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SETI@home

New SETI@home Update, August 27, 2008: Astropulse: A Fresh Look at the Skies in Search of E.T.

SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Wethimer and his team have worked hard for several years to develop a new type of SETI@home with new capabilities. Like traditional SETI@home the new program uses the raw data collected during sky-surveys at Arecibo. As before, the data is carved up into work units and sent to users for processing, and users' computers then send their results back to SETI@home headquarters in Berkeley. The difference is that this time, instead of looking for clear narrow-band transmissions, the software will search for extremely short broad-band bursts, or "pulses," coming from the stars.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has taken many forms since the first search for alien transmissions was launched nearly five decades ago. There have been radio searches and optical searches, searches at the "water hole" frequency and broad-band searches, targeted searches and all-sky surveys. But among all of these projects, SETI@home stands unique: it is the only SETI project based on the belief that by working together -- millions of us all over the world -- we stand a better chance of hearing the call of other intelligent beings in the universe. SETI@home makes it possible for everyone to take part in a quest that could one day transform our world. And it was The Planetary Society that made it all possible.

SETI@home is a distributed computing project. This means that unlike most scientific projects, which use one large computer for their data-processing, SETI@home sends out small chunks of data (or "work units") to millions of computer users around the world. Each of these personal computers processes the data independently during its idle time, when it is not occupied with its main tasks. Once the PC finishes processing the work unit, it sends the processed data back to SETI@home and receives in return a new batch of data for processing. By tapping into the unused capacity of millions of computers around the world, SETI@home has been able to conduct the most sensitive SETI search in history. Along the way, its international network has become the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the world and has inspired a slew of distributed computing projects in other scientific fields.

The Planetary Society has been there for SETI@home from the very start. In 1998, a year before the project went online, The Planetary Society provided the seed money required for the launch. The Society is therefore the founding sponsor of the largest and most popular SETI project in history! We have been unwavering in our support for it ever since.

As of now, no alien signal has been discovered in the vast stores of data gathered and processed by SETI@home, but the project scientists are undeterred. After all, the prize in the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence is the answer to one of mankind's most ancient and persistent questions: "Are we alone?"



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