Cuban-American Christian IT professional living in the United States.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe essentially is a matter of time. To believe that we are the only intelligent life that exists is to limit the sovereign authority of our Creator. God's power and majesty exceed our wildest imagination. How arrogant of us to think that we're all there is.
I pray that we find them first so we can determine the course of action that leads to our survival.
There are many examples from our own history and from the animal kingdom that show that advertising our existence without regard to the consequences is a very bad idea. Prey animals that make themselves conspicuous to predators don't live very long.
I would love nothing more than to reach out in friendship and compassion to other cultures that may be out there, but I do not believe that this scenario is the most likely. Rather, there is the very real danger that we may take advantage of a less developed species or that a more advanced species will take advantage of us. The history of the colonization of the Western Hemisphere and the genocide of its indigenous peoples both intentionally (slavery) and accidentally (spreading diseases) provide sobering examples of how first contact scenarios can go horribly wrong.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
