| Personal background |
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I'm 44 years old and work for a major IT company. Over my 20 year career, I've worked for two Chemical/Drug companies in various IS/IT roles before getting outsourced to the IT company. As my handle suggests, my main hobby is rowing (www.wrcrowing.org is the website I maintain for my club, if you're curious...) and I have two degrees from Iowa State. I currently live Pennsylvania and work in Delaware. I have a wife of 22 years and two sons, one in college and the other getting ready to go to college this fall (2003).
One of the sons told told me about SETI, I got hooked and have enjoyed taking discarded PC's and one-by-one turning them into a (slow) fleet of unit crunchers. Maybe I'll actually buy hardware specifically for SETI someday and join in the battle for numerical superiority. For now, however, I'm just enjoying tinkering with the hardware, playing with different operating systems and getting satisfaction out of turning thrown-out equipment into something useful in the pursuit of a good cause.
I currently have 5 P3's (all 750-850 MHz), 2 P2's (333 MHz) and a P1 (166 MHz). Three of those machines run W2K with the command line client, four run RH7.3 and one runs OpenBSD.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Do I think extraterrestrial life exists? I don't know, but it's certainly possible and we owe it to ourselves to try to find out. Given the size of the universe, it's difficult for me to accept that Earth has the only life-forms in existence.
When and how will humans discover it? I don't know enough about the subject to know whether it's more likely that we'll find someone using something like SETI or that they'll find us. Either one seems possible to me. I don't know when this discovery will take place either, but I doubt we'll find a needle in such a large haystack in our lifetimes.
What are the benefits and dangers? Well, it could mean lifting our civilization to unimagined levels, much as the exploration of the earth did centuries ago, only on a grander scale. It could also end it our world as we know it. I think it's most likely, however, that it will be something far less dramatic and sexy (what we discover could be nothing more than microbes, amino acids or something of the sort for instance) which lacks the Hollywood sort of melodrama that a lot of people seem to want.
Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? Absolutely - why not? What would we send? I'd send something simple that says "we're alive" such as a heartbeat or pulse of some kind.
Why do I run SETI@home? Partly because it gives me an excuse to play with hardware and OS's as mentioned above. More importantly, however, because there's something fulfilling about being part of a project of this scale in search of something so potentially grand and far-reaching.
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