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| Personal background |
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| I'm a nineteen year-old dissolute slacker and erstwhile writer. Collector of ephemera, nostalgia, miscellany, and trivia, I spend most of my time absorbing the breadth of the human experience, no matter how banal. I write sociological essays on the Merry Melodies series of cartoons. My personal favorite is the one where Elmer Fudd attacks the ants with firecrackers, and they strike back. I read, write, and listen to and make music (I'm a trumpet player of some ability.) I can think of nothing more of interest to add. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Do you think extraterrestrial life exists? If so, when and how will humans discover it? What are the possible benefits and dangers of such a discovery?
I think that it's a little stupid to ask if extraterrestrial life exists. Of course it does. I thought Drake cleared that up quite a few years ago. Humans will discover extraterrestrial life at exactly the time as it must. History tends to have a pattern of outward expansion and discovery at the precise time when the present system seems to be untenable.
Should humans transmit a beacon for others to find? If so, what information should we send?
Why not? I think the question of what information we should send is much more interesting. To be able to communicate to whatever intelligence could be receiving this message, one must modulate it carefully so that it contains neither too much randomness, which could make the intelligence mistake it for background radiation, or too much order, which could make the intelligence mistake it for an easily explainable natural phenomena (e.g., a pulsar emitting radiation.)
Why do you run SETI@home? What are your views about the project? Any suggestions?
One of the big reasons I run SETI@HOME, besides the obvious contribution to a worthy cause, would be a latent interest in the technology that they are inadvertently pioneering, which is distributed information processing. As bandwidth increases, this will be an ever more viable and important portion of computing as a whole, and I like being on the vanguard. Concerning the Seti project as a whole, I would like to contribute a thought of my own: that seti is not actually searching for all intelligent life. In fact, it is really searching for intelligent life comparably advanced with ours. Intelligent life significantly more or less advanced than our own is discounted because of the means of transmission. An intelligence less advanced than us would not be able to understand our message, and an intelligence more advanced than us would probably not care. |
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