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| Personal background |
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I graduated in 1970 from Kent State University, with a BS in Biology. Unfortunately, I found that I couldn't BS my way into a job in industry. That left me two choices -- grad school or government. I came to the East Coast (Baltimore) and went to work for the Social Security Administration, reading disability insurance claims, intending to go back to get a graduate degree in biology in a few years.
Well, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans," they say. I am still working for SSA, though I am now doing systems work with mainframe and desktop computers. The idea of distributed computing fascinated me, and SETI made a good fit with my interests and values.
Living and working in Baltimore has been very, very good to me (to borrow a baseball expression), and coming to the East Coast from a sleepy Midwestern college town was like souping up your VW. There is always something interesting going on, either socially, politically or spiritually, and my wife and I found it very stimulating. Most of our college and high school friends still live near where they were born, raised families, built careers there, and seem to us to be kind of parochial in their worldview. Breaking (or at least stretching) the bindings to the familiar is healthy for human beings. SETI is a similar attempt to loosen the bonds of the familiar and predictable.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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To me, science fiction is one of the highest of literary art forms, because it opens the reader's mind to the endless possibilities of the universe we live in. With some exceptions, it is optimistic in nature (if we're doomed, what's the point in speculating about the future?) and almost always shows an abiding faith in the ability of Man to improve on his own fallible human nature. It often progresses from point to point by intuitive bounds. Science, on the otherhand, rigorously applied step-by-step logical processes. SETI seems to me to inhabit a microscopically thin meniscus between science and science fiction. It constitutes a much-need bridge between the two ways of thinking.
SETI strikes me as not only an avenue of scientific inquiry, but also as a resistance against the center-of-the-univers conceits we humans are subject to. In a world where politicians seldom look beyond their next elections and corporate exectuives beyond their next quarterly report, SETI may well be a multi-generation undertaking. It'll take as long as it takes. It's an example of something which is being done simply because **someone** should do it.
In a landscape of arcane scientific specialities,I am thriled as a layman to make a contribution. |
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