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| Personal background |
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Na-Nu Na-Nu (for those of you old enough to remember)
After contemplating it for a long while I have finally decided to add some words to my profile (Feb 2013 as I write this):
Me
Male, 48 years old, English born and bred.
Likes: tinkering around with stuff, sunshine, peace and quiet, egg and beans on toast, tea
Dislikes: ignorant/arrogant people, bad people, politicians/politics, dogs, spicy food (could argue my first 3 dislikes are one and the same)
Current Project: trying to beat the Rubic Cube without the help of YouTube.
Homepage: www.duckmanton.net |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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The Start
I started running SETI in 1999 after coming across an article in a PC magazine, at the time and being a bit naive on such matters scanning the sky for extraterrestrial signals and being able to take part in processing the results was like being involved in a sci-fi movie.
I still love the idea behind SETI and have no intention of giving it up but as time has gone by and technology/knowledge has become more available to all I have come to realize that scanning a small area of space and limiting the radio frequencies being searched is truly like searching for a needle in a haystack (with hands/legs tied, blindfolded and the haystack on a different continent to you).
With the quantity of planets/stars/galaxies being discovered and the ever expanding universe I think it would be foolish of us to think that the earth and humans are the only intelligent life source in existence, although the human race likes to think it is important and everything revolves around us (linked to our survival instinct?) I think we are more likely a small pimple on the arse of the universe.
Three things that have always got me thinking when looking for our neighbours:
1. The huge distance and time involved, if a radio signal was found it could have been travelling to us for many years (tens/hundreds/thousands of years) making it virtually impossible to strike up any two way communication.
2. As humans we think 100/1000/10,000 years is a long time, but in the bigger picture of the life of the universe it is but a blink of the eye, it would be so easy to miss our neighbours in the vastness of time :-(
3. We need to remove our blinkers and consider the fact that our neighbours may not be humanoid, carbon based or like us in any way, they could be using a totally different form of technology (which could be bouncing off the earth as I write this) which to us is invisible as we have not considered all the possible alternatives.
Current (2013)
A few years ago I would have swayed towards the opinion that the earth had been visited and that governments know more about such things than they are prepared to tell us common folk, now I feel more neutral towards this idea (although I would love to know if there is any ‘secret’ information being held by our lords and masters).
The reason I have cooled to this idea is:
why would any intelligent entity be interested in the human race ? we fight and kill each other on a daily basis, a few live in obscene luxury while millions don’t have clean water to drink, the majority look away when someone is in need, not a very appealing sight to an extraterrestrial intelligence looking into our world and little to encourage them to make contact!
I also don’t buy into the concept of hostile aliens coming to ravish the earth for its resources either, if they are clever enough to be able to get here I am sure they are clever enough not to need our resources i.e. they would find an alternative source or use technology to create what they need.
Unfortunately I think this whole concept is based around the human need to fight and conquer, and our huge (but sad) ego’s that makes us think everything including our so far undiscovered ET neighbours will share our low morals of take what you want and kill or be killed.
Future
I shall continue to run SETI on all of the PC’s in my household, if I win the lottery I shall donate to SETI to ensure it keeps going, it’s a pity but there is probably more chance that I will win the lottery than there is of SETI finding a signal as things currently stand :-(
May the force be with you |
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