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| Personal background |
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Hi
Well, I found out about the Seti@home project through an article in PCPlus magazine here in the UK.
Not really much to tell you about me. I'm currently on my last year of a BSc degree in Computer Science at Durham University (and a member of that Seti@home user group.)
Apart from the obvious computing interest I also enjoy reading the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, listening to lots of differnet types of music, going to the pub (I am a student after all!) and being involved in the University's Computing Society and Student's Union Steering Committee (we run all the meetings, run elections, interpret Union regulations, etc. It's actually bery intersting!)
I'm also a regular reader of Dilbert and User Friendly! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I think, given the size of the universe there is a high chance that there is something out there. I'm just not sure what. They say that our planet is the only one that can support life. But what about the planet's we've not been able to discover, and what about evolution? The problem is will we ever discover it. Given the distances between planets it would take a very advances civilization to traverse those distances in short periods of time, and not have died of old age first (if such a thing exists where they come from!)
I suppose if they are far advanced compared to us, we may be able to learn from them, and we may even be able to teach them some things that seem basic to us, but may be far advanced to them. However, we've seen that man can't live without war, so there is the potential for something to happen that sets of a war between civilizations. However, quite how this would work given our current technology, we'd probably be anhialated!
Based on this, I'm not sure that making contact is a good thing. I feel there are too many risks from things "going wrong." I think a beacon should just be a single micro/radiowave that says nothing. After all, we don't want to inadvertantly offend other civilations, or show them how inferior we may be to them. Then again, it may also show how superior we are to them, and so they may decide to remain at peace with us.
I think that the Seti@home prject is an interesting one, partly because of the way in which it uses the spare processing power of other machines. After all, how many people with 1GHx process are using all that? It's a project that's achieved more in a short space of time thanks to distributed computing than could be achieved using just their own resources. However, the question could be raised that there is probably a very small chance of us finding life out there, so would a similar project to, for example, find a cure for cancer be more useful to the human race? But I shall continue to live in hope that Seti@home finds something :) |
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