| Personal background |
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Hello World! It's great to be participating in these projects with so many different people.
I have a wonderful wife, Carol, and 2 great boys (Ian, born 1993 and Duncan, born 1997.) They are all very patient with their somewhat unconventional husband and father. (We won't mention when Carol was born. ("Ladies have birthdays, not birth dates", right?)
Born in 1955, I'm an aerospace systems engineer, living in Denver, Colorado, United States of America (I've been other things in the past.) Right now,
though, I'm helping folks with allergies and asthma find some much-needed relief with my own business. My hobbies over the years have been things like: science fiction (movies and books), cycling, hiking, traveling, lacrosse, home improvement, renewable energy implementation, and flying (private pilot).
All of the host computers (6, right now) being used for my personal support of SETI@HOME and other Berkley projects are in my own home network. (What a great way to use older computers, until they break!) Only 2 of them are recently acquired Pentium 4s. The machines range in CPU speeds of 3 GHz down to 300MHz ... That's right: three hundred MHz. (My 180 Pentium Pro just died, recently.) The home network is currently handling every Windows OS since WIN 95.
I do have one question for the population at large: How the heck did you get permission to run SETI@HOME on hundreds or thousands of different host computers? |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Participating in the SETI project by providing distributed computing support is a worthwhile effort. I believe that any other intelligent species out there in the galaxy (within 35 to 40 light years) are either friendly, or at least indifferent toward humans making their way into space. Beyond that distance, well, it remains to be seen as to whether or not there's a hostile species out there...
Since I also believe that the human race must establish off-earth settlements, SETI@Home is a good way to get (and keep) folks thinking along those lines. Right now, it's popular to present scenarios regarding cataclysmic events which might extinguish the human race (big rocks from space, seismic/tectonic/volcanic events causing tsunamis or extended winter or ice age conditions, etc. However, it's my opinion that though the general public's interest in doomsday scenarios will wane, those who are involved with SETI and other projects will ensure that the race will soon have the means to get off Planet Earth. This will ensure a growing human presence in our galaxy.
My only suggestion to Berkeley, BBC and others initiating distributed computing-based projects is to for them to ensure that those projects advertise not only on the Internet, but via all other communications means (television, radio, billboards, skywriting, blimps, towed banners, etc.)
Thanks for taking the time to read this profile. Feel free to contact me at:
davecluf@mindspring.com
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