The SETI@home project is about to be inundated with data from an upgraded telescope, and the scientists need your help to process it.
The eight-year-old distributed computing hunt for extraterrestrial lifealready borrows processing power from 350,000 computers, according to Eric Korpela, an astronomer in the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley and a project scientist with SETI@Home. But with the spankin new technology, the project is processing data at about one-fifth of real time. So ideally, Korpela said he'd like to see the number of volunteers increase by five times to about 1,750,000.
The scientists added more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. That along with better frequency coverage has increased the influx of data 500 times. In a press release, project chief scientist Dan Werthimer said that means the project is 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original technology.
The souped-up telescope is generating 300 gigabytes per day, or 100
terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year -- about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. There must be an alien in there somewhere, no?
