SETI@home 1.0
Company: U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences LaboratoryEstimated
Price: Free
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
When I was a teenager, ET was a huge hit movie for me. This was the first film which showed what I thought a real alien would either look like, or at the least the events that would take place after an alien landing. Of course, it was the 1977 Star Wars which originally got me thinking about life on other planets, and what it would really be like.
As an adult, the movie Contact really got my creative spirit going. In all probability, radio waves are how we will make first contact with a alien species, if any exist. (Which I believe–I simply think how large the universe is and figure we can’t be alone. My logical mind, when I actually use it, simply won’t accept that we are the only intelligent life in the cosmos!)
When I first learned of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Life) project creating an application which people with home computers could download and actually use to help process some of the radio waves they had received, I immediately wanted to join up! And from all the attention the news and other media were giving the project, I knew I wasn’t alone. Thus was born SETI@home, an application/screen saver.
After you download the application, which is about 216K, you just simply install it. From that point on, any time your Mac is left idle for a user defined amount of time, SETI@home will kick in screen saver mode and do its thing. The first time you run SETI@home, you will need to be connected to the Internet so that you can download the radio waves which SETI@home will work with. (In other words, a big radio telescope somewhere recorded the night time sky, and your Mac or PC will crunch all the data they send you.) After your computer has processed all the data, SETI@home will send the results back to the SETI group, download another bunch of data to process, and start all over again.
Chances are, you will have no idea what the program is actually doing. I know I don’t. I can see that I am crunching the data recorded from the Arecibo Radio Observatory On January 7th, 1999, at 13:25:14 GMT from the base radio frequency of 1.419580076 GHz. What does all that mean? I have no idea, but it really sounds cool, doesn’t it?
So now I’m searching for extra terrestrial life from my Mac, or at least I am when I’m not using the computer. The program is very stable on my Mac and has not caused any problems yet. Over 350,000 other people like myself have downloaded this application/screen saver as of this writing (around the first of June, 1999) and from what I’ve heard, it hasn’t caused any major problems on any computer platform. (There may be a few bugs, which is to be expected with any program on the PC, but for me, it has been rock solid!)
This is a very cool thing! The program is fun to watch while it’s doing its thing. It’s free, and you are contributing to our search of the heavens for other intelligent life. And who knows, perhaps the proof of extra terrestrial life will be found right on your Macintosh! That would be fitting I think…
Tim Robertson
publisher@mymac.com
Websites mentioned:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
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