| Personal background |
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I'm from the Netherlands, as you've probably guessed from my nick. I'm 35 years, single, and graduated in theoretical chemistry focusing on interstellar chemical processes.
I currently work for ING, a large Dutch bank, with large holdings all over the world, including the US of A, China and all of Europe. My job is to evaluate current processes in the dynamic world of securities, and as such I advise management how to further improve the performance of our business unit.
Hobbies include hiking long distances (40 km/25 miles), playing bridge, and solving logical puzzles. In 2001 I finished 12th in the national puzzle solving championships (my top performance so far). I also like to play RPG's and real time strategy games.
I'm a proud member of the Seti@Netherlands community, and serve as a mentor for new members. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I'm sure extraterrestrial life exists somewhere. I just don't think we can communicate with it. If we discover any transmissions from an extraterrestrial civilization, chances are that it is already long extinct (e.g. because their sun went supernova) because their signal has travelled for an incredibly long amount of time. Transmitting a beacon for others to find is, for the same reason, only useful for scientific reasons. Of course, discovering transmissions from an alien civilization could have enormous implications on our own civilization and it could just as easy been forgotten the next day.
Why then do I run Seti@Home? It's obviously not because I think we'll find E.T. I do however see some extra bonuses resulting from this project. I started to run S@H over two years ago because I thought that analyzing recordings from a large radio telescope would make identification of natural phenomena such as quasars, black holes etc., easier.
And look where Seti@Home has led us today. BOINC is almost ready, and one of its spearheads is the project Astropulse, just the kind of distributed computing project I was looking for. |
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