Profile: Avery

Personal background
My name is Avery. Born and raised in Tulsa, OK, I am now somewhat of a hobo. More like a flea, though, in that I live with different friends on different days. Nothing beats hopping from house to house, building computers and fixing miscellaneous electronics to keep a roof over your head! I started running SETI@Home a few years back on my mom's laptop (P150MMX), which got stolen, much to my dismay. I continued to run it on my dad's Macintosh IIsi (woohoo! old school! Motorola 68030 @20MHz) and then on his Motorola Starmax 3000 (PowerPC 603e 160 MHz). Once those computers were abandoned (due to the stupid weather and flash floods filling my room), I forgot to install it on the new computer, a 3rd-gen iMac.

Flash-forward to present day. I have a rekindled interest in finding intelligent life ANYWHERE, and since I haven't had much luck in podunkville, USA, I figured the next step was outer space. So here I am, nearly 19 years of age, lookin' out my backwindow for aliens again.

When I'm not scanning for ET, I enjoy racing my bicycle around town at breakneck speeds, anything that involves an adrenalin rush, keeping updated on computers, continuing my education on C and Linux, building things, fixing electrical doo-dads, running wires, plumbing, A/C work, pretty much whatever I can get my hands on. Come December (around the 15th), I will be making the voyage to Texas for another temporary life. I am currently unemployed, but I do odd jobs for money (no, not the sexual kind). If you have any questions about me, you can e-mail me at rujuchavca@geocities.com or read more about my depressing life at http://www.livejournal.com/users/weevey_bob, which is my online journal.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Hmmm... tough question time.
Yes, I believe ET. Intelligent ETs, at that. I sincerely doubt, however, that within the next 100 years we will discover anything they have sent out. With about a gazillion different options for them to choose from on how to transmit a signal and even more places from which they could send it, our chances of actually coming in contact with a signal sent in light form (as radio-, micro-, and other such waves are), let alone one that we could interpret, are infintessimely small. Our technology will have to build up to the point that we can interpret a far wider frequency spectrum before we have any real hope of success. And even then, the signal would have to travel, undegraded, for god-only-knows how many light years before it would be intercepted by our antennae. If, by some miracle, we manage to find a signal, and it isn't a prank, I would imagine that the likelihood would be that we would partake in friendly communications with the others at first. Both species would very likely benefit from one another's technology, culture, resources, etc. I somewhat doubt that it would be to their benefit (or ours for that matter) to take over our planet.

I feel that sending a signal, although probably pointless, is a good first step towards establishing ourselves as a presence in the intergalactic community, if there is such a thing.

I run SETI@home because I have way too many unused processor cycles on this computer and three others here, as well as to provide myself with entertaining eye candy. Oh, and to benefit the human race. *smirk*

I pride myself in knowing that, instead of letting my computer idle with a screen saver at bay, I may indeed be the one to open up the world to a new way of life, or at least to a new thought process in the scientific community. Now all I have to do is get the scientific community as a whole to believe it! A simple task, eh?
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