SETI@HomeProject

SETI@home

SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Scientific goal: To detect intelligent life outside Earth.

Radio telescopes are employed to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. These signals to not occur naturally, so a detection will provide evidence of possible extraterrestrial technology.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the Nupedia SETI@home project to explore this idea.

The very successful Shared Computing project, SETI@home, launched in May 1999.