Think the Earth

SETI@home, a project that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, is looking for volunteers who can, from their homes, help process the staggering amount of data received from outer space.

SETI is a collective program carried on worldwide that searches for alien civilization. And SETI@home is a project that aims to analyze the radio waves from outer space collected by the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico), and detect signals that may have been artificially transmitted from outside of the Earth's atmosphere. The software used to analyze the signals is available for download for free, so that anyone can help with the automatic analysis making use of the free disk space on their computer.

Since May 1999, SETI@home has been analyzing the data with the help from more than 5 million volunteers worldwide. But now since improvements have been made to the world's largest radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory, 500 times more data processing capacity is necessary. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer, calling upon like-minded members to join the project.