The highly intelligent beings are a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley who are carrying out one part of the SETI project and realized they couldn't do it without an awful lot of help. Facing mountains of data collected by radio telescopes, the scientists came up with the innovative idea of distributing the task of analyzing the data to computer users around the world.
They devised a screensaver that would crunch numbers for SETI when people weren't using their machines for something else. The project, dubbed SETI home, has gotten off to a roaring start. The Berkeley team had hoped to have , participants; by the beginning of September there were more than 1.
The combined computing power is greater -- and far cheaper -- than the largest supercomputer in the world. Now the scientists are expanding the boundaries of their search, exploring more radio frequencies.
At Princeton more than people have signed up. You can tell who they are by the brightly colored graphs that dance across their screens as the screensaver works. The selling point for many people, as the SETI home website states, is the "small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.
Anyone with 28 kbps could be the person to discover another civilization. That number—and the bleaker view from outsiders, who said perhaps no one would join the crew—informed a poor decision: to set up a single desktop to farm out the data and take back the analysis. But the problem was, people really liked the idea of letting their computers find aliens while they did nothing except not touch the mouse. Of course, the lone data-serving desktop staggered. SETI Home fell down as soon as it started walking.
Luckily, now-defunct Sun Microsystems donated computers to help the program get back on its feet. SETI is a middle-aged science, with 57 years under its sagging belt. And so they have to look for a rainbow of possible missives from other solar systems, all of which move and spin at their own special-snowflake speeds through the universe.
In the decades that followed, they turned to supercomputers. And then, they came for your CPUs. The idea for SETI Home originated at a cocktail party in Seattle, when computer scientist David Gedye asked a friend what it might take to excite the public about science. Could computers somehow do something similar to what the Apollo program had done? What might people volunteer to help with? People were so interested in all that. Interest is interest is interest, misguided or guided perfectly.
He got in touch with astronomer Woody Sullivan, who worked at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sullivan turned him over to Werthimer. And Gedye looped in Anderson. They had a quorum, of sorts. More processors crunching data from outer space means a more sensitive analysis of more signals. By borrowing unused processing power from personal computers around the world, SETI home could plow through radio telescope data faster than ever before. When a computer was idle, the SETI Home program launched a screensaver that showed a field of colorful spikes that represented signals collected at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico as it scanned the cosmos.
And for anyone who downloaded the software, it meant that if ET called Earth, it could very well be your own CPU that picked up the phone. Together, they ran about 25 trillion calculations per second, which made SETI home more than twice as powerful as the best supercomputer in the world at that time. Over the last 20 years, the army of SETI home screensavers has parsed billions of signals collected at Arecibo and selected those that seemed the most likely to have been generated by an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Once the program parsed this data, it was shipped off to Berkeley where the data was further processed to filter out signals from satellites, TV stations, and other sources of interference, to match the data with historical observations, and then to determine if a followup was warranted. When the software stops pushing out new data to users at the end of March, the Berkeley SETI home team will continue to work through the backlog of data generated by the program over the next few months.
The team is small—there are only four full-time employees—and it has struggled to stay on top of managing the public-facing part of the SETI home program while also publishing research on the data that has been collected.
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