| Personal background |
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I have a short-form birth certificate showing that I am a natural-born citizen of Hawaii, Kapiolani Maternity Hospital, and am therefore a native United States citizen, like Barack Obama. Of course, his year of birth is my year of high-school graduation as a member of the first graduating class of Kalani High School in Honolulu. Ultimately, I was awarded a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology by Indiana University, Bloomington, and spent my academic career at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am now professor emeritus and a part-time stock photographer using a Nikon D90 digital SLR.
From before my teens I have been an avid reader of science fiction, and in my life have observed the remarkable advancement in science and technology foretold by many writers. Watching the first human landing on the moon on a black-and-white television set, I realized how primitive our technical prowess was compared to the visions I had developed from science-fiction literature.
Back in the 1990s when I first heard of seti@home, I jumped at the chance to be a participant--a microscopic piece of a gigantic computing project, but still a participant. Starting with a PowerPC-powered Apple Macintosh, I have kept SETI@home, and then BOINC, running as much as I could, only wondering lately about my carbon footprint. But my iMac consumes far fewer resources than its forebears, so I power on. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I need to feel I have made some contribution to the discovery of ETI, and the SETI project is both scientific and methodical. Incredibly, the discovery has not been reportable in the form of hard data even now, despite the HUGE odds against our being alone. When my mother immigrated to Kauai to work in sugar cane fields, all the large moving vehicles were drawn by horses. When she died, Americans had already been to the moon decades earlier.
I can't wait till the members of our SETI@home community receive the news that we have finally collected hard evidence of other sentient and intelligent life in our universe. I do remember that I was in junior high school when I gave up my Esterbrook fountain pen and thereafter used ballpoint pens when ballpoint ink became acceptable for our handwritten term papers. Now I have a 27" iMac with satellite desktop speakers and a subwoofer, an inkjet and a laser printer, and daily sync an iPhone and an iPad to the iMac. As much as we can, my wife and I have video chats with our grandchildren about a thousand miles away--for free. Only 40 years ago, we started life in Indiana with our very first telephone, for which we had to pay an extra monthly fee to rent a yellow phone and had to pay enormous charges for long-distance calls from Indiana to Hawaii.
If we humans could come this far in a couple of generations, how can others not be out there who have progressed much further? |
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