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| Personal background |
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| I'm a software developer, occasional pyrotechnician, and avid gamer. I live in Southern California with my wife Linda and two small children. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I strongly believe that there is life on other planets, though it's hard to say whether we will ever successfully engage in two-way communications with extraterrestrial life and very unlikely that we will meet it face to face. The distances between the stars suggest to me that Star Trek-like travel between inhabited systems may never become practical.
If we should find signals that can be reasonably demonstrated to originate from intelligent extraterrestrials, many would probably continue to doubt their authenticity, as at least some very popular religions are geocentric. I think widespread acceptance of extraterrestrial life would have a significant impact on Western religious beliefs, as well as on how humans of different nations and races view each other. If we find out what some extraterrestrial species are like--their behavior, appearance, biology, habitat, etc., then we as humans might learn to dwell less on our differences with each other and better appreciate our similarities.
If both interstellar communication and travel become practical, then we do have to worry some about whether there might be hostile star-faring lifeforms. We would have gone from being the dominant lifeform on a single planet to living in a community peopled by the dominant lifeforms of many different planets. Some might have learned peace, some might have survived through violence, and some might consider our own species dangerous and unpredictable. This is the only drawback I can think of to transmitting an interstellar beacon. Otherwise it would be nice to send a "greeting" signal. Of course, we have been broadcasting our presence constantly since the advent of radio, though perhaps at such low power that detection from another planet might not be possible. Carl Sagan's book Contact deals with this and other aspects of SETI quite nicely, I think.
I run SETI@home because I'd like to contribute personally to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. |
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