WHAT WE DO


JOINRENEWJOIN

Messages from Earth
  

Projects

SETI@home

New SETI@home Update, January 15, 2008: From SETI@home to Hominid Fossils: Citizen Cyberscience Reshapes Research Landscape

In the beginning was SETI@home, the first large-scale volunteer computing project, launched in 1999 with seed money from The Planetary Society. Within months the project had millions of volunteers around the world joining to form the most powerful computer network ever assembled. Other projects soon followed, focused on everything from the search for large prime numbers to protein folding.

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?"



Recent Related Headlines


More Related Headlines:  SETI