Profile: cloister bell

Personal background
I've lived in North America my whole life, here and there, and now reside in the Pacific Northwest. I work in the technology sector in technical documentation, a field I chose in college after encountering one too many poorly written technical manuals. I garden as well as the local climate allows, role play with my friends on weekends, and program for fun as time allows.

I've been interested in science, space, and the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe for as long as I can really remember; seeing the original 1979/1980 broadcast of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on PBS had a big effect on me. I feel very fortunate that events of the past 5 years or so allow me now to contribute to SETI efforts in the context of my normal life. Not only do I run SETI@home on as many CPUs as I can get my hands on (10 at the moment, and hopefully another one in a couple of weeks), but I contribute as much as I can to the SETI Instutite (in particular, the Allen Telescope Array project), and promote the Institute shamelessly whenever I can. In fact, when I got married last year, one of the "gifts" my fiancee and I registered for was for donations to the Institute in our names! I was very gratified to learn that several of my friends were interested enough in SETI to make contributions in lieu of giving us traditional gifts.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I can't remember now where I first heard about SETI@home, but I know that as soon as I heard about it I knew I'd participate. I want SETI research to succeed because, fundamentally, I want life on Earth to change. The world as we know it now is too marred by local strife and conflicts arising from differences that seem to me to be so tiny compared to what all human beings have in common as to be not worth fighting for. It is my belief that conclusive evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life would galvanize humanity to recognize the vastness of our similarities, in contrast to the ETs, and would allow us to set aside animosities over our trivial differences.

So I run SETI@home to help bring about peace on Earth--and because it's really neat. As well, I run it because scientists are my heroes. They dedicate their lives to the study of important things, to help humanity, at the cost of pursuing the pedestrian sort of riches most of us spend our lives pursuing. I find that noble and admirable. In the course of my interactions with the SETI Institute, I've been fortunate enough to meet many of the leading lights in SETI research, including Jack Welch, Jill Tarter, Frank Drake, Dan Wertheimer, and David Anderson. I have found them to be wonderful, kind, thoughtful people, as well as first-rate scientists. The best thing I can do to support them and to respect the important work they do is to participate in their programs when I have the chance, and to support the institutions that enable them to pursue their research.
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.