I am 26 years old and employed as an electrical installation engineer with Cranesafe Ltd in the United Kingdom. My work involves climbing up tower cranes on construction sites and installing anti-collision/zoning devices. Most of my work is carried out around the City of London but I do work in other locations around UK. I enjoy my job immensley and sometimes allow it to take up too much of free time.But when time allows, my hobbies are shortwave listening and electronics.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I hope extraterrestrial life exists. I think it probably does. The most important benefit of our race meeting with other life forms may be being taught by a more advanced species to look after planet. Hopefully we would listen to the experience of our visitors and learn to use the resources we have on this planet more wisely. The introduction of advanced technology could also be beneficial to continued existence on earth. But we would have to learn to use it responsibly first instead of looking at its abilities and wondering how we could kill each other with it.
Humans have been transmitting signals unintentionally into space for as long as we have known how to use the RF spectrum. I would imagine any species that has come across these transmissions have a pretty fair idea of what is going on down here. Begs the question would they want to visit us? If it were me listening in and trying to decide I would probably say no at the moment.
I believe that by running projects such as SETI@Home we can realise the tremendous power of the internet. SETI has shown the world the tremendous processing power of internet connected computers. This has led to firms such as United Devices producing software like THINK. This in turn may help us to find the cure to cancer. That would be a very welcome breakthrough.
At the very least this project has allowed over 4.5 million like minded people to meet and talk.
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.
