Profile: James Edgar

Personal background
I was born in Kamloops, B.C., lived in Vancouver, Gimli, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg,
Edmonton, Sioux Lookout, The Pas, and Melville (that's what happens to army brats and railway officers -- I was one of the latter!)
Astronomy is one of my main pastimes, but I also have an extensive woodworking shop, play a few musical instruments, read a lot, write a little, and am a proofreader for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and the Observer's Handbook.
I belong to the RASC SETI@Home group.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. Yes, ET lives! Humans will likely discover ET by the very program we're using now -- SETI@home. Or, it may happen as so many other major discoveries do, by sheer chance -- some radio astronomer who is not looking for a signal of intelligence will discover same in one of his or her searches of the skies.
I can't think of any dangers of knowing there are other intelligences "out there" -- the cosmic distances are so vast, two way communication will not only be impossible, it would be meaningless. What could we possibly say to another intelligence whose last message to us was 5000 years ago and they won't hear from us for another 5000 years??
2. Sending a beacon to others might be of some value, but we already have many radio, television, infrared, and such going out that another one won't make much difference.
3. I run SETI@home because it's there and I can! I gave up in 1999 because the program bogged my CPU down to a crawl. My new machine is running SETI@home all the time and I don't even notice. I think it will be way cool if I can be in on the discovery of the ages -- to find an intelligent signal from outside our solar system or galaxy.
Your feedback on this profile
Recommend this profile for User of the Day: I like this profile
Alert administrators to an offensive profile: I do not like this profile



 
©2024 University of California
 
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.