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| Personal background |
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| Texan. What else is there to say? Oh.. well, maybe more would help. Age.. well, I was born before WWII began. I grew up in south Texas back when one could actually SEE the Milky Way living in town - though the town we lived in would better be described today as a small village, and I remember my grandfather holding me one night when I was about three, showing it to me. Got interested in stars about then; never got over it. Grew older, read a lot of sci-fi along with almost anything else, became a Marine, lucky enough to be between wars. Got out, managed restaurants for years, then switched to working at my hobby, cars.. ended up owning several body shops, did a couple of years of college, but no degree. Retired a few years ago after selling the last shop. Married (the third time)to a beautiful Iowa farm-raised girl with gorgeous blue eyes. We have three kids, hers, mine, and ours (the last one), all grown now with kids of their own. Still married to her, too, after 33 years. Couldn't have done better in a thousand or maybe a million years. Still interested in stars, still wondering what the others out there - and they ARE out there - will be like, and what they'll think of our race. Probably quarantine us for the next ten thousand years, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out in the meantime. Hobby.. which turned into a business, actually.. digital photo reconstruction. I usually get the ones the big companies refuse to do, or say are impossible - meaning, most of the time, too much work and impossible to get people to pay for. It pays for my toys: computers, scanners, printers (photoprinters ain't cheap), and a good bit of other stuff connected to the network. It keeps me home and out of mischief. Most of the time. But since I have some good CPUs, I figured I might as well make them work a bit harder, and stuck SETI@Home on three of them, though one is offline a lot. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Does extraterrestrial life exist? If it doesn't, Someone really made a mess of the universe - and I don't believe that one bit. I think it's possible humans have already discovered them here and there throughout history, and maybe one day we'll have enough knowledge to enable us to understand if we did. If there will be benefits from discovering an alien culture, I think that any culture technologically advanced enough to even get here to this out-of-the-way planet, out in the middle of nowhere, galaxywise, will perhaps have some wisdom to share with us on how to prevent our complete elimination of life on this planet. Are there dangers in discovering life elsewhere? Probably, at least to those who insist that we are the only intelligent living beings in this universe, particularly certain religions which do not allow such thoughts. But, who knows? It's a bit late to ask if humans should transmit a beacon for others to find, since we've been doing that for a century or more.
I run SETI@Home because it's a way to help in an effort I strongly believe in: attempting to find other intelligent life out there, learn about them, and make contact with them when we are sufficiently sure that doing so won't adversely affect our lives. SETI@Home is possibly the only way for me to contribute something, however small, toward that effort. I've heard it's possible to run more than one work unit at once on computers. If I knew how, I would be doing that. If that IS possible, why not have someone put that information on the main page of SET@Home?
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