I'd heard about SETI and even SETI@home before I got to college. Not surprisingly, distributed computing is a topic that interests me, so soon after getting my PIII-500 from Dell, I installed the sceensaver, and soon after that, I met Chris Colvin, the founder of the Iowa State group, who convinced me to join the group, and to go out with him. Almost two years later, we share an apartment filled with computers running SETI@home.

As for SETI and its goals, I learned a lot about all of this in Astro 250, which I would recommend to any ISU student, from Professor Steve Kawaler. The most quantifiable way of looking at the possibility of intelligent life being out there (I'm not all fiction when it comes to science - I am an engineer, the numbers are important, even when you have to invent them) is the Drake Equation, which gives the odds on there being life like ours in the universe. Obviously it has to come out to at least equal one, but the way we worked it out in class, for the Milky Way alone, it's probably at least 2. They're out there. We just have to find them.