After 27 years, UC Berkeley has announced the ending of its SETI @ home project, a distributed computing initiative in which over 2 million volunteers participated in looking for signals from space that might indicate the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
For anybody unfamiliar with Seti @home, in this video Anton Petrov, who was one of those enthusiastic volunteers, tells the story:
As we reported at the time, the SETI @home project “went into hibernation” in 2020 when the team reported:
Scientifically, we’re at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we’ve analyzed all the data we need for now.
Later the same year, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the primary source of the project’s data, suffered a catastrophic collapse, effectively ending the possibility of collecting new data in the same way. So while Berkeley had left the way open to it resuming, SETI @home is now officially over.
Since 2020 the Berkeley have focused on data analysis. Using a supercomputer at the Max Planck Institute and a tool called “Nebula”. researchers sift through the 12 billion detections generated by volunteers over the project’s lifetime. This stage was dedicated to filtering out Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from terrestrial sources like satellites and microwave ovens. Recently, the team announced it had successfully winnowed the billions of detections down to about 100 “promising signals” that warrant further scrutiny with telescopes like FAST, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, in Guizhou, southwest China.
The results of the project have been published in The Astroonomical Journal in two open access papers:
SETI @home: Data Analysis and Findings by David P. Anderson, Eric J. Korpela, Dan Werthimer, Jeff Cobb, and Bruce Allen
SETI @home: Data Acquisition and Front-end Processing
by E. J. Korpela, D. P. Anderson, J. Cobb, M. Lebofsky, W. Liu, and D. Werthimer
If the idea of participating in “big science” appeals to you there are still ongoing projects from BOINC (BerkeleyOpen Infrastructure for Network Computing), the platform that it instigated for “volunteer computing.” The way it works is that when you aren’t using your device’s full power, the BOINC client downloads small “work units” from a scientific project’s server, processes them in the background, and sends the results back.
Foremost among these is Einstein @Home, a projects that looks for spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars, using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope (from its archived data), and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Pulsars are “cosmic clocks” that help physicists test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and understand the densest forms of matter in the universe and the project has been very successful with volunteers discovering dozens of new pulsars that professional scientists missed in their initial scans.
Alternatives include LHC @home, which helps CERN scientists simulate particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider to search for new fundamental particles (like the Higgs Boson or Dark Matter) and Rosetta @home concerned with protein folding to design new proteins that could fight diseases like COVID-19, Alzheimer’s, or Cancer.
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