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| Personal background |
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| I'm 35 years old, I live in Florida in the United States, and I'm an avid skydiver...it's the next best thing to being in space. :-) I am also a ham radio operator. I work in information technology at the University of Florida. I've always been fascinated by the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Beginning with a childhood filled with the ideas of writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, I have always looked up into the night sky and wondered what may await us out there. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I think it is very likely that extraterrestrial life exists. If we do discover it, first contact will most likely be a radio signal. The vast ocean of space between our solar system and other systems that may support life makes the radio wave our best known messenger. Radio waves, like light, can take millenia to travel to us from distant worlds, so our best hope is an elder civilization that started sending out radio signals millions of years ago. Perhaps they are even extinct, and their radio signals are still traveling across the universe, the only legacy of an ancient civilization. I believe the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence would be of great benefit to us, if only to change our outlook on the universe, which can be rather narrow. Perhaps we will be able to decrypt and understand the alien signals, and learn from them.
We should certainly transmit a deliberate beacon for others to detect. We should send a signal that is unmistakably of intelligent origin, and that contains those things about ourselves that we would want to leave as a legacy to those who might one day listen to our message -- perhaps scientific discoveries, perhaps philosophical outlooks, perhaps what we stood for and believed in, or perhaps the mistakes we made. Those signals might become our only legacy long after our sun has burned itself out, or after some cataclysmic event ends our reign on this planet.
I run SETI@home because I believe in the project, and I am very glad to have a way to participate. Perhaps my computers will be the ones to discover that history-making signal! |
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