, we take a few years and send a signal back... hundreds of years later they get it. Do we really think that they will remember sending us anything? Do we really think that anyone 100 years from now will remember us sending something to them? It's not like picking up the telephone and starting to talk... And this is all if we manage to find "someone" relatively close. If we "find" something 1 million light years away... then we're really in trouble. Even if we determine that the signal indicates life, really it only indicates that there WAS life a million years ago when the signal started... we can't take that to mean that there is life now. So, should we bother sending a beacon for others to find? Well sure, as long as it doesn't cost me anything ;-)... But seriously... why not? What should we send? It isn't really going to matter now, is it? For all we know, the only other "life" out there could be single celled animals that live 100 million light years away that will only have a life span of a few hundred generations... our signal could miss that window by centuries... without any effort. So, why bother running seti? Well, partly to prove that the computer community is a community. We are lemmings. Maybe it's partly an ego thing... my rig can crunch lots of numbers really fast. (Now isn't that a petty thing... basically saying I do the least amount of *real* work on my faster computer... gee... wouldn't it be a prouder moment to have only managed to deal with 1 work unit in a week? At least you'd be using your machine...). I guess what it all comes down to is that I can't think of a good reason why NOT.
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