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| Personal background |
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I'm a 48-year-old college student, a native Salt Laker, and a member of The
Planetary Society since the late '80s. Prior to starting school in 1999 I
was a professional rock musician for 22 years, and my resultant income level
required me to hold numerous day jobs, including restaurant, janitorial, and
construction work. I have just (June 2002: finally) received an AS in
Computer Information Systems from Salt Lake Community College, and will go on
this fall to Weber State University for my Bachelor's in CS.
My common-law wife De and I have two beautiful, intelligent, and loving
daughters, Julia and Kyla, who turn 12 and 10 this year.
I'm a humanist and a big Carl Sagan fan: I've read most of his books,
including Contact. My fondest wish is to go into space (or to the
Moon!) before I die--in the present political climate, a truly remote
prospect; but one must remain hopeful, n'est-ce pas? |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I began running SETI@home on the 18th of May, 1999; it took the old Pentium
100 about a week to finish a unit. It was and is mostly to let the computer
be useful during idle time. While I follow the "Drake equation" up to the
point of ET life being almost inevitable, ET intelligence seems to me an
occurence of which we haven't enough data to project the likelihood. With
a change in one or two variables, intelligence might never have arisen even
here; on the other hand, it seems Velociraptor &/or Tröodon may have been on
that path when the asteroid hit. If it does happen regularly, it is still
possible the nearest ET intelligence is galaxies away. We just don't know.
And so off into ontology: what constitutes intelligence, and could we
recognize it in another form? And on to the edge of space/time...
So running SETI@home is the only act of pure unguarded optimism I have ever
engaged in. The cost is nothing, really, and the payoff, if successful,
immense. What's the harm? Oh yeah, alien invasion. No one with even a
passing acquaintance with physics worries about that, and even if we were
to learn of "evil" beings, were it not better to know they're out there?
Should we send signals of our own? In a better world than this I'd say yes;
here and now it seems impractical to me, unless it can be done very cheaply. |
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