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| Personal background |
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Greetings to all. I am a mid-forties Mechanical Engineering living in Conroe, Texas About 60 miles north of Houston. I work for an LLC by the name of DeepVision and spend most of my time working on engineering and operational aspects of prototype fluids pumping equipment for deep sea drilling operations. Having worked in the prototype equipment development field for 20 plus years I have a great appreciation for the work it has taken to get SETI up and running in a stable multi-user environment.
I have a great wife (20 plus years) and two really great kids, 13 (Jaime) and 8 (Lee). They are both science (space) nuts and we spend many winter night watching and tracking satellites fly-overs. Jaime keeps an Excel log of ones we have tracked and identified. My wife Margaret is an RN and works newborn intensive care. For some reason she refuses to become part of the computer world, but the kids say that’s ok, more keyboard time for them.
I spend a lot of time out of town working with development vendors and use a laptop to stay in touch with the world. It’s on all the time for classic computer work, email, instant message and the like. It makes being out of town almost manageable. Therein SETI runs better than 22 hours a day on my laptop and 24 hours a day on my office desktop.
I have only limited time for hobbies outside work and family, but when I have the time I spend it in my shop where I restore vintage motorcycles and cars that have been in the family for years. My pride is a 1933 Studebaker Commander (show quality, takes first in class any time I can get it to a show) owned by Granddad’s brother. My next project is a ’67 Mercedes Benz 250 4dr (my parents first new family car as I was growing up). It has well over 0.5 million miles and still runs quite well. I am going to restore it to be Jaime’s first car; she can not wait to be ‘kool’ in the high school parking lot.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It’s very hard for me to believe that as complex as our life and world are that other life, both more complex and less ‘life’ does not exist somewhere in the universe. I will say though I have to wonder about this in that we have not picked-up any hard evidence either with SETI or by accident before SETI. On the other hand it is very likely that more complex life forms are not using ‘simple or complex radio signals’ within their worlds, however one would think they might have passed through this phase on the way to their current means (‘light’ I expect) and therein we should be still ‘hearing’ them.
While not strongly religious, I do accept that God could be very real and do not see this in conflict with our current understanding of the universe. I would expect that if we find other life forms, the very religious (in the classic sense), will have hard time excepting and explaining. I also expect the parts of society with limited scientific understanding and limited education will be more concerned than excited while the well educated will welcome the knowledge and possible growth to our world that might come from finding one or more complex life forms.
I see little value in a direct transmission to others as we transmit so much in general that could already be ‘heard’ and in reality it will be many generations before anything we send today would be heard and acknowledged. In the grand scheme of things our ability to transmit radio signals has been in place for such a short period of time that it is very unlikely that we have been heard even if some one is ‘listening’ for other life forms or us. It my hope that running SETI will return to society a little of what society has offered and allowed me and the family to have and share with others. If one can not give of oneself, one can not hope to feel good and have a meaningful existence in the very short time we have in this very complex world and ‘infinite’ time line universe we live.
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