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- More than a million people worldwide are helping scientists
search for ET using desktop computers in homes and offices, it was disclosed
today.
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- Scientists said the number of people signed up to the
Setiathome project, which pools together the power of thousands of computers,
had "skyrocketed" since its launch three months ago.
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- Astronomers engaged in Seti - the Search for Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence - are tapping into people's private computers to help them
crunch data from a flood of radio signals from outer space.
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- Anyone joining Setiathome can download a special screen
saver which analyses chunks of data while their machine is idle.
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- The information comes via the Internet from the world's
largest radio telescope, the 1,000ft diameter dish at Arecibo in Puerto
Rico, which is scouring the sky for signs of intelligence life.
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- Scientists hope that among the millions of radio signals
they will find one that bears the unmistakable hallmark of an intelligent
message.
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- Harnessing people's desktops was necessary because even
the supercomputers at the disposal of the Seti scientists are not powerful
enough to cope with the enormous amount of data being gathered.
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- No signs alien life have emerged so far, but the Seti
craze has spread through offices and classrooms in around 200 countries.
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- Today scientists said they had reached a landmark of
a million computer users taking part around the world.
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- Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society
which is sponsoring Setiathome, said: "Will we discover an alien signal?
Who knows? But the search itself is a grand and exciting experiment that
allows participants the chance to change human history by possibly discovering
that we are not alone in the universe."
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- Companies, schools, government agencies, and universities
had formed groups to compete for whose computers can analyse the most data.
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- The analysis is handled automatically by the screen saver
program and the results sent to the University of California at Berkeley,
while participants view the progress on their computer screens.
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- Dan Werthimer, a research physicist at the university's
space sciences laboratory, said: "Setathome is now the largest computation
ever done on this planet. We've accumulated more than 50,000 years of computing
time so far.
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- "This is also the most sensitive sky survey ever
conducted. Setiathome is so powerful because we are using the world's largest
telescope and we are able to use it continuously, 24-hours a day, by piggypacking
on other observations."
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