Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here Our Bookstore is OPEN Over 5000 new & used titles, competitively priced! Topics: UFOs - Paranormal - Area 51 - Ghosts - Forteana - Conspiracy - History - Biography - Psychology - Religion - Crime - Health - Geography - Maps - Science - Money - Language - Recreation - Technology - Fiction - Other - New Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Mothership -> UFO -> Updates -> 1998 -> Aug -> Here

From: Gerry Lovell <ed@farshore.force9.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:19:30 +0100
Fwd Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 02:08:36 -0400
Subject: Using The Net To Search For Aliens


Source: By Reuters
Special to CNET News.com
Date: Aug 26  1998
Header: Using the Net to search for aliens

There is good news for interstellar explorers.

The search for intelligent alien life somewhere in the cosmos is
about to get a lot easier--almost as easy as getting email from
E.T. All you need is a home computer and an Internet link.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have
devised a project to involve ordinary people around the world in
the hunt for alien intelligence. Using home computers and the
Net, they hope to build a gigantic global "brain" to analyze
interstellar radio signals for signs of life.

The old clunker you once played "Space Invaders" on could be the
computer that finally downloads hard evidence of real
extraterrestrials.

"We might get a million people involved in this project," said
Dan Werthimer, an astronomer at Berkeley's Space Sciences
Laboratory who is helping to run the project. "Everybody is
curious, everybody wants to know if there is life out there.
This is a neat way of letting them participate in the hunt."

Long a staple of big budget science fiction movies, the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI for short) has usually
been depicted as a job for professionals--starship captains,
dedicated radio-astronomers, or renegade FBI agents cracking a
government conspiracy.

SETI@home aims to change all that. By using "distributed
computing," a new way of linking individual computers over the
Internet, virtually anyone with a desktop PC can begin hunting
for aliens.

"Distributed computing is one of the Holy Grails of computer
science," said project director David Anderson, a computer
scientist. "If it works, it could be 100 times faster than the
fastest current supercomputer."

SETI@home scientists stress that the project is not yet up and
running and it will take at least six more months before they
are able to begin work.

Once ready, it will start using the Internet to parcel out to
individual home computers chunks of raw data obtained from the
Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest "ear" to
space that mankind has ever built. Arecibo's huge dish scans the
skies looking for radio waves that might have been produced by
alien intelligence.

"We've been leaking television shows and radio programs into
space for decades," Werthimer said. "Maybe somebody out there is
doing the same, either sending out signals on purpose, or just
leaking them the way we are."

The huge volume of radio data that must be analyzed has long
been one of the main stumbling blocks for SETI projects. Even
with fast new supercomputers able to complete as many as 200
billion operations per second, the number crunch has been a slow
grind that leaves scientists frustrated.

That is where distributed computing comes in. Made possible by
the rapid growth of the Internet, it allows scientists to break
down large computing problems and distribute them through
networks of smaller computers. Each solves its own small part of
the puzzle, then feeds its answers back into the main computer
to build an overview.

Distributed computing has been used in earlier projects
including efforts to crack encryption codes and to figure out
large prime numbers. But SETI@home will use it for a something
that everyone can appreciate--resolving one of the biggest
mysteries of the universe.

"We are confident that Earth's civilization is not the only
one," said Bulgarian astronomer Veselka Radeva, who has signed
up for SETI@home. "It is only a question of time to understand
where and who are the other intelligent creatures in the
universe."

Project managers say about 120,000 people have already
registered for SETI@home, ranging from a 12-year-old in the
Philippines to Silicon Valley computer professionals. One of
them, one day, may be lucky enough to retrieve Arecibo signals
that indicate life exists in the stars.

"They won't know right away if their clunker was the one that
found the extraterrestrial," Werthimer said, noting that the
data would have to be rechecked and reanalyzed at project
headquarters in Berkeley. "But after the checks, and if we
confirm it again, they will definitely get the credit for the
discovery."

For that chance, project participants will not be asked to do
much. Once the project is running, they will be able to visit
the SETI@home Web site and download an analysis program and
their first chunk of radio data from Arecibo.

Their PCs will then begin searching through space in their free
time. Appearing as a common screensaver, the SETI program will
kick in when the computer is idle and will not affect its normal
operations.

"It will all happen automatically. You won't even know it is
working on it," Werthimer said. When the computer finishes
combing over its first block of data, it will connect back with
the main project computer in Berkeley, send the data back, and
get a new data package to work on.

"Everybody gets a little part of the sky, their own little bit
of the information," he said. "There are 400 billion stars in
our galaxy...we need all the computing power we can get."

Werthimer's project casts a much broader net than a similar
operation run by the SETI Institute, a privately funded group
based in Mountain View, California, which is also using radio
data to hunt for alien life. While the institute concentrates on
a targeted search of some 1,000 nearby Sun-like stars considered
likely candidates for alien intelligence, SETI@home will take a
broader look.

Like the SETI Institute, which was forced to turn to private
funds after Congress canceled a similar space search mounted by
NASA in 1992, SETI@home still needs money--an estimated $200,000
before the project even gets rolling, primarily to pay for the
expensive magnetic tapes used to record the incoming radio data
at Arecibo.

But the key to success will be the participation of tens of
thousands of E.T. buffs who are willing to use their personal
computers for something other than email. "I'm optimistic on
life on the universe. It would just be bizarre if we were the
only ones," Werthimer said. "It might be that there is a
galactic community out there and they are all talking to each
other...but we humans are just learning how."

Story Copyright =A9 1998 Reuters Limited.

-- end --

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 > > >  Gerry Lovell / Far Shores |http://www.farshore.force9.co.uk
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -