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| Personal background |
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| I am 24 years old, originally from Iowa but now living in California. I am married to a lovely swede named Linda who is studying anthropology. I have two cats and three mice. I study evolutionary biology and ecology at University of California at Davis. As an evolutionary biologist, I am very interested in the origin of life and the conditions under which it evolved, and most importantly why did it evolve! This has led me to one foot in bioastronomy and the other foot in paleontology with an arm reaching out for animal behaviour and speciation. The best way to find life on Mars is to go there with a shovel and look or fossil evidence or look in the soil for dehydrated microbes! Or at least maybe we can find sedimentation layers to make more educated inferences... who knows... |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| Statistically speaking, there is other life out there. If even life has only a one in trillion probability of developing and persisting, there are possibly still as many systems. Whether we can detect that life or not or if they are in range of detection or not remains a mystery. I think there are costs and benefits to such a discovery, but "life seeks out life" and we have to know and we have to make contact. This is the ultimate test for evolutionary theory, we move from n=1 to n=2 . If the process of evolution happens in another system totally isolated from any effects of our system, then there is alot to be said and alot to be predicted. It is impossible to say what humans should be sending out as a beacon. Perhaps a helix since helices are so prevalent biochemically. Maybe a picture of water, such as a wave or something, since most scientists agree that liquid must be present in some form for the evolution of life to be made possible. But I definitely do agree we should actively seek, in some way, extraterrestial life. So many questions can be answered and many new questions can be formed. This new life might be dangerous? Yes, it most certainly can be dangerous, but all the life we have found on our planet is certainly dangerous to some extent as well; from viruses to bears to other populations of humans. Yet we still persist and grow. I joined the SETI network to put in my two cents in the search for extraterrestial signals, and I urge other to do the same. It is a great project with high ambitions that is relevant to all life currently found here on Earth. |
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