Profile: BigD

Personal background
I'm a 20-year-old slacker from South Florida. I currently work as a computer tech at a middle school for emotionally challenged students. Though my intended major 2 years ago when I started college was electrical engineering, I have decided to pursue a history major (with emphasis in Chinese culture) and continue my studies in grad school. Some day, I hope to become a history teacher at the high-school level and plan to push for the development of an Asian Studies program, or at least a course in Asian history that would be comparable to the European History course already offered at the Advanced Placement level. Who knows... with the trend in South Florida being that most new high schools are all-magnet with about 5 academies focusing in different career paths, maybe a History Magnet program would be possible that would allow for such courses to be offered.
I'm a proud user of the MacOS (I've been using Macs since about 1988), though I do also use some Windows machines from time to time... My personal heroes are (no surprise) the two Steve's... Jobs & Wozniak. My current "baby" is a Sawtooth G4, but I'm very much hoping to acquire a newer Mac in the not-so-distant future. My dream is to travel to Hong Kong and attend a Faye Wong concert (though I hear I'll have better luck if I go to Japan...), or to one day walk into a record store and find that she has released an all-English album in the American market. The best experience of my life to this point has been a Pantera concert in early 2001 where Morbid Angel opened. My favorite TV show is "Law & Order," and I enjoy long walks and private diners. Hehehe... bet you weren't expecting that? Then again, I'm usually quite predictable... : /
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I believe that it is very probable that there is life outside of our own solar system. Maybe much more advanced, maybe much more primative. In any event, I think it's a noble effort to seek out other civilizations and to try to communicate. We lose nothing in trying, n'est-ce pas? Possibly, we could learn much from distant neighbors. In the worst-case scenario, we'd learn that our own civilization will end at the hands of others more advanced, but I think that it will happen regardless of whether we know it or not if those are the intentions of a possible malevolent alien race. Much more importantly, I think alien lifeforms will help humankind get past racial and cultural divisions.
Humans should definitely transmit a beacon. I think it should contain information that could easily be processed to create visual and textual greetings. Maybe a binary black and white set of drawings of humans, or of the Earth and surrounding objects in space. I'd be a bit reserved about transmitting information that would provide a key to human languages, seeing as that could give that possibly malevolent race that I spoke of before a heads-up in terms of intelligence on us. Who knows, there could already be plans in the works to destroy our planet to make way for an intergalactic highway...
I run SETI@home because I feel like it. I figure... why not? I think the project is necessary, because I don't think we could possibly EVER process the information reaching the Earth too many times. If the work-load on the main facilities can be decreased by public involvement, I think it's not just a cool thing but a priveledge and responsibility for all of us to contribute to a project that has the potential to change the lives and philosophies of so many people. If I could make one suggestion for the project, it would be this: I think the visuals of SETI should include more explanation of what exactly is being looked for and what significance(s) there might be in certain outcomes of the "tests" we are running.
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.