A Computer Can Make You A Space Scientist!

Have you ever noticed that when people are introduced to other people, the intro goes something like this? This is John Doe, he is a pedicurist, or meet Jane Doe, she is the head of marketing for the Women’s Fashion Department at Wal-Mart, or this is Sam Doe, he is retired but is consulting for the golfers at Riverside. Now what did that all mean. John paints toenails, Jane sells women’s lingerie and Sam is a caddy at the golf course. How people see us is defined by what we do. And if what we do isn’t sexy enough, we change the description to give it a bit more pizzazz.   

How would you like to be introduced this way? Hi, this is Susie Brilliant. She is a researcher for SETI, the very important project that searches the heavens for extraterrestrial intelligence. Your mother would probably shorten it to “My daughter the space scientist.” Think about sitting at a bar and listening to endless chatter about how many barrels of beer were delivered or how many orders were processed etc. You slightly nod your head and mention, “ by the way I processed several megabits of data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope today and found several promising anomalies that may be indicative of extraterrestrial intelligence.” (What did he say Martha?)

What does all that have to do with computers? Most of you, especially those with broadband or DSL connections, use only the bare minimum capabilities of your computer. How often have you seen the screen saver pop up and run for hours while you are off doing something else? To prove my point, if you are running Windows XP, perform a CTLR/ALT/Delete to bring up the task manager, then look at the performance tab and the section that says CPU usage and I am willing to say that it displays no more than four to eight percent of total capacity. This is especially true of those that use computers just for email and surfing the web. Why not put this ninety to ninety five percent idle computing power to good use?

 Now you can. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence uses the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico to collect gazillions of bits of data representing radio signals from all over the galaxy. Within these radio signals they are looking for the one signal that might say “Hello Earth, this is Tau Ceti II calling.” Normally, this would require massive supercomputers to sort and define these signals in an effort to find the one signal that might represent a hello from ET. The cost however would be prohibitive. SETI has developed a method where by pieces of this data can be downloaded from the Internet to millions of personal computers. Once on your computer, instead of your screen saver coming up during idle time, a small program analyzes and reports back on what it finds in the data downloaded from SETI. The program immediately gives up the task if you come back and need to use the computer to read your email.

Imagine your excitement if you happen to be sitting in front of your computer and all of a sudden a message pops up “TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER.” What would ET know? ET is from out of town so you could just say, “hey, you are speaking to him.” Wouldn’t it be fun to be Global Potentate at least for a day?  To learn more about this project go http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/. There you can download the program that looks like a screen saver as it crunches data from Arecibo. You can join the other five million plus researchers from around the world and maybe, just maybe, you (or your computer) will be the one that first says hello to ET.

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