| Personal background |
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52 yrs old, white male carpenter and construction superintendent; English major from U of Washington and goodly curiosity about all fields of science insofar as they can be explained to me in layman's language.
My father read the "Science of Our Times" radio program for the blind at Sun Sounds in Phoenix for sixteen years, and I have entertained the thought of becoming a science writer myself, because, as Carl Sagan once said, "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I support and applaud the SETI-at-home project as one way to promote reason over belief, which seems to be the major struggle presently challenging the human race. Searching for evidence of whatever is really "out there" is a so much more positive undertaking than trying to force all the world into a pre-conceive canon of faith. As Friedrich Nietzche said, "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
As far as SETI itself is concerned, I feel that both the certainty of the existence of other life in the universe and the fact we have not yet perceived it can both be explained by the sheer size of our home, which was best illustrated to me by Sir James Jeans, who said "Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars."
Arthur C. Clarke's said: "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering", but he also pointed out that "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value", which leads one to speculate that perhaps "SETI" should be altered to "SETL." |
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