I am a twenty one year old student studying computer systems at Tafe living in Melbourne Australia. I have been interested in science (mainly cosmology, chemistry and physics) for as long as i can remember. My favorite book is undoubtetly Carl Sagans Cosmos. I am looking forward to getting out and seeing the world when my course is over and working out where in science my future lies. I also enjoy snowboarding and playing drums.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I think life is as natural a process in the universe as the birth of stars. There is no doubt that organic life is widespread throughout the universe, and given the multitude of locations where it may arise there would be many places suitable for it to evolve into self aware intellegent beings. The problem of course is the shear imensity of space and the limit of our current technology. I believe searching for radio transmissions is a wonderful idea and modern computing is making it possible in ways never before. Unfortunately eventually it may be up to us to develope technology to travel the vast distances and find life before the ultimate question will be answered for us. That is many years from now though (but not impossible) and Seti@home is certainly the best tool we have at the moment.
I would like to see interesting finds and statistics on the web page like fastest units processed and interesting signals found even if they are of earth origin (we might know more about what to look for if we paid attention to what we sent out ourselves). I would also like to see Seti@home used as a benchmark for hardware, if i was shopping for a cpu i'd buy one that kicked ass on Seti@home over any other chip.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
