Profile: Simon Juden

Personal background
Hi - I'm from the UK, 32 years old, married with two beautiful daughters; I enjoy cooking and eating good food (at least it looks like it might be good before I start cooking it), drinking good wine (as much as possible before tasting my cooking - I find it improves the flavour of the food), fretting about my waist size, and going to football matches to scream foul abuse at anyone who doesn't support the Canaries (Norwich City Football Club for those who don't know). I dimly recall something called "sleeping" which I am told I used to enjoy before becoming a father. I am a hopeless fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer even though its target audience is precisely half my age.

I have variously worked as a shop assistant, a pianist, a bar steward, a nightclub bouncer, a counsellor, a teacher, a satellite scientist and a computer programmer. I currently work in IT as a "technical architect" - basically what this means is that my job is to understand business problems and design technological solutions for them.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Does ET life exist? For sure. I find it inconceivable that within the entire Universe this phenomenon of "life" would occur only once. This seems so straightforward and obvious to me that I have genuine difficulty understanding how anyone could hold the contrary view. Whether or not systems close to us will have developed sentient life at the same time as Earth, somewhere out there there will be myriad life forms, some less "advanced" than us, some more so.

Should we send information about Earth? Given that sooner or later ET life will "discover" us (presumably by picking up EM transmissions) it seems to me to make sense to try and ensure that we have some control over what it is they pick up. Otherwise they'll extrapolate "knowledge" of us from any random TV channel (say), and come expecting to find a world replete with devices to trim abdominal muscles without expenditure of effort by the owners of those abdominal muscles. They will then be sorely disappointed and might annihilate us in a fit of pique (well, I would - but I last worked out several years ago so the state of my stomach is the cause of some neurosis for me). So we need to make it explicitly clear that to get good abs, you need to work out some (of course, the aliens might not actually have an analogue to abdominal muscles, in which case the problem goes away).

Why do I run SETI@home? I run the program principally to lend support in the most tangible way I can to this excellent programme of research. I think it will fail to find ET life but its existence and the massive worldwide response can and should be used as leverage in terms of obtaining funding for further research which may yield more positive results.

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