| Personal background |
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I'm from the South-West of the United Kingdom, and originated and still live near the city of Exeter. I was born in 1962, and have varied interests such as photography, electronics, amateur radio, astronomy and a general affinity to anything technical.
I have little in the way of formal qualifications, those attained whilst still at school being all I've got. My job is pretty mundane, involving agricultural engineering and component assembly, but one good point about this is that I can come home and forget about work completely, and direct my attention to things that interest me. I also run a mobile disco business part time.
I am married and have five kids, all adults now. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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The search for alien life.....
I read about SETI@Home many years ago in a magazine - possibly a computer publication, although I forget which one now. The article mentioned the idea of using the massive Aricebo dish to scan the heavens for possible intelligent signals, and it seemed such a good idea - the kind of thing I would have wished someone would do, although not being previously aware of the SETI project, I had no idea it was actually being done at the time.
It was explained that the signals received needed a vast amount of computing power to analyse, so much so that the SETI guys had no hope of being able to do it themselves, and so I was introduced to the idea of 'distributed computing'. I downloaded the software and began crunching the same day.
There are many other worthwhile projects which make use of distributed computing, but SETI is without doubt the most outlandish. My views on the Universe suggest that there are almost certainly going to be habitable planets within reasonable radio contact distance of the earth (25 light-years, say), and a habitable planet will certainly have life of some kind evolving on it - I consider life to be simply unavoidable given the right conditions - I doubt very much that an 'M' class planet exists anywhere without life.
With that in mind, I feel there is an urgent need to continue to scan the sky for intelligent signals. Although there would be no immediate material benefit to mankind, I feel it would answer that underlying question many thinking people have, and because this quest is so deep-rooted in our psyche, almost genetic, I feel we have to keep looking. Although an extremely remote possibility, the chance is there to possibly make contact with an alien civilisation whose signals we have detected, and this would certainly change the world as we know it. But for now we must search for inadvertently 'leaked' signals, or better, an intentional signal transmitted by an alien culture who are also in search of ET.
I'm not too sure about the frequencies currently used for searching for ET, but given our current (Earthbound) limitations, I think they are probably doing the best they can. Maybe one day we can erect an enormous antenna system on the far side of the Moon, making it fairly immune to Earth interference, and receive and analyse a far greater frequency range - maybe right down to VLF. This would obviously take far more computing effort to do, but by the time such an antenna has been constructed, I'd expect computing equipment to have at least kept pace. |
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