Profile: Bill Goin

Personal background
I'm older than all but one manmade object in space (Vanguard 1) - born at the dawn of the spage age. Growing up I watched Gemini and Apollo (a bit young to remember the Mercury program).

There was also science fiction - Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov and others; Star Trek, the puppet shows (Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet) and cartoons (Tobor the 8th man - early Japanese animation) and the study of science. Asimov is to science writing for the masses what Shakespeare was to the art of the play - the best, by far.

My first home computer was an Apple ][ in 1987. I started logging on in 1990 and Seti at Home is a natural outgrowth of my upbringing.

Now, I am in the last tour of a military career that ends when I retire in the summer of 2003 - on to a career in technical writing. Minnesota is the last stop (I was lucky enough to get sent to the best place the military moved me for the end of the line tour).
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. I would be surprised if the universe only has one form of sentient life - it is too vast. Finding it - that is another story - the universe is VAST and sentients might be far, far apart. We still haven't come up with a theoretical exercise for FTL travel, and even if you can get to relativistic speeds the trips would take a LONG time for those who aren't on the ship so the chance of one of those ships showing up is minimal. IF there is an FTL drive, Clarke's Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and if you have FTL you probably have stealth so we won't meet you unless they want to.

2. The beacon is irrelevant - we project enough RF frequency energy to be noticed anyway (TV, radio, etc.)

3. See above.
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