If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades, says SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak.
Researchers at SETI@Home, the popular distributed computing project, are set to begin sifting through the mountains of data they have collected over the last 18 months. Over 2.6 million users logged in and donated spare CPU cycles on their home computers, giving the SETI@Home project a combined computing power that is twice as powerful as the leading supercomputer.
Hundreds of thousands of personal computer users are participating in the search for extraterrestrial life by allowing their computers to be used for processing radio signals when they are not in use by the owner (www.setiathome.com). Now, British climate scientists would like to harness more of that untapped computing power to make climate predictions.
The SETI Institute is involved in a 'double-header' campaign to locate extraterrestrial signals. The first is a coordinated search strategy of 1000's of stars with powerful radio telescopes. The second, and more interesting strategy is to enlist thousands of internet users to process the data. The project, called SETI@Home, is currently in the final stages of development and over 250,000 people have already signed up. When finished, the application would function in the background as a screen saver, taking advantage of spare cpu-cycles on idle computers. The data would be processed and sent back to the main server for analysis. The combined effort of 250,000 users would be the single greatest distributed networking experiment to date.