16 December 2006

Is there anybody there???

I've stumbled upon SETI@home, which allows you to help in the search for extra-terrestrial radio signals from the comfort of your own computer. It uses a great little program from Berkeley University called BOINC, which allows unused disc-space on your computer to be incorporated into a network based worldwide supercomputer. Now, while i'm idling away on Harry's Place my computer is analysing data from the Arecibo radio telescope (The one Sean Bean fell off in Goldeneye). It apparently only requires your computer to be on for two hours a week to be useful, and I can't imagine that would be a problem to anyone reading this!

SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak is our guest on Little Atoms on 5th January 2007. He also has a radio show, Are We Alone? which is highly recommended.

Neil

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The SETI Institute? Could you please tell me more about this entity and if there is a way someone could make a financial contribution to their science?

4:09 am  
Blogger Little Atoms said...

right here;

http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178875

10:55 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would have thought that Folding@home

http://folding.stanford.edu/]

might be more up your alley, as it's a similar distributed computing project, but with the goal of assisting in medical research rather than getting involved with entities which haven't necessarily paid their subs to the British Rationalist Society this year :-)

5:10 pm  
Blogger Little Atoms said...

Well I just might! you can sign up to as many of these things as you want. Only impediment is the size of your RAM!

Still, I'm concerned that I might help alert a hostile alien race (which happens to be highly suseptible to Osteogenesis Imperfecta) to our presence, and they get here, death rays at the ready, just after I've helped to cure it.

N

5:23 pm  

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