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| Personal background |
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| I am 39 years old, married for 18 years, and a member of SETI@HOME for a little over two years. I am a computer programmer for a seismic data company in Calgary, Alberta. Before that I was a truck driver. I hauled logs and wood chips in the mountains of British Columbia. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I believe extraterrestrial life exists out there, it simply has to. As the wise philosopher Charlton Heston said in "Planet of the Apes", about the little shrub they found after crash landing, "Where there is one, there is another and another and another." Its just dumb to think that we can be the only one, laws of probability indicate that we cannot be alone in the universe. One only has to look up at the stars and can't help but imagine what countless lifeforms and even intelligent civilizations MUST be out there. But having said all that, we probably won't discover it our lifetimes. Maybe in another 100 or 200 years, though I will keep trying in my small way anyway. Besides, I don't think the weak minded human race in general could cope with such a staggering discovery as life outside our planet.
I believe we should send out beacons for others to find, not that we could stop it even if we wanted to, we've been doing it for some 60 years.
I have a thought though, they say mathematics is the universal language, that other beings will recognize certain mathematic formulas or prime numbers, like pi. But, wait a minute, isn't our numbering system based on 10, because our ancient ancestors used to count beans or rocks or whatever using the fingers on their hands? It is quite likely that anyone or anything transmitting to us or looking at our signals won't recognize that because they have 8 fingers or 11 fingers or none. Hmmmm.
I am running Seti@home on two work computers and two home computers. My main home PC is an AMD Athlon XP 1700 , this bad-boy can burn through a WU in about 4 1/4 hours.
I find the distributed computing power of this project amazing. Imagine three and a half million people all over the world doing the same thing for the benefit of mankind or maybe the benefit of alienkind. I am humbled. |
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