The SETI@Home project receives its information from the Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Budget cuts have forced scientists to look for new ways to analyze the data it records.

Still looking for E.T., scientists turn to your home PC

SETI@Home works as a computer screen saver for you while it helps Berkeley scientists scan the heavens for signs of intelligent life.

By DAVID BALLINGRUD

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 27, 1999

When your home computer takes a breather, up pops a screen saver, those moving images that prevent a stationary image from burning into the monitor.

What the screen saver looks like is pretty much up to the computer's owner, and so it may say a lot about you.

What does your screen saver look like?

To learn more You can find additional information on SETI at http://planetary.org and at the SETI@home site at http://setiathome.ssl. berkeley.edu.

Flying toasters? Bubble-blowing fish? Goofy wallpaper?

Please.

Why isn't it doing something useful? Like searching the cosmos for signs of intelligent life?

That's what more than 1-million people all over the world -- including a group in the Tampa Bay area -- are doing with their computers.

Really.

Their screen savers are actually programs linked to the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. During their computers' inactive time, when a flying toaster or other silly gizmo would normally appear, their screen saver begins crunching numbers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- SETI for short.

Then, when a block of data is analyzed, the computer ships it to Berkeley via the Internet and receives another block to work on.

David Anderson is a visiting scientist at Berkeley's space sciences lab and, with Dan Werthimer, heads up the SETI@Home project.

The public's involvement "has just exploded," Anderson said, "with no real effort on our part to publicize the program."

SETI@Home went online in May and just last week signed up its one millionth at-home participant -- Ed Bradburn, "a scientifically literate gentleman from England," said Anderson. "Thank God he wasn't a UFO researcher or something."

People are signing up at the rate of about 5,000 per day, said Werthimer. "It's become the largest supercomputer in the world."

Longboat Key pharmacist Gregory Shanos got involved in SETI@Home soon after it hit the Internet. He keeps a log of the units his computer has analyzed (nine so far) and of the part of the sky where the signals originated.

"For me the appeal is actually doing science research," he said. "In the past this kind of work has been restricted to just a few people, but modern home computers are probably as good as anything NASA used to send men to the moon.

"It's cool to take part in this; it's cool that everybody gets a piece of the pie."

The program generated intense interest so quickly, Anderson said, "because people have a natural interest in life elsewhere. It's one of the ultimate questions, isn't it?"

For many years, private and government researchers have listened, literally, for signs of intelligent life in the universe.

NASA funded this work for years but sacrificed it to budget cuts. It goes on, however, funded privately and by universities.

Several large radio telescopes around the world gather collect radio waves from around the cosmos. One of these huge radio telescope is located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by Cornell University. TheSETI@Home project receives its data from the Arecibo instrument.

Researchers use computers to analyze these signals for patterns that would suggest they were sent by an intelligent source, a process one researcher likened to "listening for the sound of a flute against the background noise of a waterfall."

The first scan of the Arecibo data is done by a radio spectrum analyzer that looks for energy "spikes" in the signals more than 20 times greater than background noise from space.

That same data is then distributed through SETI@Home for a much closer look for smaller, but still potentially meaningful spikes.

"Every day a tape cassette gets mailed to us," said Anderson. "Our computers divide the data into blocks and distribute it to the home computers."

Arecibo gathers a tremendous amount of data, much of which used to be discarded because there just wasn't enough computer power available to work through it all. Now, with the work distributed by SETI@Home, researchers are catching up.

"Will we discover an alien signal -- who knows?," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. "But the search itself is a grand and exciting experiment that allows participants the chance to change human history by possibly discovering that we are not alone in our universe."

SETI@Home has two components, and here's how they work:

When the at-home SETI participant stops using the computer for a while, the SETI program starts analyzing blocks of data it has received from the California lab through the Internet. It scans the data, looking for orderly patterns. It also displays its own screen saver, color images representing the analysis.

The home computer does the work automatically. When finished analyzing a block of data, the home unit connects with the server in Berkeley and sends the data. It then receives another block to analyze.

What if your computer finds E.T.?

At Berkeley, a suspicious signal or pattern of signals would be double-checked and receive further analysis. If your computer turns out to be the one that finds a pattern in the radio waves, evidence of life elsewhere, Anderson will send you an e-mail telling you that you are about to be very famous and probably rich to boot.

Anderson and all SETI researchers readily acknowledge that the chance of finding life elsewhere this way is slim.

So why bother?

There are billions of galaxies and each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, or suns. As stars go, Earth's sun is rather commonplace. More importantly, scientists have learned in the past few decades that the formation of planets around the uncounted billions of stars may be the rule rather than the exception.

SETI researchers conclude the odds overwhelmingly favor the likelihood of life elsewhere and it would be folly not to look for it.

The SETI@Home project is funded by University of California, the Planetary Society (one of the largest space interest groups in the world) and a number of private interests including Sun Microsystems, Fujifilm Computer Products, Quantum Corp., Informix and Paramount Pictures.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.