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Personal background |
I'm a Systems Administrator for the Journalism School at UO. I spend pretty much my whole day at work, and home, in front of a computer. Hobbies pretty much revolve around that, other than home ownership, and spending far too much time geeking out about things revolving around technology.
I've been a member of SETI@home for quite some time, and for the most part, I only run it on a couple computers any more on any regular basis. Alas my fanaticism with saving energy has overtaken my former fanaticism of being a leading WU contributor, or just helping the cause.
I only wish I had a machine with a GPU capable of helping with WU crunching. Maybe sometime in the next couple years. |
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
Extraterrestrial life definitely exists... never a doubt in my mind. While the chances of life on any given planet are indeed slim, once it is taken into account the number of stars and the number of plants around those stars, the odds soon become pretty convincing.
Will we ever find it or evidence of it? Maybe. Seti@home is searching an infinitesimally small part of the total EM Spectrum, and as such, it's possible we'll hear something... but not as likely as there are other intelligent life forms out there. We also assume that their signals have reached out far enough for us to hear... this would mean that species would have had to develop high power radio thousands of years ago (of course, that's barring life hasn't evolved on any near by systems). Also, due to the fact that the majority of the stars in the galaxy are toward the plane of the galaxy, and while traveling through that area, signals are likely to be masked by EM producing phenomenon... our chances become slimmer. I am not saying we don't have a snowball's chance in hell...
What if we do find life out there? Then what? They could be hundreds or thousands of LY�s away, and to send a signal back saying "we heard you" would take just that long. Or what if we wanted to visit them? Even at Light Speed (a theoretical impossibility) it would take us the same amount of time to get there...
If we search and find something, then we have piece of mind for ourselves... if we search and don't find anything, we still can't say one way or the other... if we don't search, we don't find anything and we don't know either way... except to think that we're not looking everywhere we can to find out the "truth" to the universe. THAT is why I'm putting my cycles to use... because like every other scientist, my goal is to find the truth behind something... and if we don't at least TRY, then all we're all just a bunch of preachers who can't back up what we have with anything more than ideas. |
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