Profile: julianop

Personal background
Born London (the main one), Dec 4, 55. Moved to US in '83. Live in Elk River, near Minneapolis, MN. Don't for the life of me know how I ended up here. Career so far has been in Electronic Engineering: servo systems & machine tool controls, embedded software development. Then I sold my soul and went into sales ;->
I love (in no particular order) amateur theatre, classical music & jazz, red wine, good (Italian) food, my wife Deb and two sons Alex & Stephen, and honest, compassionate people.
I don't worship anything, life itself is amazing enough, but "simple" things like gravity awe me. It binds everything in the universe, absolutely, unconditionally, and we still don't have a clue how it works. When I figure out the "basic" stuff - like gravity, relativity, and how we can make bridges and hold a vaccuum in bunches of protons spinning around electrons - then I'll turn my attentions to the really sticky problems like deities.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I wish we could break free of the question "Does life exist elsewhere?" It's not the answer that's important, it's our asking the question, and thinking about what it means, and about how we'd behave if we ever thought we'd found the answer. There's a lot to be learned just from asking the question. Like the search for God, it's the search that matters, and what happens to us while we're turning over the rocks of our own ignorance.
I've been running Seti since September 99. It's a sort of commitment to the concept of the search, I suppose. I don't think we'll ever hear a signal, much less get a response to any beacon we send. We're probably millenia out of sync - and light-millenia out of range - of any other potentially compatible civilization that has ever existed or ever will exist, but that's not the point.
Humility in the face of an ostensibly boundless universe; compassion in the day to day treatment of all forms of life, great or small; the breathtaking excitement bubbling over in the simple, honest, childlike passion for knowledge, and the tantalizing possibility that, by looking without, we might catch a glimpse of within. That's all worth a few spare machine cycles, isn't it?
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