h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This movie is based upon quite a few real characters. The blind physicist is Dr D. Kent Cullers, whom I knew as a fellow HAM (amateur radio operator) when he was still studying astrophysics at University of California at Berkeley (1975-ish).

I have a URL pointing to him at my personal space if you are interested in finding out more about him. He has a very dry sense of humor: when they were making the film he apparently auditioned for the part of himself, but, as he put it, 'They decided I was not qualified to play myself.' However, the fellow who did play the part seems to have spent some time with Kent, for he adopted a number of Kent's recognizable mannerisms.

Kent has been involved with SETI practically his whole life.

Well I see the Thought Police at BBC are diligently removing URLs in spite of the house rules seeming to indicate that you can put one in 'My Space'. Just do a Google search on Kent Cullers and you will not be disappointed.

So you´re an astrophysicist. Cool. I hope to end up as one one day. I was thinking about trying to get into a university near London. Do you know of any you would recommend for physics?

Sorry, I am not an astrophysicist. Kent Cullers, the prototype for the one in 'Contact' is. My connection with him was via amateur radio; we belonged to the same radio relay (repeater) club.

Oh, that´s too bad. What are you then, if you don´t mind me asking? And I don´t accept "homo sapiens" as an answer

That's very interesting, thanks a lot.
I read the book, but I much preferred the film.
I knew there was a "real-life" Ellie.
I'm crunching seti units on my pc screensaver. In fact, I have the settings set to "always run" even though my pc is not fast enough
I've done 310 units, but only been credited with 181 under my own name at seti Researchers because the last bloke I lived with thought it was a good idea for us to combine our totals under his own email address. Then when he moved out, he took the lot.
If I remember correctly, the seti@home project was only supposed to last for 2 years. It must be that now! Do either of you know whether it's going to continue?

Well, it´s been a mayor success. So there´s no reason to stop it. But I think they could update the look of the screen saver. For example make it so that it did the calculations while showing other screen savers.

There´s also a real life Ellie? Is there somewhere a list of all these people?

I saw a programme, on seti, I think it was on the Discovery channel.
The woman who was being interviewed was introduced as the scientist upon whom the character of Dr.Ellie Arroway was modelled.
I didn't tape it though.

Those SETI people must really have a lot of patience. I think it should be done, but I would never be able to do it myself. Knowing that the odds of ever finding anything are so small. They don´t even know what frequencies to look at.