From the dawn of mankind man has pondered the question, are we alone in the universe? When science-fiction bloomed its imagination in the 1950s, people began to wonder about actually making contact. This is when the concept of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence came about. The competition of the Cold War spurred on space exploration and, in 1959, the idea that microwaves (high frequency radio) could be used to communicate across the galaxy came about. From then on, there have been many attempts to find a transmission originating from another distant civilisation.

Founded in 1984 as a non-profit organisation, The SETI Institute is the largest SETI program. After losing NASA funding in 1992 when congress ruled out funding, The SETI Institute has had to get private funding. It continues to do so with funding from Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard. Well, no Martians found so far, but we cannot give up hope yet!

In 1996, David Gedye and Craig Kasnoff got the idea of SETI@home - using processor power of home users to calculate and analyse SETI data. They finalised the details and developed the software and, by mid-1999, SETI@home became public. To participate, all the user has to do is download a background-running application and allow it to connect to the internet when it has done processing. The SETI@home servers portion up the SETI data received from the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico into small (340kb approx.) packets of data. These get downloaded by the client application. It then analyses the data, which normally takes between ten and forty hours, depending on your computer. When done, it requests to reconnect and sends back the information to the SETI@home servers and downloads a new packet, providing they are working (which seems seldom at the moment!).

Every time you send back a packet, the SETI@home servers record it. You can look how many hours of processing time you've contributed and how many packets you've sent in. You can compare yourself with other users and get information on what place you are within all the 1.5 million users. It is also possible to join a group. When in a group, all the member's statistics are also added together so you can see how many years of processing the group has done. The members of the group are listed in order of how many packets they have sent in so an incentive of publicity is also thrown in.

Set up by Researcher Hardback, our group has now got 43 members and has contributed over 2,700 packets - over six years worth of processor time! Why not help the team effort and join the group!

Psyduck

27.12.99. Front Page

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