Profile: Richard Phillips

Personal background
I'm 41 and was born, and still live, in Melbourne (Australia). I've travelled around the world a fair bit, and lived in other cities and countries, but I still love my home town!

I guess you could say I'm one of the original kid hacker/computer geeks, as when I was a kid I used to try to get my hands on anything even remotely computer related. Of course now I would find it virtually impossible to remember how to key in a boot loader via a hex pad, or get an acoustic coupler to work.... oh, hang on - they never did work, did they... ;-)

Anyhow, I studied Classics/Geology at university, with the aim of eventually perhaps becoming an Archaeologist or Palaeontologist.... of course when I started to look for work I discovered that there were a lot more jobs out there for computer geeks, and the pay was significantly better, so (being a greedy black duck) ancient history became a hobby and my hobby of computing became my career.

I have managed to combine some of my interests a little by setting up a web site for Ninkasi (www.ninkasi.com) - the ancient Sumerian godess of beer. When I have time, I must update it....
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
When I first heard about seti@home, it appealed to me on a number of different levels. I certainly was interested in participating in a project that might lead to discovering evidence of intelligent life out there. I was also interested in the actual technology itself - I could see a lot of potential for distributed computing, and thought that the project should be encouraged.

I hope that there is intelligent life out there, if only so that we can watch "I Love Xqrsteklp!" instead of Lucy..... of course some of their jokes may go over our heads.... then again some of the jokes in "I Love Lucy" may go over their heads.... if they have any..... ;-)

Although even if this project manages to find some sort of signal, it's going to be hard to convince people that it's absolute proof - I can hear the "it could be another wierd pulsar, you know" arguments already.... Still, it would be nice to have a little bit of proof that there may be intelligent life out there so that, should we manage to nacker it down here we know that it's still around..... although of course by the time a radio signal reaches us it's quite possible that they wiped themselves out millenia ago..... hmmmm... not quite as cheery a thought as I'd hoped.... With any sort of luck they will be more intelligent, though. It's like when the Wizard of Id says that he believes that there's intelligent life on other worlds, and when asked why they haven't visited us, he answers "You haven't been listening".....
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