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| Personal background |
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| I'm 60, have a degree in chemistry, and am the leader of the Unreal Tournament 2004 online gaming clan, Deviants. I'm skeptic and a cynic. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Of course extraterrestrial life exists. We will find it sometime and probably by accident. The benefits are probably mainly non-existent other than to satisfy our curiosity. The dangers are probably mostly from ourselves, as speculated in the movies Contact and Independence Day...between the religious nuts and the morons going crazy. Seti is NOT searching for extraterrestrial life, it is searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life...whether that exists anywhere in the universe is still open to question. :) For the sake of argument, I'll concede that if we qualify, there is plenty of intelligent life on this planet that we have yet to figure how how to effectively communicate with. Communication with extraterrestrial life forms is going to be a challenge, at best.
The assumption that if/when we find intelligent extraterrestrials that they will be far advanced of us and we will sit at their feet and absorb new knowledge and wisdom is so sickeningly humble on our part, I can hardly stand it. Likewise, the assumption that communication with them over the vastness of space will be anything more than a curiosity is incredibly naive. Even if we detect communication from our nearest neighbor and send a simple "hello" to them, it'll take 4 1/3 years to get there, God only know how long, if at all, it will take for them to figure out what we said, and then another 4 1/3 years for the reply to get back to us, and then on our end, maybe we'll figure out that they said "hello" back to us. How useful!
I'm participating in SETI because I, like most everyone else, am curious to see what we may find. Often the search for one thing leads to the discovery of something entirely different... I'm equally interested in watching humanity pee all over itself in excitement when the discovery made.
Ultimately, who knows? The optimists, visionaries, or even the morons may have been right all along. |
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