Profile: Noel

Personal background
My name is Noel C. Welstead. I live in Brisbane Australia and have been crunching Seti@home work units since seti@home started. My score at writing this brief bio is 1,312,749 (Classic and BOINC)and climbing. My computers are mainly Quad Core processor with 3.0gb ram & 512mb NVIDIA VgaCards. It takes my systems about 2 hrs to crunch a work-unit. I do 12 work units at once on all 5 machines.
I am the director of my own computer company, MCSA Pty Ltd which is a small consultancy that works with Computer Aided Design applications for the Architectural and Engineering fields which gives me plenty of opportunities to keep my system up-to-date.

I am also the Eastern Australian Co-ordinator for the US based SetiLeague and the Director of the Australian based Seti Research & Community Development Institute Limited. Our group here in Australia is building our own Observatory in the rural township of Boonah. The Observatory is now under construction with about another year before we are fully operational with our twin 45 foot dishes. Our optical Seti Project will commence early next year(mid 2011) Our Observatory Dome is Completed and the Celestron C-14 is installed, we are making some changes to the dome rotating mechanism to allow an easier movement.

The whole site is powered via Solar Energy with a 13kw Photo-voltaic generation plant, very state of the art. You can read all about our project at our web site www.seti.org.au , don't forget to sign the visitors book.

I think that seti@home is a great project and will continue to crunch work units until the project is completed or we find E.T with our own project.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1) Yes, I believe that we are just one of the places in the galaxy where life has taken hold. There is not a single place on the Earth where life does not exist. From the highest mountain to the deepest ocean, from the hotest desert to the coldest, driest place on earth, Antarctica. This proves that life is pre-programmed to flourish in hostile places and in places where life is good, well, we are here aren't we?
I think that we will find microbial life on Mars and perhaps higher forms on Jupiter's Europa in the oceans under the ice. When it comes to another technological civilization, I think that we will discover it by accident, maybe in some archived or forgotten data recorded before Seti was common. Perhaps our civilization may disbelieve the discovery and instead try and invoke some other explanation for the signs just as some scientists did when the Viking biological experiments data came in. Now it is fashionable to be looking for life on Mars and perhaps the old data in the Nasa archives could be looked at in a more modern way to see if the sign's were really there.

2) Yes we should transmit a beacon, but from the far side of the moon at 1420.40575 (so as not to interfere with radio astronomy observations)using a simple Morse Code based on simple maths. Another civilization may detect this signal and realize that they had detected another technological civilization and send a simple answer back for us to decode. This may get the ball rolling on some sort of communications in each direction. The design of complex messages for E.T. to decode is useless. We need to start with simple concepts first, then, if contact is made we can show off how "smart" we are here on Earth!!! Do we need to prove that we can do complex math on the first date??
It's no use finding E.T. after the event as the signal may never repeat again for us to nail the question once and for all "Are we Alone"?
3) I run seti@home in an effort to support the cause. A post processing project is better than no project at all. I would like to see technical articles more often and more current work units being sent out for us to process.
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