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| Personal background |
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I did a PhD in Astronomy at Mt Stromlo and Siding Springs Observatories msowww.anu.edu.au, which are part of the Australian National Uni. It was dealing with spectroscopic observations of elliptical galaxies and calculating the movements of the stars within them. After doing a 2-year post-doc at the Uni of Ghent in Belgium and 6 months at the Neils Bohr Institute in Denmark, I left astronomy for commercial work. After another 2 years I moved to the London and started a software company, which is now more than 5 years old.
I've never lost contact with Astronomy and still keep in touch with several of my friends. They are spread from Finland to Alaska and, at one point, Antarctica!
Moving around has sparked an interest in languages. It is hard to maintain a language if you’re not using it, so Dutch and German have been and gone, but these days Portuguese is fluent (Brazilian variety). Brazilian friends and a Brazilian wife have helped refine it in recent years.
I first looked at Seti@Home before it was launched, but somehow the pressures of running a business distracted my attention. However, my brother (Norm) got into it right in the beginning and has been keeping me updated with his thousands of hours of processing done with a home PC.
Recently it became possible in the UK to get reasonably cheap broadband connection (24/7) to the Internet, so I installed Seti@Home on the two machines @Home... The addiction was swift and soon I had 6 machines in the office www.isis.co.uk employed in Seti@Home!
These are all on constant processing without a screen saver. The fastest PC is a P4 1.4GHz that churns out a 4TByte data set in around 6 hours. PCs in the office include a dual PIII-processor server, 3 PIIIs and 2 PIIs. The 8 PCs are now processing 18 data sets a day on average. So in the first 25 days, with a slow start, they did 220 sets at CPU dedication =4.6. Next month should see 450 sets @6.0.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I can't see how there isn't life out there somewhere and probably a lot of it. If we look at the diversity of life and its adaptations on Earth, you can only conclude that any planet with similar conditions (or perhaps not so similar) has a good chance of seeing some form of life evolve on it. Then multiply that by all the planets around all the stars in all the galaxies... that's mighty big numbers even at mighty low probabilities.
We need these planets to evolve civilizations capable of doing what we can't: sending very high-powered signals into deep space in the right direction. They must also think sufficiently like us to construct compatible technologies and use languages that make sense to us, in as much as they have an obvious structure. If Dolphins were to send radio signals, we might recognize them to be signals but that would be the end of the story. Look at the success we’ve had in understanding them so far… So what we send is probably pretty irrelevant. Images might have a higher chance of meaning something.
We also need these aliens to exist at exactly the right time. We’ve had civilization on Earth for a few thousand years and only been technologically capable of radio for a little over a century. Will we survive as a species for 100, a 1000 or a million years? Even if we take an optimistic view and say that we might survive 10 million years and emit powerful radio signals for most of that time, another civilization in our galaxy would have to be co-existing with us and be listening in our direction. A civilization in the Andromeda galaxy would need to be listening millions of years into the future. Given that 10 million years is just a tiny fraction of the age of our planet and the universe, the odds are low.
In summary, I’d say there has been, is and will be a lot of life out there, some of it technologically able. But the chances of it being within range of our receivers are pretty poor. However, we enter the lottery and all hope we’ll be lucky. Finding ET is a bit more significant... |
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