I'm a 21 year old student at the University of New Mexico and while I'm no longer a physics major I am still a huge fan of the sciences. I don't have much else to say but I do have a somewhat cool story. When I was eleven or twelve I had a soccer tournament in Socorro New Mexico. Between morning and afternoon games my parents and I went out to look at the VLA. When we got out near it we started to follow some van out to the old research center. It turned out that they were about to get a private tour of the VLA and we luckily got invited at the last minute. They no longer did any actually work in the offices, they controlled everything from a distant location, but we got to see all the old equipment and I actually got to go up into one of the radio telescopes and walk around on the parabolic dish (there so freaking huge). It was really cool and is one of the defining experiences of my life.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
While it is probably unlikely that anything will be found during my life I still feel it is important to try. Since the life time of solar systems is so long and the universe is so expansive it appears as though it's a waste of time to take part in the SETI project. But then again one never knows when a signal might come so why not listen. It certainly won't hurt.
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.
