Will your PC hear E.T.'s call?

By Richard Morochove

First published December 17, 1998

Forget those flying toasters. Soon there will be a screensaver that boldly goes where no one has gone before. It's currently in the final stages of testing by SETI@home, an ambitious project that aims to link hundreds of thousands of computers over the Internet in what promises to be the largest collaborative computing project in history.

You can participate in the search for an alien civilization by donating the unused time on your home PC. It's a long shot, but you could find fame as a co-discoverer if your PC uncovers evidence of alien intelligence.

SETI stands for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence." Current SETI projects have radio astronomers search for the narrow bandwidth signals that are not found in nature.

Narrow bandwidth signals such as television and radio broadcasts radiate from Earth 24 hours a day, like a beacon indicating our presence. In theory, we should be able to detect other civilizations by looking for their broadcasts. Yet with an estimated 400 billion stars in our galaxy, it's hard to know exactly where to look.

Current SETI research depends on signals received by radio telescopes and analyzed in real time by supercomputers looking for a pattern that may indicate intelligent life. However, supercomputer processing time is expensive, so the signals can't be analyzed as thoroughly as researchers would like.

That's where your PC can help out. The SETI@home project, based at the University of California at Berkeley, wants your PC when you don't need it.

You participate by running a special screensaver program that analyses data that comes from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The Arecibo Observatory is the world's largest radio telescope, with a dish that's more than 300 meters wide, large enough to hold 10 billion bowls of corn flakes.

SETI@home's computer system is designed to analyze a portion of the Arecibo signals in a more thorough manner. It will extract a limited frequency band of the signals collected at Arecibo, then divide this data into 256KB-sized chunks.

The screensaver program will download a chunk of data from the project's website to your PC's hard drive. When you aren't actively using your computer, the screensaver starts analyzing the data on your PC, searching for signs of an alien signal.

A few days later, depending upon the processing speed of your computer and the amount of time the screensaver operates, the software will report the results back to the project when you're connected to the Net. Then it will retrieve a new chunk of data and repeat the process.

The SETI screensaver will display a variety of graphics that show the progress of your analysis, the area of the sky you're working on and the type of signals your PC is finding.

The screensaver will run on PCs that operate under Windows 95, 98 and NT, as well as Apple Macintosh and Unix computers. It requires 32MB of RAM, at least 10 megabytes of available disk capacity and an Internet connection.

The SETI@home project will last for two years, through 2001, so the Arecibo dish may survey as much of the sky as possible.

If your computer detects a "hit", the data will be re-analyzed at UC Berkeley to confirm it. What do you get out of it? If your computer is involved in the detection, you'll be listed as a co-discoverer.

The SETI effort has been supported by some of the most influential players in the computer business. The late Barney Oliver, former head of Hewlett-Packard Labs, was involved since 1971 and bequeathed the bulk of his estate to SETI. Major financial contributions also came from HP co-founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems donated the computers that will form the core of the data recording and distribution systems of SETI@home. Paramount Pictures chipped in $50,000 in connection with the recent release of the latest Star Trek flick.

It may seem odd that computer industry veterans are heavily involved supporting a project that many people believe has little chance of success. Yet so many of today's realities in the computer business, from voice recognition software, to palm size computers to the cyberspace of the Internet were considered science fiction a couple of decades ago. So perhaps contact with aliens isn't that far-fetched.

To find out more about SETI@home or to sign up to the mailing list, visit the project's website. More than 100,000 have already joined the list.

SETI@home is now being tested by 100 volunteers to get the kinks out of the system. It's scheduled to start in April 1999. If you're on the mailing list, you'll be informed when the screensaver software is ready. CW