| Personal background |
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| I'm 16, from the UK. I'm a student, but I want to go into the computer gaming industry - I've been interested in computers since I used my first one at age 4, but in games I feel that there's the perfect blend of left-brain and right-brain activity; there's the cold, logical code on the one hand, and then there's the creative artwork, design, and general flare required to create a really great game.
I ultimately aim to be running my own company - primarily developing/selling games, but I also have extensive web backend experience (PHP, MySQL, Perl, plus the core languages), so websites will probably be on the menu. I write articles on technical aspects of games from time to time, which are published by a game developer website.
I'm about to go into my first year of A-Levels, for which I have selected Maths ( Advanced Maths), Physics, and Economics. I would have selected Computer Science for my final block, but my school doesn't offer it. I think the subjects I'll be taking will, however, provide me with a solid foundation for anything in theoretical mathematics, engineering, or even accounting. The free block will be used to build up my portfolio. :)
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| I feel that to talk about whether or not life exists, you have to define life first. And that's very difficult. After all, we're just bags of chemicals with electrical impulses shooting around in, right? By the same definition, a gas cloud containing electrical discharges could be considered a form of life. And as for sentience: I think I'd be just as happy if we discovered Martian ducks, than if we discovered martian civilization.
All in all, though, I think it does exist. Given the sheer size of space, it *has* to occur somewhere else - even if the universe isn't infinite, it's so incredibly huge that the chances end up heavily in favour of existence of ETI. But I don't think we're going to discover them - they're going to discover us. While we may have brilliant scientists and researchers, we have too many politicans and powerful fools messing things up. The aliens would have to be much better organised. :)
I do think that transmitting an explicit beacon is a good idea. Given that the first broadcast signals to reach space from the earth were TV shows such as I Love Lucy, it's probably best that we get out an, uh, 'official communique,' as soon as possible. We shouldn't be sending explicit messages of peace - if the aliens we meet happen to be hostile, sending out signals of passiveness and subservience is not a good idea - but we should merely be asking 'is anybody out there? We're new in this neighborhood.'
When I found out about SETI@home, I was mainly intrigued - a site that I frequent set up the group that I am a member of, and so that's how I found it. The underlying technology - massively distributed processing - is something which is extremely powerful, and should be developed for other applications (such as cure for cancer, if that hasn't been done already).
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