| Personal background |
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I left school in '84 to start an exciting career digging ditches for a landscaping company in Devon, England. Before long my foreman realised that I had potential, so I was promoted to pushing a wheel barrow. Once I had mastered that they allowed me to put dirt in it.
Seeing that I had always been interested in computers and having owned several, I left the company and entered the retail business as a shelf stacker at the local supermarket. After three months I felt that I had reached my potential at keeping the condiments isle fully stocked, so I moved to Plymouth, England to start full time employment working for the Government as an unemployment statistic.
Unfortunately I was not very good at this, I was fired and was forced to seek employment elsewhere. (They stopped my benefits on the account of 'You are not actively seeking employment').
So I became a 'gopher' on a construction site for a Mansion being built. My duties included getting the carpenter sober enough to operate a hammer without injury to himself or those close by, and nailing my thumb to the ceiling, 30ft up, while putting up 70lb boards of fire retardent plaster board all by myself.
It was around this point that my old school budies were nearing completion of their university education, most of them were in Computer Science and had always said that I should seek out computer programming as a way of eating on a regular basis, and living in a fixed abode and not under some bridge. So, with a hole in my thumb I worked at the local library entering book details into a database.
Then a whole bunch a stuff happened over the next 16 years. Today I live in NE Florida, near the beach, in my own home, with a lawn that refuses to to be any colour other than brown, a car that wants to kill me, a wonderful wife and the center of my universe, my son (age 2 1/2).
Currently I am a programmer with 15 years under my belt and can be found lurking at www.arstechnica.com, but that's another story. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Does extraterrestrial life exist?
I believe there is a Quantum Mechanics maxim that goes along the lines of 'Nothing is impossible, just highly improbable'. There is simpley just to much diverstiy in the universe to state that we are unique. There is something out there.
If we do discover something and it is intelligent then there is going to be some 'debate', to put it mildly, within religion.
The only danger would be from ourselves.
Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find?
Yes. I have no clue what we should send, I'll leave that one for the philosophers. But what ever we send we must include nude pictures, just to upset the 'moral' right.
I run SETI at home on a number of machines. I don't buy into the 'spare cpu cycles' stuff because when your cpu is being used it uses more electricity and generates more heat. So basically we are paying for that.
But I don't mind as this is a 'distributed' attempt. Being a 'Software Engineer' I understand the value of working out all the problems with a(n amorphous) distributed network. SETI is not just about finding ET, its also a big real-time experiment.
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