I was introduced to SETI by a friend and have been running SETI@HOME on my work and home computers ever since. I used to live and work in Ottawa Canada for a company specializing in offering computer help line services. I moved to Kingston in Nov. 2016 because its my wifes home town. My main interests are computers, religions and cultures. Learning about other cultures and beliefs goes a long way to getting along with others on this planet and is something that we will have to learn as a species if and when we contact another species in the universe.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I firmly believe there are other civilizations in the universe. There are billions of stars in the universe and for us to think that only ours has a planet with life on it is quite conceited and close minded on our part.
SETI is operating on the premise that another civilization similar to ours is using signals in the same spectrum as us and may be doing what we are which is looking for other civilizations to seek the same answer that we seek which is "are we alone?"
Any signals that we receive in the radio spectrum will be thousands and perhaps millions of years old and communication with these civilizations will be impossible with our light speed technology but it would be thrilling to receive a signal that will confirm there are other civilizations out there and that we are not the sole guardians of the universe.
Even if we manage to communicate with another species it may be all but impossible to understand them. It would be similar to someone on our planet attempting to understand a language from another culture such as a typical North American trying to decipher spoken or written Chinese. A perfect example of this was the inability to read Egyptian hieroglyphics until the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799. Up until that time no one could understand Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone contained the same text written in Greek, a known language, and Egyptian hieroglyphics giving scholars a key to understanding this ancient written language.
We know that dolphins appear to have a language and are intelligent enough to understand us over a period of time if the vocabulary is kept to a minimum but we have yet to decipher their language. If we have this problem with written and spoken languages on our own planet it can be seen how difficult it would be to decypher language from a different species from another planet.
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.
