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| Personal background |
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My membership in the Planetary Society goes way back, so I've followed the SETI project from it's inception. Personally, I find the mass distributed processing elements of this project the most interesting. I've made a living off of distributed processing at my company for many years and believe that there are incredible possibilities for putting unused clock cycles to work.
I've got serious doubts about the chances of SETI locating ET any time soon. Nevertheless, I really like what this giant effort says about our species: naive, optimistic, competitive, hopeful and ultimately, pretty lonely out here in the Way of Milkiness.
(the picture is one of my favorite places to visit--Emerald Bay on Catalina Island) |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I just read in the paper that the computer industry is celebrating the sale of the billionth PC this year. As exciting as it is to see nearly 4 million users in SETI, I seriously doubt that the true distributed processing potential in the world has even begun to be tapped.
As for finding ET?! Seems like a long shot. But, here's the rub: We've got gigabytes of data coming from Arecibo every week and a bunch of barely used computers available to crunch it. I guess it doesn't really matter whether you think there's anything in the data or not because it would be pretty irresponsible and stupid not to crunch it and try to find out.
Now don't get me wrong, I think that given the size of the universe and the widespread availability of the material from which life is made, it is almost a certainty that life in some form exists elsewhere. However, the odds that it's pointing a recognizable signal at our little dot and it just happened to get here in November 1999--the date of my last work unit--are incredibly poor.
Nevertheless, if you guys keep sending me WU's, I'll keep giving them a spin...
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