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| Personal background |
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Living in the UK. Soon to turn 40. Old enough to know better, really.
What else to say?
I became interested in science due to a early interest in science fiction, having been brought up on the staple British diet of Dr Who and Blake's Seven. I was never quite as into Star Trek, but I watched that too and these days it has become more of an interest.
Anyway, I had a passing interest in astronomy as a child which never really amounted to anything, but has stayed with me somewhere in the back of my mind (even if the only constellation I recognise is Orion). I still like to look at a starry night sky, which is quite a rarity these days with all the street lights we are surrounded by.
I now work with computers, so spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at computer screens and I am just geeky enough to think that SETI@home is a cool idea.
I have two cats. Cats are great. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I have to agree with something Patrick Troughton said about the possibility of alien life. He said it is very conceited to think we are alone in the universe.
I can walk out of my door and tread on beetles, slugs and snails, listen to birds singing in the trees (while my cats eye them with twitching tails), get in my car and destroy several dozen species of insect with my windscreen on my way to work.
If life is that diverse on this planet alone, I find it incomprehensible that such life hasn't also evolved on other planets.
That's the crux of my point, I believe in alien life. Little green men or suspiciously human looking aliens with wrinkly foreheads do not fit, somehow.
That said, I do not discount the idea of intelligent life on other planets, I am just realistic enough to know that before an ecosystem can support 'higher' lifeforms, it must have produced and be supporting 'lower' ones.
So if the odds of finding life are few and far between, the odds of finding intelligent life are even more remote.
So why am I bothering to run SETI@home? Well, the odds are that if there isn't currently a civilisation advanced enough to send out signals then there might have been one and we might pick up echoes, or there might be one out there like us who started long enough ago that the signals have started to reach us.
Or there may not.
But if we don't try, we'll never know.
Realistically, First Contact is most likely to be a hazy, indistinct audio only transmission in a language we don't understand from a time immemorial from a race probably extinct. We'll then spend years trying to find an intergalactic Rosetta Stone, only to find it reads 'Is there anybody out there?'. |
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