Profile: Dotti

Personal background
I currently live in Southwest Illinois and am retired from the USAF. I retired in 1988, went to school for a degree in Environmental Sciences and then went to work for an international fertilizer and agricultural chemical company as one of their Environmental Project Managers. Retired from there in 1999 when another company bought ours and completely eliminated the Environmental, Health and Safety Division. Work from home doing occasional engineering reports for local contracting companies, mainly in the Stormwater Management and Water/Waste Management areas.

I live at home with my husband of 30 years and an assortment of rescued dogs, varying in age from 2 1/2 years to 14+ years. We used to travel a lot, taking our "family" with us, but my recent health issues have kept us at home. While my husband does work on our aging, older home (110 yrs old), I stay in the cool house and keep things in order. I spend more time on the computer these days, but not doing reports like I used to do -- now I play around with graphics and with sites like Hubble and Space.com, as well as SETI@home. I was finally able to afford a computer with enough power to run SETI@home, so here I am. I do belive it's an addiction! :)
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
The idea of SETI@homefascinates me. While up until the past few years, I haven't really given much thought to alien visitors, it just seems more and more like a possibility in the near future. I think it would be absolutely fascinating to be a part of a team who made first contact! Scary but fascinating! I think I became more interested when I sat down and actually read "Contact" and watched the "Cosmos" series, both by Carl Sagan. What a loss to the scientific world, the astronomer-space world in particular! I so glad to see his son carrying on in his footsteps.

My view about the project? While SETI has been around for much longer than anybody realizes, it seems to just be emerging from its infancy. I think the TV series, "Ancient Aliens," has a lot to do with that. Everywhere I go, I seem to run into people discussing that show and "Alien Encounters." I think SETI is poised to take the lead in the space program, especially now that NASA no longer has the Space Shuttle program (which is a great loss in itself). Then there's all the space-based telescopes now in operation (thanks to the Hubble). Yes, I think the SETI program is poised to make a great leap into the lead!

Since I know precious little about the program in general, it's hard to make suggestions about what could or could not be included. So far, I think it's just right. Maybe I'd make one little suggestion - that the program that currently runs as a screen saver could be expanded to be one that runs all the time in the background. There are some of us who how have the computing power to support something like that. Just a thought.
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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.