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| Personal background |
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I am from the Southwest of Western Australia. I am a civil engineering contractor, and Captain of the town Bushfire Brigade. I am also a motor racing tragic and have tried lots of 4 wheeled sports. Due to a limited budget I now regularly race go-karts and have done so with success since 1991. I have always been interested in why things work, I was always the one who pulled things apart to see how they worked, improved them and put them back together. Before the internet I was an avid reader of physics and science textbooks, now everything is available online, I spend more time in front of the screen than I should just reading and soaking up knowledge. Various science podcasts mean I can continue to learn while at work most of the time.
I have been a regular of Dr Karls SSSF since 2005 and have been using Seti@home since about then. My first account was under the name Kingtut, but lost all the details when my hard drive crashed, so I started this one. I have recently built a new computer and added it to the two I already had running Seti@home. I was very surprised to find that it runs tasks 20 times faster than my old P4 3.2, I guess that it is mostly the graphics card that is doing the heavy lifting. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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The odds of there being other intelligent life in a universe of the apparent size that we see is quite good. The odds of us being at the same stage of evolution at the same time as extraterrestrials, and having them close enough for us to hear their electromagnetic radiation is quite low. Hearing their signals is not going to be easy but all we can do is to listen and hope.
The sheer amount of data coming in from the various sources is immense, and sorting through it is beyond the resources of the meagre funds put into the search by the Governments of the day. Seti@home is one of those projects where everyone with spare cycles can put them towards the search.
What interests me is what will happen if the Wow signal is confirmed multiple times. Will it be announced to the world in general? Will it go from being a front page news story one day to page 5 the next to just another obscure listening to the aliens project in the back corner of some science journal? Will the religious zealots claim that it is proof of something?
Perhaps it will be the turning point of our civilisation, from inward looking to outward looking, which makes the world a better place. One can only hope. |
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