As a video game programmer, a Christian, a role-player and someone who dabbles in both artificial intelligence and astronomy, I live anything but a simple life. My wife is just as much of a living paradox as I am. Together, we discuss topics as wide-ranging as the possibility of finding extra-terrestrial life (both intelligent and non-), religion, gaming, and even how best to conquer the world! We were married in June, 2001 so we are now in the process of building a life for ourselves.

I currently work for Insomniac Games in the Los Angeles area, working on our top-secret (for now...!) PlayStation 2 game. Having recently finished Spyro: Year of the Dragon, we know that gamers have very high expectations on our next (non-Spyro) title, so I have been among many working late hours and weekends to make sure that we don't disappoint! But I don't mind; if I didn't want a challenge, I wouldn't be in the video game industry in the first place.

I signed up for the SETI@home project because I thought the concept of lending unused processor time to find aliens was cool. While I think that life, especially single-celled life, is comonplace in the universe, and may very well exist in other places in the Solar System, I think that complex extra-terrestrial life is vanishly rare, and intelligent ET life even more so.

However, that hasn't stopped me from running SETI@home, if for no other reason than I hope to be proven wrong by it! Do I think intelligent ET life exists? Yes, I think it is quite likely, but so many of the variables in Drake's equasion are at best unknown. So if intelligent ET life does exist, we may have a hard time finding it. I think it is quite likely that we will have to develop technology to actually search our galactic neighborhood star by star before we will find intelligent ET life.

While I hope that I am wrong, even if I am proven correct with time, I don't think that searching for ET is a fruitless effort. Quite the contrary, the data that we have learned about stars, star formation and extra-solar planets have largely been an indirect result of our need to explore, to know what is really out there. SETI is just a part of that, and if we do find intelligent ET life, then SETI may very well be the most important research project ever conceived.

I hope that we find intelligent ET life sooner rather than later, and I am glad to be able to be part of that effort.