I'm a 20 year old from England studying computer science at the University of East Anglia. I run a gentoo webserver which also acts as my seti@home machine. I really do recommend gentoo to all you linux nerds out there nice and quick and easy when you've got a friend as intelligent as mine (who does all the work on it).
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Let's go by topics:
1.) I do believe intelligent life exists (though sometimes it doesn't seem like it does on earth) and I do believe we'll one day get 'em on long range. I don't think there are any truely great benifts or dangers - any conversations we're currently able to have will be pretty slow and disjointed (bit like my local mIRC server...) The only true benifit is not having the question "are we alone" because I really don't think out of all those solar systems there isn't at least one planet with life just or more so intelligent than our own.
2.) Don't see why we shouldn't transmit "hi, we're here". There's so many other potential living spaces out there that any species should be able to co-exist. Anyway! we've been broadcasting for too many years to worry about it now!
3.) I run seti@home because my webserver is terribly unpopular since it only hosts the one page @ the moments and is never really going to get popular. So it has lots of idle time it could use! I'm paying for the electricity anyway so why not use it to better the human race? I'd like to see a better linux version of the client that ran a bit faster. Making the whole project open source might help! BTW I don't usually dress like this, it was a charity event! (and ladies, the chest hair is fake and I'm currently out of the pimping loop ;-D (gf))
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.
