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| Personal background |
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| I was born in 1942. I have always been interested in science and in outer space in particular. Perhaps it was Flash Gordon, Commander Cody, and Kimball Kinnison that pulled me in. I don’t know, but I very clearly remember a sort of magical moment when I was perhaps 10 years old, at night on my bike, after collecting dues for my newspaper route, looking at the Moon and realizing for the first time that it was much more than just a light in the sky. I was hooked right then and there and I spent almost every free moment I had in the library reading books on astronomy. I built a 60mm refractor telescope at age 11 and a 6inch reflector at 13 years of age. I attended Rim of the World High School in Lake Arrowhead California. I spent four years in the US Air Force and in 1972 I graduated from the University of California at Riverside with an MS degree in physics. I came to San Diego California in 1973 to work for the US Navy at the Naval Undersea Center. I have a wonderful companion in life, Carol Parker, my wife of 25 years. I retired from government service in 1999 and since then I have been working part time as a consultant for Applied Hydro-Acoustics Research, Inc here in San Diego. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I have always felt that there are other intelligent beings out there somewhere in the Galaxy and that if we search, we will find them! Science fiction stories and conjecturing on UFO’s and so on is great fun, but it is the scientific method that will prevail and nail down concretely the existence of other life and possibly ETI in the Galaxy. Life, DNA itself, on Earth is incredibly ancient, nearly 4 billion years old. Life is not fragile at all, but incredibly robust. I think that DNA, the key to our existence, is more robust and far older than we can imagine.
It was a book by Ben Bova and Byron Preiss, “First Contact, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligenceâ€, published in 1990 that brought me to realize that amateur scientists could contribute to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was an article in this book by D. Kent Cullers, now with the SETI Institute, that convinced me to get involved in SETI. For many years, until recently, all I could do was to read and talk about SETI. What I wanted was a small radio telescope (SRT) that would have the capability to track the stars so that I could “camp out†(as D. Kent Cullers indicated) and observe specific stars, planets, or whatever, for long time periods. This was something, long term observations, I could do that professional SETI simply cannot afford to do well. I wouldn’t have the sensitivity of a big radio telescope or the wide frequency coverage, but I would have the time. This fall I will finally have a small radio telescope that can track the planets and stars and I hope to spend many years, or maybe only a few :), searching for evidence of ETI.
I started SETI@home in April 1999 as it was a scientific search that I could contribute to directly with my PC’s and it has great significance and appeal to me. I hope to gather hints from the professional searches (Projects META, BETA, SERENDIP, and SETI@home in particular) to determine where I can best point my SRT and "camp out" at selected stars and observe them for long time periods. |
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