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| Personal background |
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I am The Friendly IT Guy of Kudos Information Finland, a technical documentation company, or more exactly, it's Finnish office.
I have been studying for ages (and then some) at the Helsinki University of Technology. Usability has been my prime interest, but software engineering and media have also played a vital role, at least for my studying credits. I really would like to finish rsn.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Is there anybody out there?
Sure there is extraterrestial life. Maybe they don't look like us, act like us or smell like us. Maybe they are still bacteria in the pool and we can't find them just yet. Maybe they are highly evolved and just don't care about us, who may see us as bacteria in the pool. But the universe is just too big for us to be alone in it. It would be ignorant to think that we're alone here.
After all, life is but an unlikely combination of materia and energy, and there's lot of that to go around.
First contact? But when?
Hard to say when (or even if) we will discover anything. Maybe we've already been discovered, but either from such a distance, that a message in our direction hasn't really made it here yet, or then we're just not that interesting. Or maybe extraterrestials are already among us :) If we were to find life outside Earth (heck, sometimes i wonder if there is intelligent life on Earth..), we'd have a pretty hard time contacting them. So far, we only know how to transmit energy at the speed of light. At far distances, that just won't be enough.
Benefits and dangers?
Well, humans have a strange understanding of moral. Personal benefit is valued. Governments want to keep things to themselves. Some want to use any technological advancement as to suppress others, either by military force, economically or otherwise. That may be the biggest danger. Since we have no clue if any extraterrestials have moral values like this, it's a bit premature to say anything in their opinion...
Shouldn't we take the first step?
Oh, but we are already sending out beacons. Radio waves have been emitted from Earth for what, a hundred years? More? Many satellites have been lauched away, just to let any one out there have a clue that there is life on Earth.
A directed becon would have to be directed somewhere specific, and as we don't know --yet-- where we should point, it would seem a bit futile... |
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