Help in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Posted on Sat Sep 23 2006

By: Ashley Mikulik in Extraterrestrial Life, Science & Technology

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.

I first heard about this program a few years ago. All you have to do is download a program and leave it running. Who knows, you could be the person who will discover extraterrestrial life. I think it sounds like fun and i'll be downloading this on my computer to help in the search for E.T.!

You can read more about the search and SETI@home on their website http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php

Red Rain Proof of Extraterrestrial Life?

French Satellite to Search for Other "Earths"