Space out at home

Insight on the News, April 15, 2002 by Fred Reed

The Internet, ever a democratizing influence, has put the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence on your desktop. Now anyone with a computer and Internet access can look for little green men in his spare time. All he need do is surf to the SETI Website (setiathome.ssl.berkeley. edu) and download a screen saver.

The premise behind the project is simple. A gigantic radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, picks up vast amounts of radio noise but doesn't have the computer power to search it for signs of intelligence. A Berkeley, Calif., group proposed that volunteers with personal computers analyze the data in their spare time.

How? The screen saver actually is mathematical-analysis software that grinds through radio data while the PC is idle. There are versions of the screen saver for UNIX, Windows and Macs. So far, more than 3 million computer owners have participated.

It might seem that such effort hardly is worth the electricity. According to SETI at Home, however, the world's most powerful computer is rated at 12 teraflops and costs $110 million, while SETI at Home gets about 15 teraflops and costs $500,000. A teraflop is 1 trillion floating-point operations per second.

FRED REED WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER DAILY, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.