The SETI@Home project is looking for additional people to run a program on their computers that may reveal a signal from alien life forms in outer space.
The longest-running program in a search for extraterrestrials (SETI) needs you. SETI has been looking for signals from space since 1978. While it has yet to find a single "hello," it does have an extensive new collection of data that needs to be analyzed. This is where you can help.
A New Deluge of Data from Arecibo
The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which is the largest radio telescope in the world and was seen by many movie-goers in the 1997 film Contact, has recently received an upgrade that allows it 40 times more frequency coverage and seven regions of the sky simultaneously rather than one. This upgrade has generated 500 times more SETI data than before. Chief Project Scientist Dan Werthimer explains that "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."
What Is SETI@home?
The SETI@home project is a specific part of the SETI endeavor that allows you to run a computer analysis of the data at home while your computer is idle. First launched eight years ago, more than 5 million people have signed up to help crunch the data and possibly detect that first message from alien life. Based at the Unviersity of California, Berkeley, SETI@ home has the largest community of devoted users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 users on 320,000 computers. The new onslaught of data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes per year, which is about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress.
If you download the program from SETI@home, your computer will upload information from the database and process it and then return the information to the database when it is through with it. What you will see, instead of your 3D Text or Mystify screen saver, is the analyzation of data in a rainbow-hued graph.
The Path Ahead
Werthimer is optimistic that the improvements and additional searchers may lead to the discovery long sought by astronomers and civilians alike. "Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels," he said. "The good news is, we're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."
