Currently a Systems Engineer at a large outsourcing company. Also a webmaster with one developed website called The Market Buzz - http://www.themarketbuzz.com. Have been in the IT industry over 32 years. Have been a UFO buff for over 40 years. Read many science fiction stories while growing up. In general I'm a nerdy geek before they even came out with the term. Also a Viet Nam vet having served 4 years in the navy aboard two different navel destroyers, the Ware and the Noa from 1965 to 1969.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Is there life out there. Yes everywhere.
Is it intelligent, that's harder to prove and the huge distances make it kind of moot as far a communicating goes.
If they had to fight to survive as we have they could be aggressive towards us.
It's hard to tell as we are still very early in our social development stage
and it's not clear in what ways we will grow and expand over the next centuries.
If they were farther along this road they might know how to handle us to cause the least impact on our society which I believe is very fragile at this time.
With some of the new theories on warping space it could be in the reach of a race to send out probes to listen for other developing intelligence. Put one out about 100 light years apart covering an entire galaxy and wait to see what you net and then the probe could warp back with a report on what it has collected. This could take a couple of centuries for first reporting but in about 100 or so years another race doing this could know about us and send
a probe just to check us out. The idea of sending directions to every intelligence out in space could be dangerous as the impact of uncontrolled contact could be traumatic for our race in the short term. Look what the more civilized societies have done to our other races of people just on this planet in the last 500 years. It has been a disaster for every one of them. Think what it would be for us if they were hundreds or thousand of years ahead of us socially and scientifically.
I do think it is important for us to find other intelligent life out there. I think even with the dangers that it will help us grow as a race to now we are not the only ones in the universe. This project address this and does have some
chance I think of finding some signal in the next decade or so. Even if not it still keeps in front of us the possibility of other races in the universe in our minds to help us grow.
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.
