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| Personal background |
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I'm 39 years old, from Southend-On-Sea, Essex in the UK. I work for a software house called Rebus http://www.rebusis.com/ as a senior developer. We produce a variety of products for the insurance industry. The specific system I work with is called IRIS. IRIS is designed for underwriters in the property, casualty and reinsurance market worldwide. I work mainly with VB but also spend some time buried in AS/400s and Oracle databases.
I enjoy supporting Southend United football team (that's soccer to Americans) although given recent indifferent performances perhaps "enjoy" is too strong a word. In the World Cup I'll be cheering for England of course! I also like ten pin bowling, reading science fiction books and popular science magazines such as Scientific American and New Scientist, writing my own short stories, dabbling in 3D computer art (which takes some valuable CPU cycles away from SETI I'm afraid!), long distance walking and drinking real ales but not necessarily all at the same time...
My web site at http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~dmfw/ elaborates on some of these things... |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I'm sure extraterrestrial life exists. The evidence of organic chemistry in intersellar clouds and the speed with which life apparently got started on the early Earth hint strongly that simple life may be very common. What I'm not so sure about is how much of that life ever gets to the multicellular stage, let alone to intelligence. It's a bit worrying that life took so long to get to the Cambrian explosion and I'm not convinced that intelligence is an inevitable product of evolution - again think how long it's taken to reach this point on Earth and we don't have forever before the sun burns out (maybe as long again). So perhaps the answer to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life capabable of communicating between the stars (let alone travelling between them) is exceedingly rare. I'd love to be proved wrong about this and that's why I run SETI.
Discovering extraterrestrial life of any kind would be fascinating for what it could tell us about possibilities in chemistry and biology we may not have dreamed of and also about our own origins. Finding intelligent life would be the most important social and scientific discovery in the history of humanity. |
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