Profile: Elezer Puglia, Jr.

Personal background
I think of myself as having a very eclectic profile: I am an Italian who was born in Brazil, I am married to the daughter of a Swiss family, and I have already worked in the USA, Portugal, France and now Switzerland, besides my native Brazil.

My professional background is that of a hardware and software design engineer. I began my career as a radar data processing engineer with the Brazilian Air Force (FAB), then moved on to data communications when I left the Air Force. Presently, I am much more involved in network management and operation, with special interest in information security. Almost certainly, my Air Force tour of duty was what connected me with space exploration in general.

Last but not least, another aspect of my profile which may be interesting is that I am first and foremost an evangelical christian, and I don\\'t think at all that this comes into conflict with my views about the existence of other civilizations.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I am absolutely convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life. As I said about myself, being a christian doesn\\'t conflict with my scientific views of the origins of life in the universe; quite the contrary, being able to draw from two seemingly disparate sources of information allows me to corroborate my views more strongly than if this were not the case.

My views about our chances of any other type of contact with other civilizations beyond the simple detection of their existence conform to my biblical beliefs regarding these matters. I think yes, we will detect signs of other civilizations, possibly including information obtained in the radio-frequency and optical spectrum; but I\\'m not so sure whether we will ever come to actually exchange information with them.

The famous physicist Enrico Fermi once asked the also famous question \\"Where is everybody?\\", referring to the apparent paradox that, if interstellar travel is possible, it ought to be positively crowded out there. He concluded that interstellar travel is either impossible, or at least so difficult that nobody undertakes it because it is not worth the effort. And then again, maybe there are more than just physical reasons for the contact with an extraterrestrial civilization to be so difficult, perhaps impossible.

As for us setting up a beacon to signal our own existence to other civilizations, this may not be necessary. We leak so much modulated energy (and thus information) that our presence is very much conspicuous, particularly to a very advanced civilization. However, even though they must have been created by the same God, they might be bound by a different set of rules than what applies to human kind, and thus it might not be possible to exchange information with us. In other words, interference between different civilizations is something that is a subject open to discussion: there\\'s no biblical indication it would or should occur, but there\\'s no biblical prohibition against it either.

In any event, I consider the SETI effort to be a totally valid one, which is why I participate as much as I can, not the least of the reasons being that I am very much attracted to the understanding of the technical aspects of the search in itself and the mathematical foundations of the processing of search data.
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