SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data
The science of SETI@home
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver’s electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.
Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.
The two original goals of SETI@home were:
1.to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth, and
2.to prove the viability and practicality of the ‘volunteer computing’ concept.
The second of these goals is generally considered to have succeeded completely. The current BOINC environment, a development of the original SETI@home, is providing support for many computationally intensive projects in a wide range of disciplines.
The first of these goals has to date yielded no conclusive results: no evidence for ETI signals has been shown via SETI@home. However, ongoing continuation is predicated on the assumption that the observational analysis is not an ‘ill-posed’ one. The vast majority of the sky (over 98%) has yet to be surveyed, and each point in the sky must be surveyed many times to exclude even a subset of possibilities.
PARTICIPATE
System requirements
There is an initial download of about 10 MB.
You’ll need about 20 MB of free disk space and 64 MB of RAM.
with a typical computer (such as a 2 GHz Pentium 4), you’ll need to let SETI@home run for at least 2 hours per week (slower computers are fine but they’ll have to run proportionally more).
Download and install the BOINC software used by SETI@home, click here