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| Personal background |
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My name is Drew Wagar, born 21/08/1970. I work for Sun Microsystems, involved with Portal Infrastructure software.
My background is in computing, I used my first computer (based on a intel 8088i processor) in 1978. This had 256 bytes of RAM, and a simple hexidecimal display. You had to program it in binary!
I'm married to Anita, with a young son Mark, born in 2000, making him one of the last children of the twentieth century. He's already able to point out the moon and stars.
Apart from SETI, my hobbies include 1970s Volkswagens, astronomy, antique clocks and barometers. I also play the piano, guitar and clarinet. My local astronomy club is renovating an observatory with a 14" reflector telescope which we hope to have operation in the next year, along with a primitive radio scope too.
I am running SETI@Home on three machines as follows.
A Pentium 3 Dell Laptop at 800Mhz, an Pentium 3 server at 750 Mhz, and a Solaris Ultra IIi 10 Server, running at only 400Mhz, but providing performance on per with the two Pentiums due to it's 64 bit architecture and optimised client. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I concede the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but I think it is very unlikely that we will discover it. Looking at the progress of the human race in just a few short hundreds of years, and comparing that with the age of the universe, it seems very implausible to me that two intelligences in the universe would be close enough in terms of technology and general development to be able to share any meaningful communication.
In light of the above, I suspect that any more advanced intelligences out there are so far in advance of our own that they are already more than aware of our presence. We should devote our energies to making sure we survive our current environmental issues! As for a beacon, no information need be sent, simply a regular pulse of simple codes (eg. prime numbers) should be more than sufficient.
I run SETI@home because it is technically interesting, much aligned with my interest in astronomy. We are likely to uncover some new scientific discoveries with this search and there is always a small chance we will make contact with another intelligence!
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