I think I've let Republican hypocrisy get me down a little too much lately. I went back and was somewhat embarrassed to discover that I've used the phrase "glass houses" twice in recent TFTD's and that's a little more preachy than I really intended to be. So let's talk about something completely different, extraterrestrial intelligence.
I'm dead serious. The actual search for signs of intelligent life OUTSIDE our beautiful planet Earth.
Now, I'm not an astronomer. I don't own anything more powerful than a pair of binoculars for searching the sky. But almost every day I participate (in a very small way) in the search for extraterretrals. How? I help an organization called SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to sift through the ENORMOUS volume of data that they gather everyday and we look for patterns and signals from space.
These signals will come (we think) in some sort of pattern that will be clearly distinguishable from the background noise of the ever-expanding universe. Here is the brief statement from their website:
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.
It works like this. You visit their website and download a screen-saver. It's free of course. The screen saver, instead of just displaying bouncing balls or dizzying stars like the stuff that came pre-installed on your computer examines radio signals from space.
The program downloads blocks of data from SETI, they seem to be about 250k to 350k in size. Once they download to your computer, you are free to disconnect from the Internet. These blocks contain the raw data from big radio telescopes like the one in Arecebo. Believe it or not, that 250-350k is only about 70 seconds of readings! The first one took my computer a really long time to process, but I think that was a problem with version 1.0 of SETI's program. All the later blocks have taken about 20 hours. Think about that! It takes my iMac (233, which is approximately equal to an Intel 400) 20 hours to filter through what it took the telescope only about a minute to gather! At that rate, SETI needs about 1,000 volunteers just to keep up with that one telescope. But there are lots more than 1,000 of us. There are over 1.1 Million! To date, we've examined over 20 million blocks of data. Put it this way, we've donated 64 THOUSAND YEARS of computer time toward this effort!
My computer's 20 hour average isn't at all bad. It takes Intel computers an average of 31 hours to perform that same task. But I'm humbled by the mighty "Alpha EV6" which only needs about an hour and a half! (man, I'd like one of those!).
So far I've only come across one "signal." They warn you when you sign-up that strong signals are usually just unannounced military broadcasts or stray commercial signals. They make you promise not to freak-out and start calling press conferences. The time I found a major signal, it was readily apparent. The wave stood out far above the surrounding noise. It only took my machine about 3 minutes to decide it was something to report and it asked permission to reconnect and upload.
Have we found E.T.? Nope. Are we disillusioned? I'm not. My computer has more "spare-cycles" than I can use and I don't care if we don't find others during my lifetime, as long as we keep "our" eyes open.
But I am intrigued by the other possibilities. Imagine if we could establish some other effort to search for asteroids, meteors and other "Near Earth" objects. I'll keep filtering the blocks looking for patterns, but as exciting as it is to contribute to this search, I think we have only scratched the surface of what can be accomplished through global cooperation. These are exciting times!
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