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| Personal background |
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Hi, I'm Wim, I'm 29 and I'm a web consultant.
Although Flanders (the northern, dutch speaking part of Belgium), where I live, is a very nice place, I like to get away from time to time and travel to the less accessable places on our globe (I've been to Ethiopia, Iran, Lybia, Uzbekistan (see picture), to name just a few).
Most of my hobbies concern this passion for travel: photography (a web site with pictures is planned in the near or distant future), world music, art and culture in general. Next to this I also enjoy Jazz, read the occasional novel, and see as many good films as I can.
Lastly, I must admit I'm a nosy person, so I always want to know the why and how of things. Thus, I have always been reading up on origins of culture and life, which sort of brings us to SETI@Home, and the next paragraph... |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Extraterrestrial life exists, I suppose statistics point clearly in that direction. Although, didn't my statistics professors teach me to beware of statistics, because they can be used to prove anything, given some manipulation... Anyway, there's even talk that life on earth itself was injected by a meteorite containing the required material to start things off... Enough to justify the research.
The question remains whether there's life out there that would see us as life, and whether we would recognise it as life.
If it's the basic stuff, i.e. life's building blocks (life as we know it), the benefit is our further understanding of our own lives, which may trigger advances in medecine, so that's certainly worthwhile.
As to other life forms, if we recognise them as such, finding them could help us envision alternatives to our way of life. This would not advance the sciences, but that may influence our views on politics, economics, environmental issues... Of course there would be some substantial culture shocking, with the dangers we all know since it happened on earth as well each time a new 'isolated' culture was discovered. But that's just the way evolution works... Well, that's enough speculation. Whatever the odds, it's worth trying...
PS: Of course there's enough life on our own planet (eg. in earth's oceans or in the upper layers of the atmosphere) that remains badly understood... But there my PC cannot help for now... |
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