That’s what we’re going to be looking for.”Īlthough the public-facing portion of the experiment may be coming to a close, Korpela says the project isn’t dead it’s hibernating. “If you see an interesting signal in the sky, it needs to be there when you go back and look again. Getting a solid understanding of what it contains will require looking at all the data in volunteers only have access to 100 seconds of data from the telescope, so they can’t see this global picture over 20 years,” says Werthimer. So far, the team has only been able to deeply analyze portions of the dataset. The team is small-there are only four full-time employees-and it has struggled to stay on top of managing the public-facing part of the program while also publishing research on the data that has been collected. When the software stops pushing out new data to users at the end of March, the Berkeley team will continue to work through the backlog of data generated by the program over the next few months. Today, the data is piped over the internet to servers in California, which are equipped with terabytes of storage to handle the data for processing. In the early days of the program, the internet connection at Arecibo wasn’t fast enough to push out data onto the internet directly, so the team had to record the data on 35 gigabyte tapes that were mailed to Berkeley and then uploaded to the internet. And for anyone who downloaded the software, it meant that if ET called Earth, it could very well be your own CPU that picked up the phone. When a computer was idle, the program launched a screensaver that showed a field of colorful spikes that represented signals collected at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico as it scanned the cosmos. By borrowing unused processing power from personal computers around the world, could plow through radio telescope data faster than ever before. More processors crunching data from outer space means a more sensitive analysis of more signals. This means they are fundamentally grappling with a big data problem-they’re looking for a single signal sent by ET floating on a vast ocean of radio flotsam.įiltering through all this data requires computing power-and lots of it. Professional alien hunters are in the business of searching for weak radio signals in a vast sky washed out by interference from satellites, TV stations, and astrophysical phenomena like pulsars. Officially launched at Berkeley on May 17, 1999, the initiative helped address one of the biggest challenges in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: noise. “For 20 years, there’s been this fight between keeping the project running and getting the results out to the scientific community,” says Eric Korpela, the director of “At this point, we can’t even be sure that we haven’t found anything because we’ve been doing most of our data analysis on small test databases rather than the whole sky.” They had to hit pause on the public-facing part of the experiment to analyze the full two decades of radio astronomy data they’ve collected to see what they might find. So far, the researchers at Berkeley have only been able to analyze small portions of the data. But all experiments must come to an end, and is no exception. It marks the culmination of an unprecedented 20-year experiment that engaged millions of people from almost every country on earth. They called it Tuesday, researchers at the Berkeley SETI Research Center announced they would stop distributing new data to users at the end of March. A distributed supercomputer sounded outlandish at the time, but within four years, Gedye and his collaborator, computer scientist David Anderson, had built the software to make it a reality. What if the world’s personal computers were linked together on the internet to create a virtual supercomputer that could help with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? The network would be able to sort through the massive amounts of data being collected by radio telescopes, seeking signals that might point to an alien civilization around another star. In 1995, the computer scientist David Gedye had an idea that could only originate at a cocktail party.
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