|
| Personal background |
|---|
“if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.â€-- Friedrich Nietzsche As far back as I can remember, when I looked at the stars I got the feeling that someone was looking back. I would love to be proven right about this. Saw the Kecksburg "acorn" (one of the best-documented UFO sightings), despite that do NOT believe we have been visited by ET's.PersonalGay White male, 45, member of the Libertarian party since 1980. As a Libertarian, I think this project is great. SETI is important work, but maybe not a legitimate function of the government. Favorite AuthorsRobert Anson Heinlein and Lois McMaster BujoldComputersNot a computer professional or a scientist, so my machines are nowhere near state of the art. I've lost two CPU's since this started, now running on 3 e-Machines and a halfway decent laptop.
emailbeast2@ix.netcom.com
|
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
|---|
Do you think extraterrestrial life exists?There is the question asked and the question implied. Extraterrestrial life? Almost certainly. Life exist on Earth, and where life exist it spreads. If life originated on Earth comet/asteroid impacts, and lately our space probes, could have carried
it out of the gravity well to other worlds. If life did not originate on Earth, other worlds could have been seeded with it as ours was. Or life could have many origins, independent unrelated events. But this is not the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life, but the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence! For us to hear this extraterrestrial life, it has to build a radio (and at the current sensitivity of our instruments, one strong enough to communicate with at least a neighboring planet in its own solar system). The silence so far has been deafening, and a little disappointing. The best guess at the Drake Equation is just that, a guess, an attempt to plot a curve from a single point. But the observational evidence suggest that there is not an interstellar or interplanetary civilization between us and the Galactic Center, or if there is they are young enough that their radio traffic has not yet reached us. So we continue to listen.When and how will humans discover it?By "it" do you mean extraterrestrial life or intelligence? We
need to move out into our own Solar System, explore Mars, Europa, & Titan for signs of life. Rendevous with some comets and examine frozen samples of the early Solar System for complex organic molecules, support or disprove panspermia. Somewhere during all this will come a settlement on the Moon, and with it the Golden Age of Astronomy; Optical and Radio telescopes on Luna Farside shielded from man-made signals that can point at an object continuously for almost two weeks at a time. If those don’t detect an extraterrestrial intelligence, then we may have to consider that we are the only, or at least the first, civilization in the galaxy. |
| Your feedback on this profile |
|---|
| Recommend this profile for User of the Day: |
I like this profile |
| Alert administrators to an offensive profile: |
I do not like this profile |
|
|
