| Personal background |
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Hi there,
my name is Mario Kienspergher. I'm living in the most western part of Austria (that's the country in the heart of Europe, not that one with the kangaroos ;-). You can read more about me on http://www.kinzi.net .
I have been running SETI@home for over 2 years now. First I used only one machine at the office (a P-II/300MHz/256MB/NT4.0), but about 3 Months ago I set up a second machine at the office (P-III/733MHz/256MB/W2K) and since last month I'm also crunching with my computers at home (a AMD K6-III/400MHz/256MB/W2K and two P-I/233MHz/128MB/W95). They are not very fast, but since they run all day anyway I thought it would be a good idea not to waste CPU-time to the idle-process ;-) ...
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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(1) Do you think extraterrestrial life exists? If so, when and how will humans discover it? What are the possible benefits and dangers of such a discovery?
Of course I do - who doesn't ? Everyone with a little technical and scientific background can't doubt that there MUST be life all over the universe. I don't believe in chance - not only mother earth was able to produce life.
(2) Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? If so, what information should we send?
I'm a little bit in doubt about this. One the one hand sending a beacon is not very intelligent, because it might invite the "bad boys" of the ET community to visit us (yes, there MUST be also bad boys within the ETs when life developed in a slightly similar way like here on earth).
On the other hand: No risk, no fun. It might turn out that we never hear signals from the ETs because they don't dare to send signals for exactly the reasons mentioned above, so when we don't send beacons too we will never have the chance to get aware of each other. Wouldn't that be annoying (at least regarding the "nice ETs" :-) ?
The message I'd prefer to send would be a number of pulses, just a carrier on 1.4204 GHz keyed n-times with n being every prime number from 1-19 in ascending order repeated endlessly.
Reasons:
(a) ETs must have something like a natural numbering system. If they are aware of their universe, they will recognize one/two/three ... suns, moons, stars, ETs, etc.
(b) If they invented mathematics, they will realize that the numbers are prime numbers, so the source of the signals (= we) must be non-natural.
(c) The frequency 1.4204 GHz is chosen for well known reasons. I defer sending on "Pi GHz" or any other nice-looking frequency since frequency is based on "seconds" and it's likely that ETs will have a different base for their time measurement.
(3) Why do you run SETI@home ?
Since I can't set up large antennas etc. at my current location it's almost the only way to actively support SETI. |
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