| Personal background |
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| Hi everyone, I'm from Exeter, England, I'm 16 years old and I am a sci-fi nerd. I confess this freely because it is part of the reason why I'm interested in SETI. If we can find and communicate with life on other planets at a superior stage in their technological development, the questions sci-fi routinely discusses, like "should we interfere with less advanced civilizations?" and "How do we overcome the vast distances between the stars?" may well become really relevant. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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There are one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, give or take. There are a comparable number of galaxies, each with a comparable number of stars in the universe. I therefore find it not only staggeringly unlikely, but really quite frightening, that this planet could be the only one in the universe supporting intelligent life. Some of course, question the assertion that there's intelligent life down here, but only in jest.
As to whether or not we should send out a beacon, we are already doing so. I refer of course to TV signals, anything designed to be able to reach a satellite will be able to get out of the atmosphere, and will continue on. I am reminded of Carl Sagan's novel, Contact, which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster, and which first interested me in SETI, in which an advanced extraterrestrial civilization sends, as their greeting to Planet Earth, a recording of Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
I run SETI@home because I am interested in communication, in all its forms. I am a keen linguist, and I'm especially interested in the Classical languages. Reading Cicero for the first time, it struck me that I was entering into communication, albeit one way, with a lawyer who lived and died two millenia before I was born. If communication over such great lengths of time is possible, why not over great, to use exactly the right word astronomical, distances? |
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