- LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Beam it down and sign me up, Scotty.
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- The studio responsible for the "Star
Trek" movies has begun recruiting an army of Trekkies willing to devote
some of their home computers' spare processing power to the search for
life elsewhere in the universe.
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- Paramount Pictures, poised for the Dec.
11 opening of "Star Trek: Insurrection," on Monday made a real-life
bid to fulfill the USS Enterprise mandate "to seek out new life and
new civilizations."
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- It's seeking fans of the sci-fi series
to turn on their computers and in turn help the SETI(at)home project, which
already has about 100,000 people signed up. Their machines will try to
detect signs of alien civilizations trying to communicate from space.
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- "We want close to 1 million sign-ups,"
said Susan Lendroth, a spokeswoman for The Planetary Society in Pasadena,
a project sponsor that is contributing $50,000 in kickoff money. Paramount
is giving another $50,000.
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- Anyone who signs up eventually will be
able to download a unique screen saver developed by SETI(at)home project
director David Anderson and Dan Werthimer, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence program at the University of California, Berkeley. The screen
saver lets otherwise idle computers analyze radio telescope readings that
may contain signals from alien civilizations.
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- "We're setting things up so it will
act like a regular screen saver," Anderson explained in an interview.
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- When a computer user who has connected
to the Internet steps away from the machine for a few minutes, the processing
will start up. "All the times it's on but you haven't used it for
a few minutes, it will be computing," he said.
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- The processing will continue even after
the Internet connection has been severed. After the analysis is completed,
which can take days, the program will send the information the next time
the computer connects to the Internet.
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- "The screen saver will tell you
continuously what it's doing, show you a picture of the data analysis,
tell you where in the sky it came from. We sort of hope people will get
in the habit of leaving their computers on," he said.
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- Testing with real data on a few computers
will begin in December; the screen saver software will become available
to home computer owners on April 2, Ms. Lendroth said.
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- The program enlists Internet-connected
computers to crunch data collected by SERENDIP IV, the latest in a series
of projects called Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby
Developed Intelligent Populations. The program operates from a 300-meter
radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that scans the
skies for radio signals.
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- SERENDIP records raw data, which is then
entered into the computer system at the University of California, Berkeley.
Each participating computer will receive one small piece of raw data from
the stream to analyze; when it finishes, another will be sent.
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- Anderson explained that all the other
current listening projects "have built special-purpose supercomputers
that can simultaneously look at millions of different frequencies and find
spikes that last for a few seconds."
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- The new project will be using computers
connected to the Internet to analyze "much more carefully than has
ever before been possible," he said.
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- He said the plan is to run the project
for two years and "maintain a couple hundred thousand people constantly."
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- So far, in more than 20 years of listening
for signs of alien civilizations, "no one has found anything that
has been verified as an artificial signal," Ms. Lendroth said.
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