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| Personal background |
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| 39 years old, 6'3", blond hair, blue eyes (that a girl could drown in I was once told, but she was trying to sell me something at the time, so who knows?), devastatingly handsome... Computer Guru, author, shopkeeper, and all-around good guy. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Hmmm... you've changed the questions... I'll go with the old ones:
1. Do you think extraterrestrial life exists? If so, when and how will humans discover it? What are the possible benefits and dangers of such a discovery?
2. Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? If so, what information should we send?
3. Why do you run SETI@home? What are your views about the project? Any suggestions?
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1) Of course extraterrestrial life exists! How arrogant must we be to assume anything else? Maybe we've already discovered it... Benefits would be powerful allies & vast leaps of technology. Hazards would be subjugation by powerful enemies & destruction by our own hands from vast leaps of technology. Ya have ta make sure the kids have grown up before you hand them the keys to the gun cabinet.
2) Yes. Given the sheer size of space, it's not altogether likely a beacon would be heard, but we should try anyway. I'll leave the selection of information to the experts! ;-)
3) I run SETI@Home because the colonization of space is inevitable. Here's why: The population growth rate of earth is unsustainable. We will run out of habitable land & arable land. At that point, 1 of 3 things will have to happen:
A) Draconian population control laws. Give our free society, even if everyone knows the importance of population control, there will always be some selfish person who says, "I don't care that I'm helping to kill off the entire human race, I still want the right to have 10 kids." And our current laws will agree. So this one is unlikely.
B) Some large-scale catastrophe that kills off a significant percentage of the population. Whether this is a meteor hitting the earth, plague (likely, given what the population density will be by then), or famine (likely, given what the total population will be by then), will not matter. In any event, this will only delay the inevitable. It will ease the problem, not cure it.
C) Colonization of space. Once we run out of room here, we'll have to get more room. The only way we can do that is to seek out other habitable planets. That means, at a minimum, large-scale interplanetary travel & terraforming. In order to do without the terraforming, we would need large-scale interstellar travel, which would require either extended lifetimes or FTL travel.
If there are extraterrestrial species, in order for them to come here, they would have to have perfected the interplanetary/interstellar/Faster-Than-Light travel that we would need. Contacting them and getting their assistance drastically increases out chances for long-term survival. |
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