I am a Clemson Engineering Grad. I have spent many years in the engineering fields covering areas from Electrical Engineering to Radiation Engineering and Radiation Safety. I have worked both with live radiation sources to the use of High Energy Particle Accelerators in the rubber, plastic, medical and chemical industries.
In my lifetime I have visited almost every continent on the globe.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I run seti@home because I believe that simple math predicts that there are planets in this vast universe that may support life of some form. And that at some point in that lifeforms development it might become an advance civilization capable of electromagnetic communications. Considering the vast distances involved it is also possible that these civilizations may no longer exist and that we my find only the electromagnetic signals of a long gone life.
Conversely we must also think about ourselves and our own fragile existence. Consider that if we do not advance our wisdom as fast as our technology, we may someday in the not so distant future be destroyed by our own technology. We could also suffer a fate of some random natural disaster. Some day an advanced culture located across the universe may through our collection of daily signals find that we existed millions of years in the past to them. This collection of mixed signals may be the only archeological evidence that we ourselves ever existed.
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.