Profile: highlander

Personal background
I am a 27 year old programmer from Australia, currently living in New Zealand. When I'm not stuck working on the computer I'm usually out fishing.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I would be very surprised to learn that there is no ET life - not least because it could never have been proved! Any line of reasoning I have ever attempted leads to the belief in ET life - for example, if we were created deliberately (by some kind of god) then the vast majority of the universe is a complete waste unless there are other 'experiments' out there. If, as I believe, we arose without intelligent design, then we live in a universe where life can occur spontaneously and so it should have happened many times. It still seems possible that the universe is infinite - if this is the case then there must not only be life but in every form not prohibited by the physical nature of the universe!
At the moment the only type of signal we could possible receive is an electromagnetic wave of some frequency, whether radio or visible light or microwaves, so we must concentrate on this for now. Perhaps we will eventually discover a more efficient method of communication, tune into it, and suddenly find ourselves on the intergalactic chat line with aliens saying 'finally, we were beginning to think you were all deaf!'
I don't see any danger from alien contact. Every idea we have had for interstellar travel makes the whole enterprise absurdly expensive - it would simply never be worth trying to take over another solar system. On the other hand, if they have advanced to the point where it's no longer such a big deal, surely they would just pick an uninhabited system to develop? We have much bigger problems from space to worry about - all of them inanimate - like impacts, gamma ray bursters and so on.
I don't think it's really necessary for us to send a deliberate signal, though I see no harm in giving it a go. The thing is, we are never going to meet a civilisation that is at the same level of technology as us. It may turn out that we have pretty much figured out all the important things such as how to send and receive signals across space, but I doubt it very much. Maybe every technological civilisation goes
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