Profile: Philip Storvik

Personal background
I am a 28 yr old programmer living in Murfreesboro, TN, USA. My hobbies include star gazing, music, photography, computers & woodworking including tinkering with the equipment for all of the above and most important of all, my family who all run SETI as well. I am a transplant to the US, my father having moved us here from England in th 70s. I count Portugal and Norway as home countries as they are my mother's & father's, respectively.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Do you think extraterrestrial life exists? If so, when and how will humans discover it? What are the possible benefits and dangers of such a discovery?

Yes, I think that in all the 10,000 billion billion star systems out there something like what we call "life" must exist. What are the odds that would only evolve on 1 small planet in an insignificant system in a remote region of a fairly nondescript galaxy? Benefits? Hmmm, well, as a bit of a cynic I think it possible that even if we can find sign of life communication would be rediculously impractical but the benefit to humanity that we aren't alone could be tremendous. Dangers? Who knows? Not I.

Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? If so, what information should we send?

Well, since we've been transmitting for decades that seems rather unnecessary. I suppose a simple binary code COULD be deciphered by an intelligent species, but what to say? I think looking might be a better solution.

Why do you run SETI@home? What are your views about the project? Any suggestions?

From a purely practical standpoint I run it so the processor, which normally just sits & spins so to speak while not being told to do anything, ought to do SOMETHING. I don't have great hopes that something will be found but we'll never find "it" if we aren't looking. Even if the ET search is in vain, there must be some practical astronomical research use for all the data we are churning. My suggestion would be to continue to increase the science behind the work the SETI clients do so as to take better advantage of faster and faster processors. When I started, I was running at about 30hrs per unit. Now my fastest PC runs at 3.5hrs. Even though that makes the stats look good, that's not the point of this is it? Thanks for the great work so far and thanks for exposing & further developing the fantastic tool of distributed computing.


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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.