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| Personal background |
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Raised in southern New Mexico, I attended medical school in Albuquerque, and studied Internal Medicine in Salt Lake City. I now am an Associate Professor in the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and teach medicine at the campus in Peoria.
My interests are education and I enjoy time with my family. I have four daughters- three are in high school and the fourth will soon be.
I continue to be amazed by what I can see and do with my computer and the Internet. Not long ago, I viewed images of the terrain of Mars shortly after the Mars Explorer took them. Later, I browsed along the sequence of genes in a human chromosome. Now, I am sharing in the work of searching for life elsewhere in the galaxy. This is a great time to be alive.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Who could seriously contemplate the cosmos and then conclude that what we see around us is all there is to life. I suspect that when we finally get out there, we will probably find that life is not as rare as we might have suspected, and intelligent life will be there, and is probably looking for us.
I doubt that extraterrestrial life will arrive suddenly and completely, making a triumphant entrance as in the movies. Rather, the first traces will be ambiguous clues that will be long debated before they are accepted, and even then not by skeptics. Time and work will lead to a body of evidence that will support the existence of extraterrestrial life long before it is actually encountered, just as evidence is now secure for the existence of planets circling other stars.
Should we send out a beacon? If you attempt to answer this question based on an understanding of the nature of those who would discover the signal, then the question cannot be answered. The question can only be answered from our collective values as reflected in a worldwide dialogue on whether we do or do not want to be discovered. As for what we would transmit, I suggest “1000 hours of free internet access! Hurry up while the offer lasts!â€
I run SETI@home because I am a dreamer. I want to be a part of something larger. As a boy, I stood on the banks of the Indian River in Titusville Florida and watched Apollo 11 climb into the sky. In those days, all of the engineers and scientists at Cape Kennedy were part of a great and wonderous dream, and their success is now a landmark of history.
My view is that the leadership of the project should press on and continue to find funding, political support, sponsorship, and public approval. It will likely be a long search, but the dream is a good one. |
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