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| Personal background |
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I am a 45 year old engineer born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I have lived here most of my life. I am a chemical engineer by training, graduated from UC Berkeley many years ago, and work in Silicon Valley to manage and develop equipment and processes which allow chip making companies to make their products...the very tools that allow us to crunch the data for Seti at Home. I have been interested in science and engineering since I was 5 years old, and grew up during the heady days of the space race to the Moon which captured my imagination about the possibilities of space exploration. As well as what we can do when we have a single purpose.
I am married to another Berkeley engineering graduate and have three kids, two boys and a girl, ranging in age from 4 to 11 years old. I am continually amazed at the uniqueness that each one of the kids brings to the world. I enjoy hiking in the mountains around the Bay Area, computers, reading, and spending time coaching kids in sports, at school, and in life. I have learned a great deal about systems, software and science through interactions with people participating in the Seti at Home program and Team SETI-USA, of which I am a member. Its been a lot of fun. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I believe extraterrestrial life could exist, but the chances of it being at the same level of development as we are seem remote...it will either be more or less advanced. How will we discover it? By listening first and eventually travelling to look for it. Will it find us first? Perhaps it already has and we don't know it. Lots of questions, but we have to look. Throughout history challenges have brought out the best in humanity. We are and have been transmitting a beacon of sorts for the last 50 years...through our electromagnetic emissions. How would we talk to it?? Mathematical relationships should be somewhat universal since we would both live in the same physical universe.
I run Seti at Home for a number of reasons. First, I want to see what we can find. I think it is a way to continue exploration of space while we wait for the discoveries and developments required to travel to the stars.(not in my lifetime!)Second, we are pioneering a new model...the model of distributed computing, with public participation. Many more things can be done with this capability...drug screening, computational fluid dynamics, econometric modeling, etc. Finally, on a more mundane note, Seti at Home allows me to burn in computers I build as a hobby and for friends, and it does a good job at it.
I hope to see Seti expand the search by adding in other telescopes which would cover other parts of the sky. |
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