Profile: Karl Roos

Personal background
Greetings Earthlings! Actually, we are suburban parents in Centennial, Colorado. Karl is an electrical engineer that designs power distribution and lighting systems for buildings. Laurie is the biggest astronomy enthusiast of the family, but she informs and inspires all of us. Karl provides the computers and computer time, Laurie supplies the passion for astronomy and SETI. We have two young children and spend most of our time trying to entertain and educate them. We like mountain biking, skiing, and hiking. We enjoy our best night sky viewing in the Colorado high country where the light pollution is diminished and the air is crystal clear. What started out as a curiosity about S@H became somewhat of an obsession. We're now running on eighteen PC's - mostly AMD silicon, but we allow some slower Intel bits from time to time. Most of the systems are overclocked AMD XP CPU's running Windows 2000 on Nvidia NForce2 chipset motherboards. We use SETI Driver running behind SetiQueue (two GREAT programs) to keep everybody going.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
To me a fundamental question posed by S@H is one of the most important for humans as sentient beings - are we alone? It is a question that goes to ones religon, personal beliefs in God or other deities. I have always believed that there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Just the mathematical probabilities nearly guarantee that to be true. The thing which has always perplexed me, though, is why extraterrestrials have not contacted humans and made themselves known to us. I've seen and read enough Sci-Fi movies and books to know there are possible reasons that contact would have been withheld, such as interfering with natural evolution (the prime directive), dangerous technology, etc. But there are likely to be thousands and thousands of other intelligent life forms out there. Even if contact was a "bad idea" somebody or something somewhere would have happened to make the existence of intelligent life outside the earth blatantly obvious, even if by accident. I'm afraid the lack of communication perhaps means the barriers of space and time are too great to cross. That the technology to cross those barriers doesn't exist within the realm of possibility....for humans or any other beings. Does this mean that the technology cannot physically be developed, or that intelligent life manages to destroy itself before the technology can be developed? Or does it simply mean that God exists and really is in control? Its a telling fact that no signals have been discovered in the 3 years that Seti@Home has existed. The quantity of data that has been analyzed is overwhelming. And there hasn't been a peep. It's disturbingly quiet out there!!!!!!!!! Maybe S@H is just listening to the wrong channel? I undersand the data is all collected from a frequency band based on a characteristic frequency from hydrogen atoms. Maybe we should be listening to the nitrous oxide channel insted?
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