The Renaissance Society is Out of This World

Although last week was officially the beginning of this semester's Renaissance Society's offerings, it's more of an introduction than a full-fledged schedule. This week, I attended the norming mini-seminar, the afternoon seminar, and the afternoon Forum. It would have been hard to attend more than I did.

I had some doubts about the first session when I first read the title "The Search for Extra-Terrestrials". I thought it might be about Project UFO or some other dubious scheme. But it turned out to be a really good presentation about the SETI project, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence by Dan Werthimer, the chief scientist for the project. He described how people have been trying to contact extra-terrestrial beings almost as long as we've thought there might be some out there. Flashing lights or rings of lit kerosene-filled trenches or even gigantic fields planted in specific crops that could be seen from space have been proposed but usually not funded.

In the 1950's and 1960's there was a lot of popular interest and popular scientists such as Carl Sagan were able to persuade NASA and the Ohio State University to use some of their radio telescope equipment to study radio signals coming from space. Gigantic supercomputers were thought to be needed to process all the data coming in if we were to have any hope of finding some meaningful signals.

Then in 1979 UC Berkeley launched their SETI program. The SEIT@Home project which is described in detail at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_about.php was proposed in 1995 to make use of all the extra computing power of idle personal computers. According to Dr. Werthimer, more than 5 million participants from almost every country in the world have contributed computer power to this project.

To participate, you are asked to download the software to your computer and configure it to your desire. You can have the analysis program run in the background all the time or run only when you are not using the computer or only as a screen saver (i.e. you have not used the computer for several minutes). You will be allocated a certain amount of data from a radio telescope input signal. When your computer has complete the analysis, the results will be uploaded to the Berkeley computer and you will be allocated another chunk. Your personal data and programs are never touched and you will probably never notice the program running except that it has some fantastically dramatic screen saver graphics.


Dr. Werthimer also explained that the program is branching out and is now under the acronym BOINC which stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. They hope to use this powerful mass of millions of PCs to "cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research."

Sounds interesting to me. I'm going to try it out and report back about my experience. Have you had any experience with this program you'd like to share?