Word: seti
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...done my small part to help the search for intelligent life in the universe. Last week I went to seti.org home page of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, clicked on its new Click to Give donation box and charged $1 to my American Express card. SETI wasn't actually my charity of choice--though I'm as curious as the next guy to find out who's living out there. I was led to the site by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who was walking me through the newly launched Amazon Honor System...
...fastest supercomputer in the world doesn't really exist. Or rather, it exists, but only in a virtual sense: as a network of machines scattered around the globe, linked via the Internet to three powerful servers grinding away in a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. SETI@home, as the sprawling system is known, has been online for about a year searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by tapping into the spare number-crunching power of (at last count) 2.3 million...
...called community, or distributed, computing, and the phenomenal popularity of SETI@home has spawned something of a distributed-computing craze. This fall several Internet start-ups and not-for-profit groups have launched new initiatives in fields ranging from gene mapping to drug design, hoping to harness spare PC processing cycles and either give them away or sell them to the highest bidder...
...grander dream--of contacting extraintelligent E.T.s like those canal-building Martians imagined by the early 20th century astronomer Percival Lowell--lives on in the radio and optical searches underwritten by private outfits like Drake's SETI Institute and the Planetary Society. And even scientists dubious of success don't want to be spoilsports. They agree on the importance of continuing the quest, not just for microbes on Mars or Europa but also for those faint signals from some remote world--if only to underscore the preciousness of life and the importance of protecting perhaps its lone example. Admits Drake: "Even...
Maybe you'd like to try tracking down E.T. yourself? If you have a PC or Mac that sits idle at least a few hours a day, you can join the 1.7 million people who have downloaded SETI@home, a free screen saver (available at setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu that uses your computer's downtime to help sort through the reams of noisy static gathered by radio telescopes. The odds of pulling a Jodie Foster (who snared the elusive extraterrestrial signal in the 1997 sci-fi flick Contact) are a zillion to one. But if you fail--or even if you succeed--nobody...