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| Personal background |
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| I'm a mid-twenties programmer for UC Berkeley in California (USA). I have an older sister and a younger brother, and an adorable niece and nephew. I try to maintain a moderate stance in all matters, but usually get branded an unrealistic liberal wacko by the conservatives, and a stick-in-the-mud unimaginative luddite but the left-wing. I believe in God and talk to him often. I won't tell you to do the same (that's your business). I'm fascinated by physics and love the challenge of "making stuff work". |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I don't think humans are ready to talk to ET yet, and if ET knows we're out there, he probably realizes that.
The universe is a very big place, and I don't doubt for a moment that life (at least in a microbial form) exists out there, even in our own galaxy. Intelligent life, while presumably a rare phenomenon, still stands a good chance of existing somewhere in the heavens by simple virtual of scale.
Will they ever use radio during the span of their civilizations? Possibly. Will they continue to use radio for long periods (long on a universal scale)? It would seem unlikely to me, but that's a guess, all any of us can do is guess. So here, we have this thin shell of space (even a whopping 10,000 light-years thick is insignificant) expanding outward from somepoint in time (distant past or distant future or even right now). How likely is it that Earth is within that shell? Astronomically small. But lets say we are, and that we're listening to the right point in the sky and that we understand this faint interstellar whisper in a language and encoding format that we can't begin to guess at. Unless our neighbors are within 100 light years (that's one tenth of one percent the diameter of our galaxy alone) or nice enough to include the encylopedia galactica, I'm not expecting a conversation more fulfulling than "Yo.... sup?".
Should we broadcast? Why not, maybe our descendants will develop FTL travel and be able to listen to their planet dwelling ancestors and be able to laugh at the silly things we do. Maybe some other species will detect our signal, and we can encounter them before the universe decays into electron/positron pairs separated by distances larger than the current size of the universe. Maybe our sun will go red giant before we make it off this rock and our radio signals will be all thats left of our planet.
So why is a cynical sod like me running the client anyway? Good question. Because I don't know. And it'd be so cool to be proven wrong. |
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