Profile: Rob Picton

Personal background
I live in Durham, a university town in North-East England, with my wife and 3 children. Originally from the south coast, I spent the first half of my life, with some boarding school back in the UK, in Africa (Malawi and pre-independent Zimbabwe), and then oscillated between England, Holland, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.

S@H is run at home on two of our Macs and my son's PC. I have a long standing interest in astronomy, and use an 8" Meade LX90, but more regularly a pair of 10x50W binoculars. Although I don't have a formal Science background, I completed an Open University astronomy course a few years back, and am continuing studies with the O.U., as finances allow, for a BSc, the majority of which I hope to be astronomically oriented.

To Sir Patrick Moore, ultimate respect!
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Given the myriad galaxies in the universe, the chances of life existing beyond our solar system seem far greater than it being unique to this one.

I wrote this before I heard of the Drake equation -
N=R*fs*fp*ne*fl*fi*fc*L - and feel even more justified in writing it after reading the following quote by Professor Colin Pillinger of the OU in an article on the Beagle2 countdown:

"It would be arrogant to believe we are alone. I think life elswhere in the solar system is a possibility. Beyond the solar system I think it's an inevitability."

Sending out our own signal leaves us vulnerable, but I'd like to think that a species intelligent enough to contact us would be peaceful; the chances of us destroying our own world through aggression and stupidity are pretty high at this stage of our existence, and for anyone/thing to evolve and come out of the other side developing a technology capable enough of interstellar communication and/or travel would indicate a greater harmonisation than we seem able to achieve on our planet.

The appeal of SETI@home is to be part of a co-operative of a world of interconnected computers contributing to scientific interpretation of data, that hopefully, one day, will lead to the discovery of a signal out of the scope of natural explainable phenomena.


(Photo is taken 2 years back on the peak of Mount Toro, Menorca, Beleriac Islands in the Mediteranean.)
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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.