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| Personal background |
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| Hi all, I am a mechanical engineering graduate from London, UK currently in search of that first jump into the world of gainful employment. Being that I am now a member of the second most useless group of individuals on the planet (unemployed graduates - second only to armless mime artists) I have had a huge amount of free time on my hands. My major hobby is computing and anything to do with computers and so in a moment of madness decided to network my entire house and all its old and generally flaky old machines up together. Now that was achieved (involving drilling slightly larger than necessary holes in my folks house - they don't know about that yet) what to do with 12 machines ranging from 486 DX2s to P4 2.2 Ghz all on a 10 base-T network? - Get them working that’s what and SETI is a project I love the idea of! In many ways half the importance of the SETI@Home project is not the actual data analysis but the work done developing a world-wide processing network able to work its way through such a huge amount of data, using often out of date or less than cutting edge equipment - an idea I have a great deal of time for. If I can convince a 486 to run XP (granted it takes 22 minutes to start up - minor issue) just think what could be done with all that old equipment we spent small fortunes buying over the years - in reality no useful processing task is truly out of reach anymore and SETI@Home I believe will be seen as the first of many valuable projects to harness PPP - People Processing Power. Long Live PPP!!! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Does ET exist? Certainly, it is impossible to believe that out of all the stars with planets (and perhaps between the stars - who knows?) another group of compounds does not exist which reacts in a way that we characterise as life. However if life does exist in place then I believe that it will always tend to produce a group of intelligent species - one of which will probably be bright enough to produce radio communication. Hell, we worked it out and I don't find half the things we get up to too bright. When will we find it, much harder to say. We have taken the first step; at least we are looking. But time is our biggest enemy. Like all species man can't exist indefinitely and therefore we have only a short window to look and be seen. Now assume that all species on all planets have the same window. We will only see those species in our own window, greatly reducing our chances of finding life. Finding life this way is like sitting on a train and trying to communicate with a certain person in train going the other way. You only have short time looking out your window to see them at theirs and when you finally see them they might not even be looking at you!
Benefits and dangers? Depends on what happens next. If ET appears close to home (say within 500 light years) communication is theoretically viable. Granted a little slow (a thousand years is a long time to wait to find out that there's nobody home but if you leave your name and number after the tone.....)but a message could be received from them and it could be that they decide that as messages take so long they might as well send us everything they know. The benefits of such a transmission would be clearly be great if they are an older, more knowledgeable species (not hard, given our current knowledge) One thing is however almost certain, there won't be some giant alien war fleet sent to enslave us and invade earth - why? Because we aren't worth the bother! Why would they? For us - I doubt it, if they can travel light years with enough resources to c |
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