SETI Array
If you have not heard of it the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has been listening for decades now for a hint of a radio broadcast from outside our solar system, They have an array of antennas listening almost constantly. The approach known as radio SETI, it uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Being privately funded they could not afford a super computer to crunch through all of the data they would gather so they turned to the public. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.
This search uses your unused personal computer cycles, along with cycles from all of the other participants to in effect form a super computer. This requires you install a small client on your computer. It will fetch observation data from SETI and then process it on your computer and send the results back to SETI. The client is configurable so it can run without impacting the use of your computer in any way. In addition you get a really cool screen saver which displays the data as it is analyzing it.
If your lucky enough to be the person who detects the first signal from alien intelligence you will be named as the co-discoverer and your name will go down in history for this momentous achievement. The software is free, you get a nifty screen saver, your can sleep better knowing that your un-used computer cycles are being tasked with something productive and not just wasting electricity. What more could you ask for!
You can get the software and join SETI here. The have software for all flavors of computer, Linux, Windows, Mac etc. Join thousands of others in he search, SETI WANTS YOU!
Been there…have the T-shirt, but no ET’s. Much that I have seen over the past few years has indicated to me that nothing we have sent out over the past decades has survived as detectably intelligent information for more than a few LY’s due to basic physics. It would require the power of some of the more prominent stellar objects to do better, and we are aware of no physics that would allow control of such objects and their output. There are various schemes for using a form of stellar Morse code by placing rotatable shields in a particular path pointed at a particular location in space. The problem is that such a communicator would have to know where they were pointing, within a very small angle, something they would not know without some indication of interesting properties, something they are unlikely to have. More importantly, depending on criteria, they might have enormous numbers of such possible targets as indicated by the work that SETI now does. I can no longer justify the work that SETI does. On the other hand, I can think of many other uses to which the SETI arrays could be put.