betz.org a journey through the very ordinary

I used to be really interested in the seti@home project. This project basically uses a distributed system that uses the free cycles of your PC to analyze radio telescope data collected by the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The concept of the project is pretty simple. Willing computer owners download and install a free software program from seti@home. Then, while the computer isn’t being used, the program kicks in and starts crunching blocks of data that it receives from the project. When finished with its set of data the program sends the results back to seti@home and receives a new block to analyze. On and on the analysis goes, on thousands and thousands of sleeping computers, all in the hope to find some kind of signal that will lead to the discovery of other intelligent life in our vast universe.

At some point along the way, I completely forgot about seti@home. That was until I ran across this digg submission. It links to an article that goes into some technical detail attempting to explain why, with our current listening technology, it is difficult to hear a signal that might be there. The article is worth a read and does make sense.

However, what caught my attention was the fact that seti@home actually caught a signal that scientists felt was of interest. The signal has been named “SHGb02+14a“. Interestingly, it has been seen on three separate occasions. Though it is acknowledged that it could be some natural occurring phenomena or an artifact of the telescope itself, it is the best candidate that the project has to date. Interesting!

• Digg.com: I SETI was an alien
• Damn Interesting: Space Radio: More Static, Less Talk
• Newscientist.com: Mysterious signals from light years away
• seti@home