Word: seti
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Increasingly that means looking as well as listening. For nearly four decades, SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) scientists have scoured the skies with their big radio antennas without getting so much as a convincing peep, though there have been some tantalizing false alarms. Not only can suspect signals be elusively faint, they are also hard to separate from the universe's hodgepodge of natural noises. Given that, many scientists have begun wondering about entirely different kinds of extraterrestrial smoke signals, especially lasers. Says Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, a veteran of many SETI radio searches: "Lasers are an interesting alternative...
...most elegant displays of the power of the Internet to be harnessed for what experts call distributed computing. "The largest supercomputer you can buy has 9,000 Pentium processors in it," says SETI@home director David Anderson. If everyone who has downloaded his program uses it, he points out, "we have what's equivalent to a box with 400,000 Pentiums...
Fine. But what I really yearn for, as I watch the beautifully rendered 3-D graph that sprints across my screen in flickering blues, purples and reds, is a Jodie Foster moment. In the movie Contact, you may remember, Foster plays a frustrated SETI scientist who stumbles across an alien radio signal. That's how I see it happening to me: I'll be slumped over my desk in the Time & Life Building, struggling with another bout of writer's block, when all that random noise will suddenly transform itself into a smooth undulating wave...
...hopes were deflated by Dan Wertheimer, head of the SETI project, who advised me not to hold my breath. The picture on my screen, it turns out, represents a mere 107 sec. of data from 1 millionth of the night sky. My chances of winning the galactic lottery are about 1 in 100 million--assuming there is any prize...
...even if we are alone in the universe, the online hunt seems to be bringing together folks down here, from kindergartners to CEOs. By tracking who's processed what data, SETI@home has sparked a friendly rivalry to be No. 1. Microsoft, Oracle and Sun are just a few of the firms caught up in this macho space race. And as Anderson suggests, there are any number of other large scientific undertakings that could adopt the SETI model. Maybe someday my idle PC will be helping map the human genome or find a cure for cancer...