SETI@Home Project
Free Software Could Help Us Connect With Extra-Terrestrials
SETI@home is a worldwide team effort from the University of California, Berkeley to search for intelligent extra-terrestrial life, using Internet-connected computers to analyze radio data.
At the moment, this project has approx 5.4 million participants worldwide, who have installed the free BOINC SETI@home software on their computers, which has been named the biggest computation in history by the Guinness World Records.
At the moment SETI@home as the power to compute over 270 TeraFLOPS, and for comparison, the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene, computes about 280 TeraFLOPS.
This project has been on the go since 1999, and has captured and inspired millions of people around the world. The system works by using any computers idle CPU power to analyse radio data, and then send it back to the main SETI@home servers.
The ultimate goal of the project is to detect intelligent extra-terrestrial life, whose planet may be emitting radio waves into space. The SETI@home software searches for several different types of radio signals.
The more people who participate in the project, the chances of finding and confirming an extra-terrestrial signal are much greater.
SETI@home has captured the minds of many people and inspired them to create teams and groups on the project, in which people can join. Some see the search for ET competitive, and make heavy use of the points system which is incorporated into the project. The more a user or team computes, the more point they will get.
Recently, there has been confirmed reports of several improvements to the SETI@home projects, including new dish receivers being built, more modern equipment being used, and also a new technology currently being developed to enhance the SETI@home system, which will allow the software to search for more types of signals.
Many computers run the SETI@home application, including Linux, UNIX and Macintosh machines, but obviously, by far, the majority of users are running standard Windows machines. This goes to show that almost any computer can run and participate in this project.
Radio source SHGb02+14a is probably one of the biggest discoveries of the SETI@home project. This radio source is now one of the main candidates in which could have been a signal from ET. The signal was discovered in March 2003 and was observed on three separate occasions at a frequency of 1420 MHz which is a frequency which ET would most probably use because of its proximity to one of the main frequencies which hydrogen absorbs and radiates photons. This source is located between the Pisces and Aries constellations.
Finding a signal from and intelligent extra-terrestrial race would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, event mankind will ever experience.
In the meantime, SETI@home will hopefully continue until it at least finds one confirmation of an extra-terrestrial signal from an intelligent alien race.
Until then, lets continue computing and looking forward to the big day!
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