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| Personal background |
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I work in spacecraft integration and test for TRW, Inc. and
have a Ph.D. in computer science (robotics and AI) from the
University of Southern California. My hobbies include
bonsai and programming.
I was born in Carmel, California and obtained a bachelor's
degree in mechanical engineering from the University of
Hawaii. I also enjoy surfing, tennis, chess, volleyball,
and time with my family and friends.
I have been interested in science since I was a child and
try to keep abreast of developments in astronomy and
physics. The implications of ET life (or its absence)
for philosophy, ethics, and politics are quite interesting. My personal home page URL is
http://iris.usc.edu/home/iris/rwagner/.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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The statistical argument for the existence of ET life is fairly strong, but nevertheless I suspect we may be entirely alone in the universe. This does not mean that the statistical argument is wrong, but that we may be the first of many. After all, some one planet has to be the first one to evolve life. On the other hand, we may be on the only planet with life that will ever be.I would certainly prefer to have company. An alien viewpoint to share would be refreshing and challenging. There are a lot of hard problems to solve in science, engineering, and philosophy, and working together, many intelligent species will likely make more progress than one alone.My operating assumption is that once life is established on a planet, it will evolve to intelligence sooner or later. At some point, a "Cambrian explosion," similar to our own, will occur and the necessary complexity eventually will then develop. As professor Gould has pointed out, though, life is fairly happy with single-celled organisms, and there
is no guarantee that intelligence will develop. We may truly be a fluke of nature.If other intelligent life exists, establishing contact (and a good relationship) with them is important. Some people might argue that it is prudent to be suspicious of an extraterrestrial society, that they might be malicious or unintentionally harm us. They might justifiably point to the historically poor record of cultural collisions in the past. However, cosmological theory suggests that there is only a brief time in the evolution of the universe in which conditions for life to arise occur, and that as the universe expands, the galaxies of those civilizations that do develop will drift further away from each other until communication becomes excessively difficult. For life in our own galaxy, there is the danger that it will be extinguished with its local star if it doesn't reach out and make contact. We should therefore take the earliest opportunity to reach out to our companions in life. ©2001 by R. Wagner |
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