| Personal background |
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I am a Kiwi (from New Zealand, where The Lord of the Rings was filmed). I'm "over 40" with a wife, and two kids at primary school. I am a self-employed Test Analyst - making sure that the software written and supplied to a client does what it is supposed to (sometimes, it DOES!!!). I don't have a lot of time for hobbies - two active kids take up most of my non-working 'free' time, but I enjoy computer games, snow skiing, reading (mostly science fiction or science fantasy - especially Terry Pratchett), swimming, gardening, Dilbert and cars.
I have been running SETI@home since April 2000 - initially on a Digital 200MMX with 64MB of RAM and since April 2001 on a PIII, 1GHZ with 256MB of RAM (much faster, but not 4 times faster, but I need MORE RAM!!)
April 2002: I am now running the command-line version of Seti program, and am getting through far more work units than with the 'pretty' visual version - around three a day as opposed to 1 every 2-3 days! I hope to hit 1000wu before Xmas!
November 2002: Finally upgraded to 1MB RAM - hasn't made any apparent difference to processing speed of WUs, but at least the rest of the machine now works as it should! Reached 1000 WU on 29 November 2002.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I became a SETI supporter because I thought it would be cool and exciting to be part of a wordwide effort to look outside this tiny section of the galaxy for other life which HAS to be out there somewhere - the universe is too big for it not to be out there. This is the next best thing to being an explorer on an intergalactic spaceship! I'm sure we will find 'anomalous' readings one day - then there will be a huge debate on what to do about it.
I don't think we need to transmit a beacon/signal - we've been doing that all of last century with radio and TV broadcasts - and not all of those transmissions have been complimentary to the human race. The problem with a beacon is, in which direction would you point it? Every second of every degree in the angle would be light years apart at enough distance.
I think we should try to do more analysis by encouraging medium to large businesses to use their networked PC's and servers to analyse packets in the 'downtime' hours, when the business is not being run. Many corporates do not have 24x7 operations and would therefore have PC's sitting idle for up to 12 hours a day - this idle time is a real waste. The electricity to run the PC's for that extra 12 hours anaysing a SETI packet would be a negligible cost. |
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