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| Personal background |
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Hi! I've been interested in this sort of stuff ever since I read a SF story a couple of decades ago which dealt with receiving and decoding a signal. It included some "screenshots" of the data and showed how it was refined into something intelligible.
Carl Sagan later had a hand in the Voyager messages, which were physical artifacts attached to spacecraft. His "Murmurs From Earth" book dealt with this and it was all very carefully and cleverly worked out.
I heard of SETI@Home a few years back, but I guess until I had a broadband ADSL connection I wasn't really keen on joining. A chap in BookCrossing set up a group and badgered members and well, here I am!
BookCrossing (http:\\\\www.bookcrossing.com) is a group dedicated to "releasing" books into the wild. I'm getting a lot of fun out of my participation and somehow I've managed to be the second highest "releaser" in Australia. Of course, being an online bookseller helps!
Cheers, Peter |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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1. Of course extraterrestrial life exists. Just look at the numbers. In the medium term we're not going to go out and find it in other star systems, so it will either turn up here, or we'll find some sort of signal. As to the dangers, we've probably got very little control over what an advanced civilisation can and will do when they show up, but we can get all sorts of information from a signal. At the very least, knowing we are not alone in the universe will cause significant changes here.
2. We've been transmitting signals for many decades now, and all any alien intelligence need do is reconstruct television shows to get a pretty good idea of what we are like.
3. My computer is on continuously, and better it should be doing something useful when otherwise idle. SETI@Home is a good idea - like BookCrossing. The website could use a bit of work so that it's more usable.
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