ET Phone Earth
March 2004 :
Humankind has never been satisfied with what merely lies in his own backyard. We must explore. We have to know what is beyond the next hill. The more questions we answer about our existence, the more questions we ask. Our inquisitiveness will never end.
That's why we have the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on Mars at this moment. We hope they will help us define what and who we are in this vast universe.
In just our Milky Way galaxy alone there are about 400 billion stars. And we now know other planets exist around many of them. Do any have the potential for sustaining life of some kind? Are sentient beings out there among the stars of our galaxy pondering their existence and ours as well? Do they have the same drive deeply entwined in their DNA to determine if other intelligent life-forms exist elsewhere in the universe? If we are alone in the universe, then "it seems like an awful waste of space" as Jodie Foster said in the movie Contact.
Most "respectable" scientists dispute reports of UFOs and close encounters with alien beings of any kind. (That's a topic for another time.) Those purported sightings aside, we have no proof that any alien civilizations exist. But we still want to know for sure. Talk about a discovery that would dramatically change our world!!
Man-made radio signals from Earth daily "leak" out into space. Since they travel at the speed of light, the more powerful radio signals (from the late 1930's) to ever leave our planet are now 50 plus light years away. Those signals would be very weak, and it would take a very sophisticated alien receiver to discern them from all the other natural galactic noise.
That's why scientists deliberately transmitted a very powerful radio signal into space using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974. It was directed toward a globular cluster of 300,000+ stars called M13 in Hercules. It is about 25,100 light years away, so it will be a while before "someone" receives the message, decodes it, and formulates and sends a response. That's if they are listening as the signal zooms by their star system. I wouldn't want that long distance call on my telephone bill.
SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) projects have continued in one form or another to this day, with several countries trying their ear (sic) at listening for extraterrestrial signals. But there is one program that continues today that you can play an important role in. It's the SETI@home project.
This ambitious program also uses the Arecibo radio telescope, but this time it's listening for ET signals. So much data is collected that it can't be thoroughly processed in real-time. Therefore, it is stored for processing at a later time. At first researchers thought it would take years and costly computer time to process all the collected signals. Then, someone got an absolutely brilliant idea. Where can one find lots of smaller computers sitting idle most of the time. Home computers!!!! So began the idea of distributed processing.
The signal data stored at UC Berkeley is "chopped up" into units 107 seconds each. Computer users at home can download software (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/)that not only contains a nice screen-saver, but it also provides the number crunching processing program required to perform a detailed analysis of the downloaded data.
(The computer analysis is too complex to present in this quick review. When you decide to visit the SETI@home website you can click on all the links that describe the screen-saver display characteristics and what they represent. Also you'll find information on the various calculations performed on the data to detect any potential signal.)
Once a unit has been processed, the program will signal the user to login to the website and transmit the results and get another unit of data. Downloading a unit takes me about a couple of minutes on a dial-up connection. Processing the data is another story. On a Pentium 4, 2.53 Ghz computer it takes an average of about 4 hours and 30 minutes to complete.
There are several options you can choose. You can set it to run only when your machine is idle (like a regular screen-saver), or you can have the calculations always running, and the screen-saver will still kick-in when the machine has been idle for a set time. It's really simple to do, and it's really important.
Millions of computer users around the world have analyzed SETI data in this manner. Researchers promise that the user whose computer detects a true signal will get credit for that discovery. Since the inception of SETI@home the researchers have processed the initial acquisition of signal data, and are now re-analyzing signals that showed "potential." Some require re-observation to determine whether we have kindred spirits in this vast universe.
Soon that follow-up phase will be complete, and SETI@home will be replaced by a more ambitious program called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). It has been developed as a distributive processing application that can be adapted to any scientific discipline. However, plans do call for a southern hemisphere SETI search, plus a new program called AstroPulse to detect possible extraterrestrial microsecond radio pulses.
These projects will benefit from the enhanced architecture that BOINC will provide. Think about it. Climate and global warming models require enormous computing power. So does cancer research. And you can play a big role in lending your computer idle time to scientific endeavors.
Get rid of that star-field screen-saver effect or the 3D pipes. Go beyond your backyard, the next hill or our solar system. Download your SETI@home software at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and contribute to mankind's search for the ultimate discovery. Maybe your computer will detect that signal from an alien intelligence. You, and our world, will never be the same.
Don't forget you can sample the local neighborhood of our galaxy with optical telescopes at Seagrave Memorial Observatory on Peeptoad Road in North Scituate every Saturday night beginning at 8:00 pm. Admission is free. If snow covers our parking lot, the observatory will remain closed. More information, including directions, membership, and weather related closures can be found at our website: www.theskyscrapers.org
Keep your eyes to the skies and your SETI screen-saver humming!
