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| Personal background |
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Originally from Texas but I've been a Californian for most of my adult life.
I'm gray-bearded but a fair portion of my mind still thinks of me as a thirty-
something youngster. I like to fly tail-draggers and shoot a variety of guns
just to see how far away a can can be before I can't hit it four times out of six.
Other than that I just enjoy life, play a little guitar (am learning to build
acoustic guitars), eat some good food and have a nice glass of wine now and then.
Oh yeah... I like photography and spend a fair amount of time shooting photos
and doctoring them up in Photoshop.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It is beyond my capacity of imagination to think that amongst the billions of
solar systems nestled in the millions of galaxies that there has not evolved
intelligent life "as we know it", and by that I mean creatures that can
percieve the world around them and manipulate it to their benefit, expand their
knowledge, create a social structure to sustain the advances they have made,
and have curiosity as a component of their intelligence such that they might
be out there wondering if we exist over here on the fringe of the Milky Way.
Short of ET actually landing and saying hello, I think that, as a star ship
captain might put it, using the "long range sensors" is the most likely method
by which we might ascertain the existence of intelligent life out there some
where. We have a lot of rather short-sighted members of our own community of
intelligent beings who could not readily accept such a thing because of the
limitations placed on their consciousness by religious or other limiting
paradigms. In other words, a lot of people would simply "freak out" if they
knew ET was a reality. Thus I feel the biggest danger of First Contact would
be internal to our own global society.
I run SETI@home because I think it is a cool thing to accept the possibility
that we are not alone in the Universe, and to do a very tiny bit to make the
discovery of ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) more likely.
As for beacons, I don't know. The biggest question there is where to point it.
An omni-directional beacon would require such massive power as to be impractical
as far as I know about such things. Even a focused beacon would require a
considerable amount of juice and the likelyhood of pointing it in the right
direction seems to be of about the same order as a blind hunter going outside
and pointing a shotgun at the sky. He'd use up a lot of ammunition before he
brought down a duck or goose. |
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