| Personal background |
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| I'm a telecommunications consultant and writer/editor in Canada. I have been a reader of science fiction since I was a teenager (several decades ago now). One of my favorite types of science fiction story has always been the "alien contact" story -- where the humans encounter another species/culture and have to learn to understand it/cope with it/defeat it (depending on the story). SETI brings this into the real world, and SETI@home makes it possible for us all to participate! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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When I "bumped into" SETI@home on the web in August 1999, it seemed perfect -- a way to participate in the ongoing search!
The other thing that intrigues me about SETI@home is the distributed computing aspect -- I am thrilled to be part of a project that brings a huge amount of computing power together, by combining the relatively small powers of milions of individual PCs. Very elegant, and its success has outstripped all of the early forecasts.
As to whether I think other intelligences are out there -- I think it's unlikely that we are unique, given the size of the universe and the vitality of life once it emerges. But whether we will encounter another intelligent species any time soon, I have no idea. And as to communicating with them -- science fiction has always suggested that if a species has space travel or tries to communicate, that gives us something in common to start from (ie at least they are "intelligent", though whether an alien intelligence would be comparable enough to ours that the problems of communicating with them would be more solveable than that of communicating with whales and dolphins is possibly debatable!)
Then there is the question of whether an alien contact would be benign -- that's also a complete unknown. |
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