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| Personal background |
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I'm an undergraduate at the University of Iowa pursuing a double-major in physics and astronomy with a minor in German
I work as a research assistant in the Experimental Particles and Electric Fields group at the University of Iowa Physics department. I'm also co-chair of the UI Civil Liberties Union (the campus group affiliated with the ACLU), President of the UI Amateur Radio Club (club station callsign W0IO, my callsign is AB0YT), and a sometimes-active member of the Society of Pagans Interested in Reviving Ancient Lifestyles (SPIRAL)
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I certainly hope that extraterrestrial life exists. Although the Universe and its structures are beautiful on their own, it could get pretty boring after a few millenia of looking at it if there's nobody else up there. Not to mention, it's a extra-terrestrial civilizations are a great excuse for space travel!!
If extraterrestrial life does exist, it probably comes in many of the same forms as terran life, and some that we can't even contemplate. This means ET microbes, ET gigundo beasts, ET humanoids, and ET non-humanoid sentient life-forms (who knows, maybe they're the microbes or the gigundo beasts!). And, it probably exists in variants more and less "advanced" than our own flavor of life. Given a set of data, the probability that any given point is an extreme in any measurement is very low, despite the fact that two of them have to be. And yes, it probably comes in both benevolent and malevolent forms, and some stuff in between.
Obviously, this means that the possibility of encountering marauding alien "terrorists" of much greater technological prowess than our own, who want only to conquer us while the president of the US denounces them as "evil" and launches the entire nuclear arsenal against them, certainly exists. It also means that some corporate explorer could discover and colonize a planet on which the dominant life form is a "space cow" whose "beef" humans find to be incredibly tasty -- until they find out that it contains a pathogen which, after a twenty-year latency period begins to crystallize all of your mucous membranes -- or we could meet Spock. Who knows? But I don't think we can stop looking out of fear of meeting something big and scary. That didn't stop the Europeans (or anybody else) from exploring the Americas, it doesn't stop us from exploring Space now, and let's face it, if the Cardassians are out there, they'll discover Bajor soon enough, whether Bajor is looking to be discovered or not. |
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