| Personal background |
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I'm a 21-year-old guy living and working in Cambridge, UK, having studied zoology there for the past few years. I thought I'd do something completely different and so work in Database admin and Alumni Relations for my college... I suspect a more techie job is my long-term future.
In my spare time I'm definetly a geek. Most of the stuff I do with clubs and organisations tends to end up with me doing publicity, designing brochures or the like... most of this stems from my love of macs and willingness to learn Photoshop, a surprisingly simple and very powerful program that most people seem to shy away from. Away from the computer and the 'net it links me to, I love reading and a good bit of cycling and walking, usually either around Cambridge or as far-flung as northumberland or [gasp] Wales.
I'm from the Netherlands originally, hence the weird name. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I'm pretty sure that extraterrestrial life exists... where and how is a completely different matter. Little green men aside, I think that life in any environment will have developed over time to suit it pretty well.. so maybe not 'primitive' life, but I'd lay the odds on most life we find being 'simple' - as in, attuned to that environment, however complex the biochemistry and such behind the simple processes. And with the right set of conditions, that could lead to what humans define as intelligence... but I'd say we have a higher chance of finding 'simple' life in Mars or Europa than intelligent life on a sol-type system elsewhere. It might be there... but our chances of finding it from here are lower.
Human life is very much a 'snapshot' of life on earth - whether or not we're still using powerful electromagnetic waves in four centuries could make a huge difference in our chance to detect intelligent life far, far away. But as our tech advances we can only use what we have and keep searching... just in case someone has the same idea as us.
So yeah, i also reckon we should transmit a beacon of some kind. We're already transmitting far and wide, so no worries there, but much of it depends on our electronics system and thus could be hard to detect as a proper message, although I'm sure it would be a great indication of some form of intelligent symbol. But to remove all doubt, a form of mathematical signal is probably best... codes, sequences, a la Contact.
I run Seti@Home in the vague hope it'll make a difference... far worse than running it uselessly would be the realisation that we've been missing something. The project is great, let's see the number-crunching continue to new wavelengths and different tests! |
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