Profile: Steve Callihan

Personal background
I am 51. I live in Portland, Oregon. I work for a commercial leasing company. I have heard of the Seti Project but did not know I could help search for intelligent life in other places until now.

I am an avid Mac user. I am currently playing with digital video. I keep a drawing journal.

I hope we do find intelligent life in other places.

Once they are found, how old will the detected messages prove to be? What will they say? Will we find ourselves strangely alone with no other obvoius signs of intelligent life? Will messages come to us so red shifted, they are undeciferable or possibly unrecognizable?

- Steve
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
There is strong a chance, we are completely alone here confined with our evolutionary cousins, the great whales and the apes. That would be strange.

If there are other space explorers, there is some chance, we will run into one another or receive one another's signals,

We are sending out beacons in all directions. One targeted to a more promising point in space might be useful. I run Seti at Home because I think the odds are against us finding intelligent life other than right here on Earth. Intelligent life elsewhere in this universe is not guaranteed to have radio transmitters/receivers or transmitter/ receiver like devices of any kind. Humans have only had these devices in any signifigant numbers for the last seventy five years. This means that our oldest radio signals have reached out apporoximately seventy five light years distant from us. That's not really too far when measured against the universe as our science has scaled it.

Lacking transmitters makes the whales silenced under the radio transmitter standard for discovering intelligemt life. They aren't likely to be heard from this way as intelligent beings any time soon. I imagine there are creatures like the whales in many places, who will know only themselves and their locality. We may only have the opportunity to imagine them and not the opportunity to greet them. Indeed we may be accelerating away from them so fast that any transmitter's signal they might send would reach us long after our species has passed into oblivion. If we do meet up with some space travelers and their radio signals (against all odds), that would be fantastic.
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