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| Personal background |
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| I am a chip hardware designer living in Austin, TX and specializing in floating-point design. One of my recent accomplishments was the design of the 'Altivec' floating-point units on the Motorola G4 which is now used in the Apple PowerMac desktops up to 867 MHz. I've been running seti@home from the start- from a workunit taking ages to complete on a K6-2 to my current dual-processor Athlon XP 1900 system which completes two work units every four hours. In my spare time, I enjoy amateur astronomy, biking, running, and weight-lifting. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| I've been reading about the possibility of extraterrestrial life for a long time, starting with 'The Cosmic Connection' and 'Intelligent Life in the Universe'. My predictions are: We will find out that microbial life is extremely common in the solar system and that we will find it below the surface of Mars and in the oceans of Europa. We may find more complex organisms as well under the Europan ice. As to intelligent life, I believe that intelligent life is probably rare but present in the galaxy. I've always thought it interesting if, once we began our search, what if we found not ONE signal, but many, many faint intelligent extraterrestrial signals? Alas, this does not seem likely at this point. I believe that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that 'we' (intelligent life on Earth) are one of the first to evolve to this level simply because conditions in the galaxy leading to intelligent life are more hostile than we generally supposed and that it takes a long time for stars with proper metallicity to be born, etc. So there may be a small to fair number of emerging civilizations of about our level of technology evolving now in the galaxy. We will eventually find one at a distance of no less than several hundreds of light years away, and more likely, a few thousand light years away only by drastically increasing the frequency coverage of our seti searches. With the rapidly-increasing performance of computers and the increase in the number of persons willing to devote distributed resources to such a search, I think that my hypothesis should be testable within the next two decades. Even a negative result after two decades of searching all possible frequency bands will be a significant result, and that can only occur if we, the dedicated seti volunteers, continue to volunteer our time and equipment in the search. For the first time in history, we will be in a position to KNOW whether intelligent ET life exists. |
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