July/August 1999

From Wireless to Wired
by Doug Addison

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence took a giant leap into the digital age in May when the Planetary Society and the University of California at Berkeley released software that looks for radio signals from space on a personal computer.

The SETI@home software uses the Internet to download radio data obtained by astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The software runs as a screensaver, crunching data while a computer is idle.

Screenshot of SETI@home software. It scans for ET while your computer is idle.

A 250-kilobyte chunk, which takes about five minutes to download with a modem, can keep a home computer busy for several days searching for spikes or patterns in radio signals from space. If the software detects anything interesting, it uploads a report to astronomers for further investigation.

Development of SETI@home was an international effort three years in the making. Volunteers helped with programming, debugging, and translating instructions. More than 200,000 users in 100 countries were using the software one week after it was released, making SETI@home the worldÍs largest supercomputer, says project co-director Dan Werthimer.

"It's a global science project," Werthimer said.

The software is available for Windows, Macintosh, and 30 varieties of Unix. For more information or to download SETI@home for free, visit the project web site at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu</a>.

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