| Personal background |
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Hello, I'm Christopher C. Woodbury (Chris to my friends).
I'm old enough to be a member of AARP (if that has any relevance).
I'm a computer consultant in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina.
(This economy is killing my business.
I'm going to have to go out and get a real job!)
I started running SETI@home on my home PC a few days after it became public.
However, I've convinced (maybe "worn down" is a better word) one of my business
clients to run it on some of his server class systems.
Thank you, Drew Robison of BPStudios.com!
This has done wonderful things for my "score"! :)
Visit my SETI@home web page. (http://wolves.homeip.net/~ccw/seti.html)
It should shortly have some picture from my visit to the Very Large Array (VLA)
of radio telescopes in New Mexico!
(The ones you may have seen in "Contact".)
It is situated approximately thirty miles west of Socorro on U.S. 60 in the Plain of San Augustine.
This is a bowl in Rocky Mountains wide enough to allow the VLA to arrange its
telescopes in patterns miles on a side!
While outside visitors can't actually visit the scientific facility, they've got
a visitors' center.
I found it worth going out of my way as I was driving down Interstate 25.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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1. Does ET exist?
I have no doubt that other life exists in our universe.
The universe is HUGE.
If life could arise here, there is hardly any
question that it could happen somewhere else.
However, the very size
of the universe is a problem in contacting extraterrestrial civilizations.
Which leads us to ...
2. Should we transmit?
The probable distance between transmitting
extraterrestrial civilizations is likely to be large.
With speed of light limitations on transportation, the only
real way to share information would be by transmitting a "beacon".
What should we send?
Start of with prime numbers,and then send pictures, first simple N by N matrix,
then more complicated pictures.
Illustrate pi and the square-root of two and then give the numbers (base 10 and 2) to ten decimals.
Also, show ones explaining how to interprete
sideband communications where we transmit higher bandwidth information.
3. Why do I run SETI@home?��
Monkey curiosity!
How are we going to know if
there's anybody out there transmitting if we aren't listening?
So, I'm doing my small part helping find out!
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