| Personal background |
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As the user name suggests, my name is Brent Espenship. In a nutshell, I am a 30-something family-man and self-proclaimed nerd (and all that those imply). I am into all sorts of nerdy pursuits (E/M engineering, math, science, and technology), along with aviation, linguistics, music, travel, and the outdoors.
IMHO, I am apretty average, practical guy with a dash of imagination thrown in to keep things interesting.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I found out about SETI@Home (S@H) from a friend and my then supervisor at Autodesk, Andrzej Pruszynski, along with Juha Viikki. We all decided it would be a worthwhile cause and set our PCs at work to crunch S@A data during their offtime. Needless to say, I have really become enamored with S@H over the years.
For me, S@H has several components that I really appreciate that are also expressed very well in the novel and film Contact. First, it is pure (as opposed to applied) research, that is for the sake of curiosity and is in the pursuit of advancing knowledge for its own sake. Do not get me wrong, applied research is very important and is frankly much more pragmatic and efficient in terms of spending research money. But that is part of the beauty of it - it is commonly-accepted that no one should get rich doing pure reasearch, making it more of an altruistic endeavor.
The second is ET - I hope we are part of something bigger, and that we are not simply the lonely, tiny dot at the center of the universe. My hope is that we are not alone in the universe and that intelligent life that would want to contact us would be at least neutral, if not benevolent, towards humanity. Contrary to the War of the Worlds concept (which I think is great entertainment, by the way), life seems rare enough (life intelligent enough to accomplish inter-galactic travel even more so) in the universe that resources and habitable space would not be an issue.
I have been working on S@H since 24 Aug 1999, making the switch to the BOINC client between June and August of 2005. I left SETI@Home classic with 342,399 hours (14,266.625 days / 39.06 years) of CPU time and 75,231 results. Finally, in all fairness, more than half of both the SETI@Home classic and BOINC time has been donated by my employer, Autodesk.
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