SETI Logo by Marcus Waikat

The question 

"Are we alone in the universe?"

has puzzled thinkers, whether trained or not, for centuries. Ever since we as a species realised that the pretty white dots on the night sky were more than mere backdrop, we have looked, and wondered what was out there. The twinkling of the stars  must have fascinated primitive man, although it would be several thousand years before, during the first manned space missions, we discovered that that twinkling had more to doing with stratospheric jet streams than the stars themselves.

As Douglas Adams wrote in one of the more frivolous passages in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

"Space is big. Really big. I mean you might think it's a long way to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts compared to space".

This is undoubtedly true, and on this basis, the question should not be "Is Earth the only planet featuring sentient life?" but "Where should we look to find other life forms in the universe?" It really is fantastically arrogant of those amongst us who believe that Earth is the only inhabited planet, and the notion does not sit well with either of the two main theories of Creation. After all, the taking into account the randomness of Big Bang theory coupled with Darwinian Evolution theory it would be hard to envisage that four billion star systems and hundreds of billions of years could only produce one ecosystem. And God has quite clearly made such a bad job of this planet that he's bound to have had another go!

Anyway,
this is straying from the point, which is to introduce SETI@Home, one of the best computing-related ideas in a long time. The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence at Home is a project undertaken by the University of California at Berkeley and the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico (click here for Puerto-Rico resources - Puerto-Rico related news, books and web resources).

Arecibo Observatory. Recognise it from Goldeneye?
Click here for more images

It was thought of by David Gedye, along with Craig Kasnoff, who formed the initial project team. A scientific plan was developed, which received widespread support at the 5th International Conference in Bioastronomy in July 1996.

SETI scientists have undertaken to scan all of the sky the Arecibo Telescope can see, for signals that may have been sent by intelligent life forms. They have written an analysis program that factors in rules such as potential movement between source and receiver (the Doppler Effect), and a host of others so that the analysis is as thorough and accurate as possible. But having written the code, and having obtained the data, the project fell on hard times, and was unable to afford the supercomputer time to perform the processing.

At the time of writing, the largest supercomputer (called Janus at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque) in the world has 9,216 Pentium Pro processors. Which is a lot. Until, of course, you consider the number of processors attached to the internet. At about the time that funds ran out, someone on the project realised that most of the computers in the world spend a large proportion of their time idle, or frantically saving their screens. And that most of those computers are connected to the net. Imagine all this processor time going to waste, with their project failing because they couldn't afford processor time! One can almost sense the outrage that these scientists and engineers were feeling, and they must have wondered how (or indeed if) they could try and harness some of this time for themselves and their foundering research.

It’s one thing lusting after the wasted processor time, quite another harnessing it. Altruism goes so far, but internet users are notoriously lazy, and need to have things parcelled up and sorted out, easy and funky in order to fire their imagination.

The idea to write a screensaver that could do data analysis could not have been long in coming. In fact, they had the prototypes for the client and server, plus the signal analysis code way back in 1997. All they had to do was figure out a way to distribute the data to be processed out to users, and how to get the analysed data back. What a way to make the increasingly commercialised internet do something useful (and not far off its original purpose) for a change, instead of being hijacked by companies trying to make a buck or two! 1998 became the year of money, as the team raised the cash to continue. Late in the year, the recording of data began.

SETI client. Click here for full-size view

So SETI@Home is a screensaver that can be downloaded (see the link at the bottom of the page). Once running on a host, the user creates an account, and it uses this account to connect to its home server, from which it gets a 340K unit for processing. The unit contains 300K of raw data, the rest being header information for the client. After this is done, the connection is severed, and processing begins according to the user's preferences. Once processing is complete, SETI reconnects to its home server, uploads its results, and gets another unit.

There are aliens out there, I’m convinced. 

While we run the risk of them being aggressive toward us, we as a species have a responsibility to help find them. If this can be achieved at no cost to ourselves, then so much the better.  The question “Why are you doing that?” should be responded to with “Why are you not?”