| Personal background |
| I'm a 27 year old network engineer at an ISP in St. Louis. I've been running SETI@home for a long time. Many of my hobbies are very computer-oriented. I enjoy building PCs, collecting obscure bits of computer hardware (I especially like old workstations, the 'high performance' computers of yesterday, like older SGIs and Suns). Other than computer-related hobbies, I enjoy writing, reading books on various topics, listening to music, working on cars, and many other sorts of things. I'm halfway toward a degree in biology, but it's on hold for financial reasons. Currently, I've got SETI@home running on my home desktop, my home server, and my work desktop whenever I'm logged in. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
"Do you think extraterrestrial life exists? If so, when and how will humans discover it? What are the possible benefits and dangers of such a discovery?"
I think extraterrestrial life does indeed exist. The universe is so vast that I'd find it very hard to believe that the generation and evolution of life only occured once. When and how we'll discover it is a tougher question. We may find life in our own backyard; microbes on other bodies in the solar system that our previous exploratory probes had missed. There's always the possibility of us picking up EM signals from another intelligent source, but if there's no life in our backyard, and we don't hear any with our big 'ears', it'll be awhile before we have a chance of finding it; we've got a long way to go before we step out of the yard and start poking through the desert of space. The benifits are broad, including learning more about the universe and ourselves, possibly learning solutions to our terrestrial problems, and just knowing we're not alone in the great void. The dangers are also broad, as a species, we're not very mature, we destroy things too willingly. I'd hate to see us destroy life somewhere else. There're also issues like new diseases we might catch, and the off chance we'd upset some other intelligent species enough to have them turn violent against us.
"Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? If so, what information should we send?"
You mean we're not doing this already? We're pouring radio signals of all sorts out into space. I suppose if we were to set up a signal purposely to be heard, we should transmit a simple mathematical message, maybe followed by some encoded images (if the 'listeners' have eyes, a picture is worth a thousand words, especially if you don't speak the language.).
"Why do you run SETI@home? What are your views about the project? Any suggestions?"
I run SETI@home for a lot of reasons: I really believe in the project, and I'm excited at the tremendous amount of computing power harnessed. |
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