| Personal background |
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I'm 31, and a computer programmer / hobbyist in the San Francisco Bay Area. And yes, I *am* keeping my electricity bills down ;-).
OK, so now I'm 34 and living in London, UK. Times change.
I would also like to thank Dr Andrew Beddall for the loan of two extra CPUs from his Physics Dept computers in exchange for a little help with Linux every now and again. What a deal!
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I first became aware of the SETI@home project when a friend from my local running club pointed out an article about it in the Saturday morning paper. (This was way back in 1998 before the Beta programme, when the early software was even available for download!) And then we started arguing about whether ETI existed anyway. At the end, I said I was going to download the SETI client, and then he looked at me and said:
"But I thought you didn't believe in this!"
And for the record, if we discover anything I will be absolutely astonished. After all, Space Is Vast and humanity hasn't been transmitting signals for very long. Jodie Foster said since 1936, and I believe her ;-), so that's about 65 years, which means we can only realistically expect a reply from an ETI within 32.5 light years of Earth. That's really not very far at all! An ETI any further away would either have "just happened" to have decided to send a signal our way, or would have to have lit itself up like a cosmic Christmas tree.
But on the hand, not finding an ETI because we couldn't be bothered to even look isn't particularly scientific. So I'm looking.
(Oh yeah, the distributed computing aspect is pretty cool too, even if my CPUs aren't ... Got to keep those work-units crunchin'. :-)
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