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| Personal background |
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| I'm a former student of Cornell University in Computer Science ('02). I ran SETI@Home classic from 1998, when I ran it as a screen saver on my (borrowed) Power Machines mac clone (210 Mhz PPC 604e) until May 2004, when I made the switch to BOINC. Now I run it on my Powerbook (G3/400/Panther), my PC tower(P3/866/Win2k), and my PC laptop (Pentium M/1.7/XP Pro); I don't know why anyone wouldn't run it with the lowest priority on their system ... viva SETI! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I run SETI@Home because I think it's a great example of a distributed computing project - this is exactly the application distributed computing excels in solving (well, working on, at least). I think it's a worthy endeavor, even though my expectations of success aren't optimistic, and I believe other worthy science will spawn from the SETI work, perhaps even in distributed computing (and not in extraterrestrial searching). I am very impressed with the wide range of operating systems the client comes written for, and I believe this is a model experiment that people should study should they want to run an experiment in the future.
The project definitely has a "cool factor", as evidenced by the Arecibo telescope appearing in movies and SETI getting airtime on the news. I think extraterrestrial life could exist, but we probably won't discover it this way (but I'm participating partly because there might be a chance ...). I think either they'll find us, or we'll venture out in the distant future and find them.
I don't think we should make ourselves any more visible on the cosmic radar than we already are - if something comes looking for us, maybe it will be like Independence Day. It is a good idea for us to try to find them; at least we'll know we're more advanced then! |
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