| Personal background |
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During the day, I am a senior scientist for Rockwell Scientific performing applied research on artificial intelligence (planning, decision theory) and optimization (resource management, scheduling).
In the evening, I garden and play with my beautiful brilliant three-year old (she can find Jupiter in the sky--can you?) and beautiful brilliant wife. Since I have a small child, I have cultivated a wide range of exciting and challenging hobbies such as cooking, kissing boo-boos, blocks, lego, making animal noises, giving animal rides, bicycle supervision, watching animated classics (again and again and again and again) and story reading. I have also found mastery in laundry, vacuuming, mowing, weeding, auto maintenance, bill paying and tax form preparation. At night after EVERYONE IS ASLEEP, I look for deep sky objects (10" dob, 16" dob on order) and occasionally weightlift. In past years I have actually been known to ski, windsurf, dive and play competitive bridge. Maybe I will be able to do this again in a few years.
Is it worth giving up every second of your free time to raise kids? Absolutely. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Do I think extraterrestrial life exists? Well, I think that the Fermi paradox is pretty damning for the existence of a lot of extraterrestrial civilizations. I believe in the following values for the Drake equation:
R = 10 [Half of the stars created per year (20) per galaxy are feasible for life]
f_p = 0.7 [Fraction of stars with suitable planets]
n_e = 0.1 [liquid water]
f_l = 0.1 [fraction with life]
f_i = 10e-5 [Breakdown: prokaryotes: 0.1, multi-cellular: 0.1, intelligence 0.001]
f_c = 0.5 Fraction of intelligent aliens that develop radio and try to communicate.
L = 2000 [An optimistic assessment of the life time for civilization]
This gives a probability significantly less than 1 (7 x 10e-4) that there is another intelligent civilization in our galaxy. Given that there are something like 100 billion galaxies, my odds that there are other civilizations in other galaxies is quite high.
Should we transmit a beacon? Seems only civil to say high to your neighbors, if there are any.
Why do I run SETI@home, although I believe it extremely unlikely that we will discover other civilizations, I believe that discovery of an alien civilization would be the most important discovery in the history of our planet. Thus SETI research is an important thing to do. |
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