Profile: Steve Fahie

Personal background
I worked for a government department in Ottawa Canada, and was in IT for about 30 years. I spent many years working with IBM 360's and their successors, but everything is now servers and workstations instead of huge rooms with one or two gigantic computers, and everyone with 3270's on their desk. Wasn't getting a screen wonderful after having to deal with punch cards and fanfold listings ?

I'm retired now, but I keep my hands in it a bit by repairing home computers out of my house. Many of my clients are older people who don't want to disconnect their computers themselves, and really appreciate someone who can do it for them at a reasonable price. The stores offering home IT service charge a fortune for this kind of thing.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I think ET is out there, and some day we may even detect signals that appear to be from intelligent sources. I am guessing though, that life at this level is so rare that evidence will come from many light years away, basically preventing any return communication with today's technology and understanding of science. In spite of that, solid evidence of life somewhere else would be an astounding discovery, and I believe in concerted efforts to find it. We have been sending signals out to space for a few years now, since we first developed wireless communication, but it's so random and unfocused that it's unlikely to be useful. We should be sending out something clear and strong, not a message in any of our multitude of languages on earth, but a clear electronic signal that could only be generated by an intelligent species, and easily recognizable as such by other such species. Even if we are long gone from this planet when it is received, it could help another life form make that big discovery far in the future.
Your feedback on this profile
Recommend this profile for User of the Day: I like this profile
Alert administrators to an offensive profile: I do not like this profile
Account data View
Team None
Message boards 1 posts



 
©2024 University of California
 
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.