Surfing For Aliens?
While you surf the Net, your home computer may soon also be performing a much loftier task scouring the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Home computer users are being enlisted in an effort to analyze little slices of the sky for faint radio signals from distant civilizations.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are developing software, called SETIhome, to analyze the vast amounts of data collected by the world's largest radio telescope, the 1,000-foot-diameter instrument at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Project leaders hope to get at least 100,000 volunteers to download the software from SETIhome when it becomes available next April.
"We have to improve our ability to listen before we're likely to hear anything," said project director David Anderson. "And part of that is increasing computing power."
Sponsored by the Planetary Society with donations from Paramount Pictures, Sun Microsystems and private individuals, SETIhome makes use of a technique called "distributed computing" to spread the load of crunching the data collected by the telescope, which can scan 168 million radio frequencies simultaneously.
SETI, for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, "is a problem especially well-suited because you can break it up into different pieces," Anderson said.
Volunteers will be able to download a chunk of data. In idle moments, their computer will analyze the chunk. Then the results will be uploaded to the main computer in Arecibo and another chunk downloaded.
The computer at Arecibo is equivalent to about 10,000 Pentium computers chained together, said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for SETIhome. But with more computers brought online, more data can be analyzed and even weaker signals detected.
SETIhome needs about $400,000, and about a quarter of that has been raised, Werthimer said. But "people have been real eager to help out. We've had a lot of volunteers that are just raring to go. They want to be part of a global science project."
Written by Chris Allbritton
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