| Personal background |
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I am a 27 year old software engineer and dance instructor living in the Washington, DC area with my wife, 5 cats, and one dog. We also have a pony (who does not live with us) and are buying a horse to be her companion and for my wife to ride.
I work for the MITRE Corporation (a not-for-profit corporation founded in the public interest to do R&D and systems integration for the government) and the Arthur Murray Dance Center in Tysons Corner, VA. I write information management software in all sorts of languages by day and I teach people to dance all sorts of dances (ballroom, swing, and latin styles) at night.
My other passion is driving - right now I just drive a sports wagon (Audi S4 Avant) and have participated in a few road rallies and one autocross, but I hope to expand that to real track racing in the not too distant future.
I enjoy life. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I do think that extraterrestrial life exists. Without religious bias, there's not a whole lot of reason to think that our planet is unique in the universe, large as it is. So there are probably other planets out there with life, and some some with complex, intelligent life.
It's anybody's guess whether a program like SETI will first detect intelligent life by scanning the radio emissions of the cosmos, or whether we'll encounter simple life in our explorations of our own solar system. Another possibility is that the universe is seething with transmissions, but because of the horrendous inefficiency of radio, they're all using technologies that we're not aware of. Suppose the communications links are beams of coherent neutrinos? We could have one focussed on our system right now and we wouldn't know. Someday we'll have the technology to notice such a communication, but we don't now. (Note: I pulled that idea out of the air - it has no scientific basis).
But we have to keep looking.
Disovering extraterrestrial life will teach us all that we are not alone. Even for those like myself, that already feel this is likely, the confirmation will still serve to expand our mental concept of the universe. We should all be striving to expand our worldview - to see people of other cities, states, nations, colors, with other creeds, cultures, attitudes, philosophies, politics, as fellows - not "others". Discovering that the universe has other life in it, especially intelligent life, will bring those of us on Earth together.
I love that worthy projects like SETI@home exist to make use of the wasted cycles on the global distributed Internet computer.
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