Making Contact

Brandweek, Nov 27, 2000 by Jennifer Owens

My dad lives as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get and still get reception from a satellite dish. So when he said he was helping in the search for extraterrestrial life, I figured he was just taking his dog for long walks in farm fields. But when he showed me SETI@home (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu), I knew he was serious.

According to the SETI@home site, my dad is one of more than 1.6 million participants in 224 countries who have signed up to help in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, as the various research programs searching the skies for sentient beings are called. Founded in May 1999, the SETI@home project is based on the idea that while it could never afford a supercomputer big enough to analyze all SETI data, it can get the same power from lots and lots of little computers working together to crunch numbers while their owners sleep.

That's where Dad's Mac comes in. Having downloaded the SETI@home screensaver software, Dad allows his computer to reach across the Internet for a chunk of data to analyze.

When he's not using it, his computer works the data and then reports back to SETI@home.

According to SETI@home, researchers are looking for what they assume will be extremely weak signals in a narrow frequency range. And while SETI@home has yet to detect anything, it has received enough computing time to equal at least 165,000 years, averaging 10 Teraflops, or about 10 times the largest supercomputer on the planet.

And what if Dad's computer finds something? SETI@home stresses there is official protocol to be followed when letting others in on the news. Warns the SETI@home site, "it is important that participants in the SETI@home project do not get excited when they see signals on their screen and go off on their own making announcements and call the press. This could be very damaging to the project."

So Dad, don't go calling the Mansfield News Journal just yet, OK?