| Personal background |
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My name is Andy Brown, and my wife and I live in Stockport in the north west of England. I work for a small local company writing business software. I'm running Seti@Home on a couple of PCs at home, and am trying to sort out a small home network at the moment. I'm using SetiQueue to get round the problem Seti are having with bandwidth so I can connect when things are quiet.
I use the nickname Archer because archery is one of my main hobbies, and most of the people I know online know me as that. Other hobbies include reading sci-fi and fantasy, RPGs, Viking re-enactment, and computers (building my own and games playing). I have also recently been trying to turn the 30 ft long patch of near-wilderness behind our house into something resembling a garden. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I first got interested in the thought of intelligent alien life through reading science fiction. Then, back in the early eighties, I read a book by Isaac Asimov called Extraterrestrial Civilisations. That gave the best guess based on what was known at that time, and came out with a figure showing that there are enough civilisations in our galaxy to average around 40 parsecs apart. Ever since, I've wondered just how near the closest are, what they are like, and whether we will ever be able to bridge the gap between our worlds.
I believe we are not alone. Even if the chances of intelligent life developing are tiny, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy where it has a chance, and galaxies uncounted in our universe. With that many places it could develop, I think it is more likely that the galaxies are teeming with life than that we are alone.
I think the only way we are likely to find other intelligent life in the forseeable future is to listen for them. We simply don't have the technology to broadcast a message powerful enough to be understood at interstellar distances, and we don't know where to aim a directional signal.
Seti is running the most organised program trying to find signals with an alien origin, and I'm glad to do my small part to help. I would be overjoyed if I found the first confirmed signal, but know that I am only a small part of a very large project so the odds of that are remote. However, without the many people like me, we wouldn't have any chance of finding it. |
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