SETI @ home

Hello.

In an attempt to further make known my nerdish tendencies, I've started an SG SETI@Home group, which you are all welcome to join. Click here to do so and join fellow nerds in finding ET!

Hehe, I'll try to sign up soon. My screensaver is rarely on, though!

I downloaded that shit once and it didnt work. Boring

SETI is fukin' old school dude! It's cool. If I had an unrestricted connection I'd be 'bout it.

"That shit" is actually pretty cool if you take the time to read up on how it works. Maybe you didn't notice it running in the background?

I m using seti since 3505 hours as a background task.

Hey - let's get some more SG members to sign up. I just signed up and it looks like mycophile and me are it! you'd think with all the geekwads around here SG SETI would be packed!

If you have a broadband/always on connection - go here to download the SETI software for your computer. Then click here to join the SG team! Wouldn't it be cool if WE found some aliens?!?

>Researchers spearheading a worldwide effort to find ET, or anyone else out in space besides us humans, plan to revisit a group of their most likely candidate radio signals using the world's largest radio telescope.


The SETI@home program, a distributed computing effort that uses the personal computers of millions of volunteers to examine radio signal data, is planning a stellar countdown to check the extraterrestrial-potential of up to 150 radio signals detected with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.


The signal batch is cream of a candidate crop of five billion radio observations pulled from the SETI@home network, which program organizers will recheck to see if they are strong enough to be an extraterrestrial communiqué, repeating and emanating from portions of sky bearing sun-like stars and planets.


"Our chances right now [of finding something] are small," said SETI@home chief scientist Dan Werthimer in a telephone interview. "But you have to plan for success."


The Arecibo Observatory will work for three and a half days, starting March 18, to revisit the candidate signals identified by SETI@home users. In addition to onsite analysis, each of the new observations will also be fed into the global program for a more detailed examination, Werthimer said.


Launched in May 1999, SETI@home uses the computers of four million astronomy buffs in 226 countries. Together they act as a supercomputer, collectively sifting through the 35 terabytes of raw data collected by the 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo dish and reporting the results to the program headquarters at the UC Berkeley. One terabyte is about the equivalent of 231 million pages of typed text, but SETI@home volunteers received a fraction of that - 350 kilobytes - at a time to examine.


Volunteers download a screensaver-like program that examines Arecibo radio observations while the computer user is away. Once the analysis is complete, varying from a few hours to a few days depending on the computing power of each machine, the program alerts the user and sends the examined material to SETI@home researchers via the Internet.


"It was always the idea to revisit observations once the first analysis was complete," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, SETI@home's founding and primary sponsor. "The question is, are these signals really good enough? That's still an unknown, and it's what this next phase of the program is going to tell us."

SETI@home is a separate extraterrestrial search effort from the SETI Institute, a group that pursues several scientific and education projects aimed at the discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. SPACE.com has a partnership with the SETI Institute.

Dude, I've been doing the SETI @home thing for years!
369 data units completed and over 11,500 hours of computer time.

Yup ... I'm a geek.

sweet ass... i too have been "helping seti" for too long.... tho i admit its proved to be more a neatly nerdy screensaver than anything else...

That's funny. So the Yeti is actually either Chewbacca or one of the Banana Splits? All of those sherpas afraid of Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky? Shame on them ... but the big question is, can I run these programs simultaneously?

okay so i decided to download the stupid thing...what the hell is it doing? how do i tell if i found an alien or something abnormal? i mean, hell, i could be on the verge of some scientific breakthrough and i'll have no idea...

Presumably they'll email you if your machine helped them isolate something .... and you might get a gift certificate to 'Old Navy' or something ...

ok, yeah, I made up the 'Old Navy' part ...

Woo! Old Navy!

so, uhh, how exactly is my computer helping anything? last time i checked my gigantic satellite dish is on the fritz... and unless the aliens are using RoadRunner, i doubt i'm gonna find anything...

I've been running it for years ... I trust Berkeley.
Shit, it's running right now ... just let it run. What's the harm?

woah, i just found an advanced race of little green people living in my sock drawer! hell yes!

lol i'll leave it up for a while...my little Matrix script screensaver was getting old...needed something more geeky anyway

You don't have to use it as your screensaver ... I never have ... I just let it run in my system tray in the background.

Jeez - everyone wants instant satisfaction! It analyzes and sends the data back to the SETIHQ where the smart guys look at it. If they find an alien they ring you up and THEN you become famous. You get into Star Trek conventions free for the rest of your life and get to have sex with girls who dress up like vulcans and Princess Leia and stuff.

eeeeeeewwwwww, Star Trek? Star Wars all the way, man

The truth is out there...

::bump::

I just hit 1000 hours.

joined @ 2138 hours, with 302 units complete

I use Grid.org it fights bioterrorism and other desiese. Easy way to help out a bit.

I joined when this thread was started and I have...
3882 hrs.
that's only 52 data units!

I have my disk defrag set to run when my screensaver is on. Will this interfer with it?

I don't believe it will ... it's never interfered with any of my scheduled tasks or other screensaver or anything. It just chugs along in the background.

The new computer kicks out Data Units in an average of five hours (old PC averaged like 18 hrs.), but having dial-up rather than cable has been keeping down my numbers, which are almost too geeky to admit.

Data Units Completed: 488
Total Computer Time: 12580 hr.

Thanks for reminding me what I wanted to d/l on my computer