Profile: Eric B

Personal background
Seti cruncher since 1999 with over 35,000 WU's completed.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
#1: Why do you run Seti@home?
I believe Extraterrestrial life exists, even intelligent life. However I don't think we will find radio signals from other technologically advanced civilizations. Radio is a poor means of very long distance communications. I think that some other means would be used, something we aren't familiar with at this time. A radio signal traveling several 10's of light years originating from a source meant to transmit signals a few hundred or thousands of miles would probably be totally undetectable by ANY technology. I figure any kind of vldcs (very long distance communication system) we come up with would be known about by other comparable or more advanced civilizations than ours. Imagine a room full of deaf people communicating via light beams and you were there but you were blind but not deaf. I'll bet there's a lot of communications signals whizzing right by us but we're blind to them. We need to figure out "how do you send information many light years, and how do you do it in such a way that it gets there in a reasonable amount of time and isnt degraded to the point of being lost in the noise and the final quality is that it doesnt rquire a bazillion mega watts of power". Solving this one technological hurdle would move us forward on the "civilization advancement curve" by an order of magnitude.
I have no suggestions as to how to solve this, only that I beleive we should be dedicating the energies of leading thinkers and scientists towards achieving this goal.

#2: What are your views about the project?
Well, I'd like to see better BOINC software for Linux, at the moment i can run BOINC in a console but the gui is broken (Mandriva LE 2005, x86)

#3: Any suggestions?
I think scanning radio signals will never find anything. Raido is the wrong medium to look at. Its kind of like this: "why look for smoke signals when everyone is communicating via Radio?" We need to be thinking out of the box and looking at new technologies. I run radio SETI because I could be wrong. To me its not about whether I'm right or wrong its about finding out the truth. And...
The Truth is Out There.
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