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| Personal background |
I'm Armin Burkhardt, 44 years old, I finished my Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1992. Now I am now working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart (http://www.fkf.mpg.de), Germany, as head of the IT support group. We use BOINC applications to burn in our new computers. Currently Einstein@home is my main application as my employer - the Max Planck Society - takes part in the LIGO collaboration that runs this project.
I must admit, I am more fascinated by the technical realisation of the project, which I consider a first and very important step towards grid or cloud computing and a world where computational power will become a utility for everyone like electricity and telephone today.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
Regarding extraterrestrial life, I believe that evolution is an universal principle and not restricted to earth. Therefore I think it exists, but I doubt that we will contact or meet it in the forseeable future.
I think, with a few exceptions, our views of extraterrestral life are far to antropocentric. Neither the living ocean depicted by Stanislaw Lem in "Solaris" nor the Cheela creatures living on the surface of a neutron star imagined by Robert L. Forward in "Dragon's Egg" and "Star Quake" would be detected by the current project.
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