Profile: Steven Meyer

Personal background
First of all, in spite of my association with BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), I am a Stanford Fan (Go Cardinals! Beat Cal!).

I live in California, USA, close to San Francisco.

The photo above was taken one morning as I was on my way to work, on the Muni light-rail traveling along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, looking across the bay.

Decard Cain Raps
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I was first interested in space flight in the early 60's when men first went there on sub-orbital flights.

The Questions of "Are we alone?", and "Will we meet any one out there?", came to mind by the time that Apollo was about to land on the moon.

I watched the first moon landings on a miniature (by today's standards) black and white television and recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder (I wish I still had those recordings!) by hanging a microphone from the top of the television so that it hung down in front of the speaker.

When I learned about the SETI at Home project in the late 90's, I signed up and started crunching Work Units for the SETI@Home classic project with two mono-processor computers. Today I crunch with 6 CPUs on 2 computers, each with about 1000 times the processing power of my first computers.

More recently, I started crunching (crushing?) SETI MultiBeam Work Units on the GPU, turning out a new result about 4 times per hour. Man, this rocks!

It is really great to be a part of a project that may one day answer The Questions.

God and Seti:

In all the universe, there must be other planets compatible with life, and on some of those planets there must be life, unless Someone has prevented it.

It would make sense then to look for signs of life, if only to prepare ourselves for the eventual meeting.

Now, some would say that it would be an awful waste of space for this to be the only planet on which life is found.

I say, if it is prevented by the maker of everything, then that is His business, not ours, so it clearly is not our place to say that it is a waste of space.

So, if it is in His Plan, we could very well be alone in this gosh awful big universe.

Yet, since we do not know His Plan for all of the universe, we cannot assume that His Plan is this way or that way.

So, I am looking in the only way that I can for evidence of His Plan out among the stars.

As I recall, Helen Keller, a deaf and blind person of some note, was taught to speak by tapping on the hand. Eventually, a preacher "spoke" with her about God, and Jesus. Helen's response was "Oh, I have known Him for years".

Maybe someday we will hear ET say the same thing.

Oh, we have known Him for, well, over 1,000 of your "centuries".
When did your people meet Him?
...
Gee ... um ... well ... er ... only about ... ah ... 21 centuries ago ...
...
Ah! So! Hence your year numbers!
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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.