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| Personal background |
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I hate travelling; correspondingly, despite being born in Scotland, I have lived in England, America, and now Australia. I fully expect any future loves to be inconveniently situated on the moon, at closest. Perhaps helping SETI@home find me another bloody awkward love is not such a good idea after all.
I'm an old-school programmer, from the days when 68000 assembly language was considered a perfectly valid language in which to write a game, and thus I occasionally mutter rude remarks about the SETI@home program (without addon bits) not queuing a few work units in case the user is offline when one is completed, getting 300K lumps rather than trickling subsequent work units in idle bandwidth, not having much of a run-in-the-background interface available for Windows, and, given those simple omissions, probably also not being as optimised as it could be (a small increase in speed would make a lot of difference, of course, given the format).
I'm also occasionally a writer, artist, engineer, sculptor, web designer, game designer, chef, scrabble player, and whatever else takes my fancy at the time, except for composer, skater or ski-er at all of which I am inexplicably inept. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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To imagine that the only life in the universe is confined to one planet seems extraordinarily vain. To imagine that humanity is the only possible way intelligent life could evolve is certainly extraordinarily blinkered.
It seems unlikely that any other intelligent, technological life - any life capable of spacefaring at all - would be a threat. If one is capable of exploiting resources on distant planets, there are plenty uninhabited that can be exploited without conflict. If one wants slaves or servants, technology will always provide better than unwilling biological entities. The only reason one might have for aggression would be in the expectation of aggression from the other party; any other party capable of spacefaring should be capable of following this same logic to its simple conclusion that, unless a lifeform is horrendously virulent, spreading to every habitable planet it encounters, that lifeform is not a threat unless threatened. Dangers, then, seem unlikely.
Possible benefits, of course, are manifold; not least, the exchange of probably very different technology, probably to the benefit of both cultures. A beacon, then, should include as clearly as possible without language, the information that humanity has no wish to fight unless threatened, and would like to exchange information. This would probably be best displayed in the form of a visual animation with dots representing entities; different colours for different races. Of course, encoding a visual animation in any form that doesn't include sending the physical display unit, that could be decoded by a race with completely different technological outlook, would be a tricky task at best. The fact remains, it's unlikely that it would hurt to try.
Why do I run SETI@home? Because my processors aren't doing anything else with those cycles, and folding@home's software isn't as good. |
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