Tuesday, March 29, 2005

ET Phone Home



For the past few years, I've been installing a little program called Seti At Home on all my computers. This little piece of software downloads radio signals recorded from outer space at Arecibo, then searches through them for some sign of intelligent life in the universe. If someone on the other side of the galaxy were to point a radio telescope at us, they might be able to pick up faint traces of old reruns from Jack Benny and Lucille Ball. Unlikely, but possible. Anyhow, it's an interesting way to use up some of those spare processor cycles. If any of this sounds a wee bit familiar, you may be thinking of the movie Contact, with Jodie Foster, from the book by Carl Sagan.

You can click here to see my current stats. Well, my current stats on the new version of Seti@Home. There's an older version that I ran for years and years, and I think you can find those stats here. (I can't seem to find a way to link directly to my stats without using my email, so this link takes you to the group page. Close enough...) The photo above is three shots of the Moon through different filters. We've been up there looking for aliens, but as far as anyone outside of NASA knows, we didn't find anything.

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