Profile: Chris

Personal background
I'm a grad student in computer science at Virginia Tech, here in beautiful Blacksburg, VA. I'm currently working on my thesis (involving network simulation) and teaching the Intro to C course (which I really enjoy) this semester, and hopefully graduating in December. I'm a space fanatic, and am particularly obessed with any and all things deadling with the Apollo moon program :-) Though it's been a while since I've flown, I'm a pilot and hold a flight instructor's certificate (perhaps the proudest accomplishment in my life). My current interests include anything to do with science, particularly as it relates to paranormal claims (I'm proud to say I'm a skeptic :-) ) and my newly adopted cat, Isabelle (who's "chillin" with me in my picture :-) ).
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
With the vastness of space - and time - I can't imagine that our planet is the only one which holds or has held life. But, to quote Carl Sagan, "I don't want to believe. I want to know." Beliefs don't mean anything without the evidence - I'm confident that we'll find it. I'm not convinced that the life (or remnants of life) that we find first will be intelligent, but even microbial life on a moon or Jupiter or Saturn will forever change how humans view their place in the universe.

I first heard about SETI@home from my advisor. For a while, I've been interested in distributed computation and using large numbers of not-so-powerful computers (by comparison to the supercomputers which would normally do the work) to do simple number crunching. This seemed like the perfect application of that technology. Currently, I'm running SETI@home on an AMD 850 Athlon, with 256 MB of RAM, and RedHat Linux.
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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.