| Personal background |
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I'm from Cambridge, UK. I've been Teaching English in Bogotá, Colombia for the last 8 years, although I originally studied Micro electronics and worked in a programming team on VAX computers.
Interests include wanting to know if there is in fact anything out there.. Digital Photography and have been known to make Sushi at times.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Whether or not life exists 'out there' is not a question that anyone can answer, we have to look, as this is our nature as human beings. If we don't look then we will never know. If we look and we find nothing, we haven't failed but simply checked a hypothesis.
The statistical chance that we find life through this current process is marginal at best, as many aspects have to come together for detection. For instance, the life we are searching for has to have been at a particular evolutionary stage to have created radio waves that could be detected now after travelling for millions of years and we have to be looking at the right point in space.
If we find life, it would change our view of the universe, but probably not much more at present. Unless space travel can reduce the millions of years into a moment, then we will never meet or even communicate with our newly discovered friends. We may be able to learn something from their transmissions, but probably not. Imagine listening to all of the transmissions that are floating around our planet, what real knowledge could be learnt without extensive analysis of the millions of transmissions per day. How would we be able to separate the 'rubbish' from the potentially useful transmissions?
Maybe we should have a beacon for others to find, the chances of opening communications doubles if two groups are looking instead of one.
I think that SETI@HOME allows me to participate in something, so that I can say that we looked. As I said, if we don't look how do we know. I think that the program is big...4,000,000 plus participants... but really it is still a baby if we are going to really search the whole universe. Each and every participant helps to increase the processing power of the group to a point that maybe we will have the power to search all the skies in the future.
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