100 mystery sounds under review for signs of extraterrest...

What’s Happening

So basically Over 11 years, citizen scientists collected billions of data signals for the SETI@home project.

The post 100 mystery sounds under review for signs of extraterrestrial life appeared first on Popular Science. SETI@home had millions of volunteers from around the world helping in the search for extraterrestrial life. (let that sink in)

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The Details

After reviewing almost 30 years of signals, University of California Berkeley researchers have identified 100 mysterious, deep-space radio blips they want to review for signs of extraterrestrial life . And they couldn’t have done it without 11 years of volunteer work from millions of PC owners around the world.

Even with today’s advanced computers, the world’s most complex data problems can’t be solved by a single machine. Instead, it’s far more efficient to break up tasks among many separate computers.

Why This Matters

For decades, but, the technology to handle even these distributed responsibilities was relegated to well-funded companies and government institutions. But with the rise of personal computers (PCs), UC Berkeley researchers like David Gedye and David Anderson realized that the untapped pool of citizen scientists could be a vital asset. And what bigger data pool was there to draw from than the vastness of interstellar space ?

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

Key Takeaways

• In 1999, the computer scientists teamed with astronomers Eric Korpela and Dan Werthimer to launch SETI@home .
• Although Arecibo’s line of sight only encompassed about a third of the entire sky, that still included most stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Bottom Line

“We [were], without doubt, the most sensitive narrow-band search of large portions of the sky, so we had the best chance of finding something,” Korpela dropped in a recent UC Berkeley profile . Before launching SETI@home, project organizers estimated they’d receive around 50,000 volunteers.

Is this a W or an L? You decide.