Profile: Dave Rogers

Personal background
I am a disabled veteran who served in the Air Force from 1984-1994. I saw service at the Tactical Fighter Weapons Center, Nellis AFB, RAF Greenham Common, U.K. and Holloman AFB, NM . For my last job I was attached to a U.S. Marine Corps unit for Operation Restore Hope in Somalia serving in a number of capacities.

I have been a newspaper reporter and editor both for military journals and civilian daily papers. Currently I am a graphic artist for the State of New Mexico at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

I have also practiced martial arts for most of my life and proudly received my 2nd Dan in traditional Aikido from Professor Henry Ellis and Sensei Derek Eastman, two of the grandfathers of British Aikido.

I currently live in New Mexico with my wife and daughter.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I became interested in SETI at home a couple of years ago when I took the position as the graphic artist here at the Space Center. I recently began running it again after researching material for a magazine article involving the question of extraterrestrial life.

I am not an astronomer and I'm no mathmetician. I'm not a biologist, anthropologist, archeologist - or any other kind of scientist. I was never very good at schoolwork, and I was terrible at taking tests.

As such, I clearly do not have the background to comment intelligently on the possibilities of Alien life. However, I can say that questions as heatedly debated as this do seem to echo back to some ill-defined, universal human need.

Perhaps those who search and question do it less because they want to - and more because at some level, they have to.

In the end, like some quasi-religion, it all comes down to a matter of faith. We believe the tiny points of light in the sky are stars - that these stars represent suns, and that these suns may have planets like our own orbiting them.

It would seem we love the mysterious. And as a people, we are driven by images and driven to look for ourselves in other things.

Often the images are dark; illustrating the flaws contained within us all. But sometimes, the shapes we see in our minds and project onto the world around us are those of perfection, expressions perhaps of the last item left in Epimetheus' jar - hope.

Maybe that's what this search represents; "hope" for a greater future for us all - and maybe more important than the goal of the search is the search itself.
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