| Personal background |
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an open minded analytic! 33 years old living in Milton Keynes, England. I'm a professional musician, with a background in engineering and an interest in science fiction and popular science.
Current reading material: James Blish "Cities in Flight" and Howard Bloom's "The Lucifer Principle".
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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About the SETI project:
I am open to the possibility that there is life out there on other planets that's why I am cooperating in the BOINC project. I am convinced that regardless of the results of the project, something useful will come of this research.
It is the quintissential needle in a haystack search, so people who proceed with the project will have to have the conviction that there is a needle to find and I feel in a universe as vast and as varied as ours, that shouldn't be too far fetched. Whether life is discovered within our lifetimes is actually irrelevant. The fact that we have turned on the probe is enough for me.
To my knowledge, SETI has only been in operation for 30 years, which is a tiny length of time in comparison to the vast period the universe has been in existence. There are many reasons why we haven't found coherent signals to date. A few I can think of off the top of my head are:
1. We are truly alone in the universe
2. We are the first culture in the universe to use radio transmissions
3. The nearest culture's transmission window hasn't reached us yet due to the separation between our systems.
4. Other cultures have lived and died before we could detect their signal transmission "window"
5. Other cultures may have developed other means of communication that do not rely on manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum within the range we are searching (for all we know these lower frequency waves may be harmful to their physiology!)
I'm sure there are many more reasons to think of. The human transmission "window" is only about a century wide. In comparison to the window for which human civilisation in all it's forms has been in existence , that's not very big, and much less in comparison to the time span of life on earth as a whole.
So I'm optimistic that one day, if humanity still exists, or whatever we evolve into can still utilise our findings, this project will produce the result it was set up for.
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