Profile: J. B. Rainsberger

Personal background
Please see http://www.jbrains.ca and http://www.twitter.com/jbrains for information about me. I started using computers at IBM Toronto Lab to run SETI@Home in 1999 and now have one full-time computer working on the Great Search.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I am certain that life exists beyond this planet, but "certain" in the sense of total belief, and not in the sense of having evidence. Having read a number of great works of science fiction treating "first contact", I am somewhat aware of the potential for difficulty on actually finding life beyond Earth; however, that event clearly would represent a quantum leap forward in our cultural evolution, something we should face with anticipation rather than dread.

I cannot suggest what kind of beacon we should send, although we should try. The progression of prime numbers in binary numbers seems a safe bet, but that's as much a guess as anything else.

I run SETI@home because I like both aspects of the software: the harvesting of latent CPU cycles to simulate a massively parallel computer and the attempt to decode signals from space. I could have this machine work on one of the big cryptography problems, but this problem has so much more potential...
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.