From: Richard Sampson <rjsa@sprintmail.com> Subject: IP: Discover Alien Life With Your PC And SETI Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 08:09:03 -0500 To: "ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com" <ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com> ****Discover Alien Life With Your PC And SETI TOKYO, JAPAN, 1998 NOV 5 (Newsbytes) -- By Martyn Williams, Newsbytes. The SETI@home project, which hopes to harness the idle processing power of thousands of desktop personal computers to help in the search for intelligent life in the universe, is back on track with an April 1999 launch date. The project was launched in mid 1997 and was scheduled to begin operations early this year (Newsbytes, August 18, 1997) but the launch was delayed after funding problems slowed research and development work. Now, with new funding and hardware donated by Sun Microsystems, the project is back on track. Hoping to attract the millions of computer users that believe in the existence of intelligent life in space, the project will be based around a special screensaver. Like any screensaver, the software kicks in when you aren't using your PC but unlike other software, the SETI@home application won't present you with a banal selection of flying windows of swimming fish. Instead, it will be doing something much more useful: analyzing radio frequency spectrum data captured by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The analysis is searching for a signal out of all the noise from space - a signal that may reveal the existence of intelligent life. The project team estimates that once 50,000 PCs are enrolled in the project, the SETI@home program will rival other similar SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) programs that are looking for signals from space and may turn up signals that would otherwise be missed. The program works like this: data is collected from SERENDIP, a SETI project based at UC Berkeley, on magnetic tape and transferred to SETI@home servers. This data is then distributed to participating PC users as they log onto the Internet and the data is analyzed on their PCs. Once finished, the results are returned to the project servers via the Internet. First tests of the system, with 100 volunteers, has just begun and the project hopes to make available the first generation SETI@home screensavers in April 1999. These will be available for Windows, Apple and Unix based platforms. What's in it for the user? Apart from helping science, the team says, "There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth." For more information on the project, how to offer your spare computer capacity and how to donate money, check the SETI@home Web page at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu . Numerous foreign language versions of the page are also available. Reported By Newsbytes News Network, http://www.newsbytes.com -0- (19981105/WIRES ONLINE/) News provided by COMTEX. [!BUSINESS] [!HIGHTECH] [!INFOTECH] [!PUBLIC+COMPANIES] [!WALL+STREET] [COMPUTER] [HARDWARE] [INTERNET] [JAPAN] [MONEY] [NBY] [NEWS] [NEWSGRID] [PUERTO+RICO] [RADIO] [RESEARCH] [SCIENCE] [SOFTWARE] [TOKYO] -- ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************