![]() Interest is interest is interest, misguided or guided perfectly.īut Gedye wasn’t a SETI guy-he was a computer guy-so he didn’t know if or how a citizen-computing project would work. “It’s a slightly misguided interest, but still,” says David Anderson, Gedye’s graduate-school advisor at Berkeley. What might people volunteer to help with? His mind wandered to The X-Files, UFOs, hit headlines fronting the National Enquirer. Could computers somehow do something similar to what the Apollo program had done? Gedye dreamed up the idea of “volunteer computing,” in which people gave up their hard drives for the greater good when those drives were idle, much like people give up their idle cars, for periods of time, to Turo (if Turo didn’t make money and also served the greater good). The idea for originated at a cocktail party in Seattle, when computer scientist David Gedye asked a friend what it might take to excite the public about science. In the decades that followed, they turned to supercomputers. In the 1970s, when Werthimer’s Berkeley colleagues launched a SETI project called SERENDIP, they sucked power from all the computers in their building, then the neighboring building. There’s only one way to do that, says Dan Werthimer, the chief SETI scientist at Berkeley and a co-founder of “We need a lot of computing power.” And so they have to look for a rainbow of possible missives from other solar systems, all of which move and spin at their own special-snowflake speeds through the universe. Since then, scientists and engineers have used radio and optical telescopes to search much more of the sky-for those “narrowband” broadcasts, for fast pings, for long drones, for patterns distinguishing themselves from the chaotic background static and natural signals from stars and supernovae.īut the hardest part about SETI is that scientists don’t know where ET may live, or how ET’s civilization might choose to communicate. It began in 1960, when an astronomer named Frank Drake used an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, to scan two Sun-like stars for signs of intelligent life-radio emissions the systems couldn’t produce on their own, like the thin-frequency broadcasts of our radio stations, or blips that repeated in a purposeful-looking way. SETI is a middle-aged science, with 57 years under its sagging belt. ![]() In the years since, more than 4 million people have tried Together, they make up a collective computing power that exceeds 2008’s premier supercomputer. Luckily, now-defunct Sun Microsystems donated computers to help the program get back on its feet. ![]() Of course, the lone data-serving desktop staggered. And for launch, a million people signed up. That number-and the bleaker view from outsiders, who said perhaps no one would join the crew-informed a poor decision: to set up a single desktop to farm out the data and take back the analysis.īut the problem was, people really liked the idea of letting their computers find aliens while they did nothing except not touch the mouse. When the researchers launched in May of ’99, they thought maybe 1,000 people might sign up. Anyone with 28 kbps could be the person to discover another civilization. Each participating computer would dig through SETI data for suspicious signals, possibly containing a “Hello, World” or two from aliens. The data would come from observations of distant stars, conducted by astronomers searching for evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. Their screens would be saved by displays of data analysis, showing which and how much data from elsewhere their CPUs were churning through during down-time. And so it was that before the new millennium dawned, researchers at the University of California released a citizen-science program called idea went like this: When internet-farers abandoned their computers long enough that a screen saver popped up, that saver wouldn’t be WordArt bouncing around, 3-D neon-metallic pipes installing themselves inch by inch, or a self-satisfied flying Windows logo. Watching the internet extend its reach, a small group of scientists thought a more extensive digital leap was in order, one that encompassed the galaxy itself. AOL, Compuserve, mp3.com, and AltaVista loaded bit by bit after dial-up chirps, on screens across the world. The year was 1999, and the people were going online.
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