I live in Bellingham, Washington. That's about 80 miles north of Seattle and about 12 miles south of Canada. It's a nice place with water, mountains, and all the fun activities that go along with them.

In the 90's I played piano for a living. I still play quite a bit and even have a website for learning jazz piano (http://www.learnjazzpiano.com). These days I make living doing web development through a home-based company, Avant Solutions.

If you're reading this, you are probably interested in science an new technology. You might want to check out the Searl Effect (http://www.searleffect.com). This is a power generator that has some interesting side effects, such as possible antigravity. I haven't seen one work yet and haven't quite made my mind up about it, but it certainly looks feasable as a clean energy source.

That's all!

I've also been a huge Sci-Fi fan, as many here probably are, and many of the outcomes of meeting an advanced civilization are not as bright and shiny as we'd like. So I need to respond to number 2- I think it would be best to discover some other civilization before they discovered us, just to be on the safe side.

It's called look before you leap.

But on the other hand, what if one day we do meet an alien civilization? And, if by chance we can actually get some communication going (keep it up, linguistics majors!), it would be rather nice to get a new viewpoint on things, eh?

I have to admit, though, I'm a bit of a pessimist. Not about the fact that there may be life out there, I'm quite sure of that, but of the fact that we'll be able to sense it, and if it's intelligent enough to sense us, it would probably be intelligent enough to stay away until we all come to our senses. Humans kill each other, let each other starve, don't live in peace, etc etc etc.

I'm part of the school, "They'll contact us when we're ready"