| Personal background |
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| Doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Of course extraterrestrial life exists. The question is how often does intelligent life arise and is there anyone within shouting distance who is at a similar level of tech? I suspect the problems we face with pollution, over population, and war kill off many civilizations after a few hundred years so the window of time a civilization is producing detectable signals is short. Deliberate interstellar commuication probably does not operate by radio unless two civilizations arise close together in time and space, so the few civilizations that survive their technological adolescense probably do not produce radio signals any more than we use drums or carrier pidgeons. This very medium of the internet allows a high level of traffic to be carried with only a modest portion of it ever being transmitted by radio. In 500 years radios will be a curiosity like an abacus. In the big picture 500 years is a very short period of time, yet technologically where will we be? My belief is the first ET's we will discover will probably be microbial extraterrestrial life on Mars or a moon around Jupiter or Saturn. If we discover life through a project like SETI it will be with a great deal of luck. However it is one of the most reasonable and interesting science projects our world can undertake.
As for transmitting a beacon, we have been doing that since the first radio broadcast. For better or worse we have been announcing ourselves in a noisy fashion for almost a century. A beacon would only add an intentional message inviting a response.
I run Seti at home because it is important for humanity to stop navel gazing and consider the larger environment we are in. It is also one of the few ways the average person going about an average life can participate in such large scale and important scientific work. Besides its fun! |
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