I am Thomas Hammel. I am in my early 40's and work for Eumetsat in Darmstadt Germany. I was born in Germany and moved to Canada when I was 5 years old, I returned to Germany in 2003 after spending 7 years at IBM Canada.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I have always had an interest in our universe and space travel. I grew up during the Apollo space program and had hopes of a future with flying cars! I am fascinated with the possibility of extraterrestrial life and truly believe it is out there. I am not certain that it will be life, as we know it and possibly the first life we find will not be found by SETI and will not be sentient. I like the idea that we could discover life that is using tools that emit what SETI is looking for. If we do find evidence of that kind of life it may possibly not exist anymore due to the extreme time needed for radio waves to travel the great distances. We also could not possibly get a signal to them in a timely fashion to communicate, as we know it. It could possibly be thousands or even millions of years to return any communication. This would make for a difficult conversation. However such a discovery will answer the all-important question and get our leaders off their butts when it comes to space exploration. I find it difficult to believe that we have elapsed almost 25 years with no expansion of manned space exploration. Let’s go to Mars! I think transmitting a beacon would not be a bad idea however we as humans already make a great deal of noise from our little blue ball in this giant coliseum of extraterrestrial bodies. So how can we really improve on a radio polluted blow horn of beacons? That would be kind of like yelling for help at a stones concert.
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.
