Profile: John Moffat

Personal background
Hi there.
John's the name. I'm male aged 55 and I live in Scotland. I used to have other hobbies apart from astronomy but now that I'm married I don't have time for them any more. I work for the Forestry Commission which is a department of Her Majesty's Government. I joined Seti at home last year and did some work units on an older PC until it went down big time. I also changed my broadband package so I haven't been able to claim the 167 credits that I earned from my last lot of work. Bit of a bummer but what the hell...!
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Why do I run Seti at home. Better question would be; why not? I've got the spare capacity, the broadband is an "All the Time" connection, so why not?
There may be signals from other entities coming our way but it's equally likely that within the 140 light year wide bubble of space that our own radio transmissions have reached there aren't any races which have the capacity to transmit back. Or maybe they have picked up "Big Brother" and are wisely keeping quiet. :-)
I'm not very confident that there will be extra-solar planets orbiting Sun like stars close to us. Most of the exoplanets we've discovered are hot Jupiters. They couldn't have formed so close to their parent star so must have migrated to their present positions. That migration must have altered the orbital paths of any smaller rocky worlds, either drawing then in as Jupiter did to comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 or kicking them into highly elliptical orbits. Its not very likely there are any left within the habitable zone for life to evolve on.
If the stars close to us are like that, what are the chances that stars further away are any different?
So to me, it's a bit of a long shot but even if the chances are less than 1 in a million it's still worthwhile because even negative data is still data. It's as important to know where you have been as where you are going.
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