SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the SETI@home program allows home computer users to employ their computer’s idle time to scour the universe for extraterrestrial life patterns.
With users from over 226+ countries, this program has grown to be the world’s largest experiment in distributed computing. Distributed computing is fast becoming a successful substitute for the all-powerful supercomputer. In this type of computing, a project or problem with an overwhelming amount of data is shared with many individual computers.
SETI@home participants download a screen saver program that allows packets of data from the world’s biggest telescopic dish to be transferred to their personal computer. When not handling other tasks, a participant’s computer analyzes the packet for known patterns and returns the results to the SETI@home server.
The mother computer at Berkeley studies particularly interesting patterns from the data returned by SETI participants hoping to find signs of alien life or an advanced civilization beyond our solar system. The SETI@home project started in 1999, and the program has been continued and expanded by widening the spectrum searched and bringing in more radio data. The SETI@home project has been an unqualified success. As of April 2003, the program had almost 4 ½ million participants.
The odds of finding an alien signal this time around are thought to be very low. But this is not an exercise in futility. The true value of SETI is the potential of adapting the power of distributed computing to other applications. Just think, such joint computing power might crack encryption codes or research climate modeling. It could even further biodiversity research to predict extinction of animals with time to take appropriate action.
So far, no message from ET – but who knows where SETI will take us?
For more information, see the extensive SETI@home Website.
