| Personal background |
|---|
I am from the midwestern United States and I work in the telecommunications field. About 18 months ago I saw an article on a co-worker's desk that talked about the SETI program. I was interested, so I installed it on my computers. I now have over 1100 units under my belt and they are going faster now that I'm running an AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz T-Bird instead of an old Cyrix 166 .
As far has hobbies, I have 3 kids to keep me busy. When I can find a few minutes, I can be found in my basement banging away on my old Ludwig Vistalite drum set. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
|---|
Given the sheer number of stars in the universe, I wouldn't be suprised if there were many civilizations in existence. Given the fact that radio waves attenuate to the square of the distance, I doubt we'd ever detect their signals unless they came nearby. I think our chance of detect radio wave lies with a large antenna array (say, the size of the moon) to get the antenna gain up (which happens to be in the numerator of the radar equation. If we do encounter another civilization, I hope they are peaceful. For if they are, we will have a lot to learn from them and vice versa. If not, then I hope our weapons are a lot better than theirs...
I wouldn't worry about sending a beacon. We couldn't put out a strong enough signal that would be detected more than a couple light years away at this time. Perhaps when we get better microwave tubes...
I run the SETI program to see how high I will get in the standings. I keep an Excel spreadsheet to track my progress. When I started the spreadsheet a little over a year ago, I was in the 92nd percentile. Now I'm in the 98th percentile!
My recommendation to the SETI team is to consider sending several data units to the more dedicated crunchers so those of us who aren't alway connected to the internet can keep the crunching going after a unit is complete. It could be a couple hours before I realize that I need to connect to send a unit. That's a couple hours the computer could be crunching... |
| Your feedback on this profile |
|---|
| Recommend this profile for User of the Day: |
I like this profile |
| Alert administrators to an offensive profile: |
I do not like this profile |
|
|
