I'm a 36-year-old Earth Science Teacher from New York State. I teach on the U.S.-Canadian border in a town called Massena. I got interested in SETI because my students only find learning science useful if they can see its application to everyday. Not only does SETI show them this but they think it's pretty cool so they're interested in it.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. I'd like to think extraterrestrial life exists. If not, in the words of Dr. Sagan, it's a pretty big waste of space. I guess I don't hold out much hope that there is life as intelligent as we are. I think we will discover microbial life either on Mars or on one of Jupiter's moons. I think the big benefit of this discovery is just knowing that we are not alone in the Universe. I think humans will most likely end up colonizing the Universe.
2. I think the message that is about Voyager is a good message.
3. I run SETI@home at my school. Like I said, I don't think that we'll find anyone broadcasting a message to us. It's like searching for a needle a haystack. There are a lot of assumptions that need to be made such as the stage of development of other possible civilizations and what frequencies they would broadcast on. If these assumptions are off then we'll miss any possible signal. But I think it'd be an even bigger waste if we didn't try to find other civilizations.
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.
