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| Personal background |
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Updated: 19 Nov 2006
I just completed 6.7 years of active duty service in the USAF. I worked in Satellite and Telemetry communications. I also worked on ICBM rocket motors. That was a blast, literally. I am now working as a Systems Engineer at Innosys Technologies. My engineering specialty is yet to be determined and will most likely parallel my educational endeavors.
I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Park University. In the very near future, I will be starting my Graduate degree at the University of Utah. I am interested in computer engineering and mathematics. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It would be statistically futile to state that the conditions that provide for life here on Earth would not exist in the great expanse of the Universe. Google "The Drake Equation". Even though any sufficiently advanced civilization might indistinguishable from what we consider to be "Nature", it is worthy of making some calculations to put things into perspective.
If our visible universe is at least 78 billion light years in radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum due to inflation, one could calculate the time it would take to cross such a distance. Granted, According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least 10 to the(35th) light-year across!
Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from one end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10 to the(18th)light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10 to the (35th) light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?
3.7 billion years
Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10 to the(100th) galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it.
For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 1075 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms composing the Earth.
Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended.
With that said, it seems the question whether or not there is Extra Terrestrial life in the Universe should be a side issue. What really matters is how we will communicate with them.
Our nearest spiral galaxy, the Andromeda Spiral Galaxy, is over 2,000,000 light years away. For a message to reach us today it would need to have been transmitted towards the end of the Pliocene age, when Homo Erectus first appeared and began to diversify. To put it another way, the race that transmitted such a message would be 2,000,000 years more advanced then we are and we can only imagine how primitive we would appear to them. We need to consider also that if we did receive a message from the Andromeda Spiral galaxy, by the time we did they may no longer exist.
Do we want to end up like Earth's dinosaurs? Earth's dinosaurs are a example of living in the bliss of ingnorance (no fault of their own). Repeating this mistake can only doom our future generations to whatever earth or outer space subjugates. It seems kind of funny in introspect, that we are riding on a rather large out of control space ship orbiting a massive fireball with no ability to eject.
Unfortunately, right now, in our short life times, the search for extra terrestrial life does not directly affect our lifes or our safety. This means that only visionaries who realize the incredibly positive social changes and cultural benefits of making contact will be the only ones contributing.
Maybe what we need a nice sizeble rogue comet or astroid on a collision course with Earth...or maybe an unpredicted solar flare anomoly from the Sun, to give us a nice kick in the ass. It's such a sad situation, that we as a human race cannot use our potential brain power in concert. We must come to the realization that we cannot go on living the way we are without serious consequences. Even ants, with no brains, can work together to move mountains!
I suppose S.E.T.I is a beginning though. All of us who are helping this cause should be considered the visionaries! Thank you to the visionary students and professors for launching S.E.T.I@home into action and giving all of us a chance to participate in something worthwhile! You are the tip of the "public" spear......Sharp Salute... |
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