| Personal background |
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| In my quest to be called Dr. Dr., I've returned to university for Ph.D. #2. I am a reformed chemist who is pursuing his other great interest - computing. My primary goal is to have a life some day. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It would be arrogant to think that earth is the only home to life in this universe. Who knows when we will find it? The discovery itself should not present many dangers, and a push for further exploration would likely be a consequence. CONTACT with extraterrestrial life may present some dangers - let's just hope they're friendly.
I once heard a comedian say that we humans use IQ as a way of determining what we eat. If an animal is dumb enough, we eat it. Let's hope we measure up.
When you talk about sending a beacon, you're talking about encoding information. That information will be interpreted in a context that we cannot control, so we need to keep it as universal as possible. So, simple counting and prime numbers are good candidates. Also remember that it will likely be a LONG time before anyone actually receives this message, so we can't assume that OUR civilization will be the same.
SETI@home fits in with the "three R's" (Reduce, Re-use, Recycle). There are times when it's nice to have lot's of power under the hood, but I'm just not a fast enough typist to keep my system busy all the time. So, I may as well put all those wasted cycles to use. Under Windoze, I sometimes find the SETI client interferes with my work, but I've never had any problems (yet) when running the Linux client.
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