| Personal background |
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By day I am a sysadmin for a nationwide restaraunt chain. By night I am your average everyday husband, father, and computer geek. No outstanding educational merits or awards. Just a passion for computers and life, whatever form it may exist in.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Imagine for a moment a star generating an electrical pulse. This pulse travels across the galaxy for millions of years and by chance strikes the parabolic dish at one of a number of observatories used by SETI. This strike causes a slight "bump" on some instrumentation and that bump gets recorded to tape. Eventually a tape full of bumps is sent to the SETI@Home team at Berkely California. They make copies of those bumps and send them to all us participants for processing. One of my computers gets ahold of the bump, a recording of the original star pulse, and chews on it, gnaws on it, dissects it, and in the process analyzes it. Eventually it sends the bump back to SETI@Home along with it's findings concerning the bump. Most of the time the result is then recorded as being inconsequential.
Even if ET was not found in that bump, it is still simply amazing to me all that time and distance a pulse travelled to get into my computer. Even if ET isn't found, there's something exciting about being surrounded by computers full of space signals. |
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