We have our own SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)  team here at news weird. Here is  info for joining our team (News Science isn’t Weird) and also our team stats.

Call Us weird if you want but, We participate with Berkeley (University of California) in the search for life beyond our planet.

Let’s start with the acronym SETI – which represents the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This search involves using giant radio telescopes. The use of these telescopes (which are essentially very giant antennas satellite), scientists involved in SETI hopes to detect radio signals “leaking” from other intelligent civilizations or that other civilizations have specifically sent to us.

The basic principles behind SETI is based on two facts:

1. There must be other intelligent life forms. The Milky Way galaxy alone contains billions of stars like our own sun, and the universe contains billions of galaxies. If intelligent life can evolve and become people, presumably it can evolve in many other places too.

2. The intelligent civilization would be discovering radio waves and start leaking into space. Humans, as a form of intelligent life discovered radio waves at the beginning of our development, and have been leaking radio signals in significant quantities for most of the 20th century. It leakages RF signals across both AM and FM radio to television broadcasts to all types of satellite broadcasts and radar. Every time you open the garage door, the leakage is a radio signal in space!

3. Today intelligent civilization would realize that there might be other intelligent civilizations, and could try to send high-power signals right at us. We Earthlings have actually tried this in several different ways. If you can find a copy of Carl Sagan’s book entitled Murmurs of Earth, which offers a great introduction to what we have tried (from radio to phonograph records connected to the satellite!).
While the first or second hypothesis is invalid, then SETI is a waste of time. If both turn out to be true, however, is only a matter of time before they detect something and that would be great news!
The Weird little problem with SETI is that it requires massive computational resources. Imagine having a radio that can listen to all radios, television, radar, satellite and garage door opener frequency all the same time. SETI’s approach narrows down a bit, but still listen to a large number of frequencies. Then, the team must look at each frequency separately and try to choose if you are taking an intelligent signal from the noise.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, the antenna used for SETI @ home record about 35 gigabytes of information every day. According to the website of SETI @ home, the home team has averaged about 30 hours to process two “work unit”, and 35 gigabytes of data each day is divided into work units to 140,000. Now that generates about 4.2 million hours of computing time to process two day’s of information! Big Weird WOW.

Purchasing of this amount of computing power would be incredibly expensive, so to work around this, SETI @ home designed an absolutely great computing power method that is air tight. When the computer is idle, it displays a screen saver. In most cases, a computer that displays your screen saver is doing absolutely nothing. All the computational power available in your machine is being wasted. So SETI @ home has created its own screen saver, which is installed on your machine. With SETI @ home screensaver is installed, the computer actually processes information from SETI when inactive. The screen saver downloads an information packet that contains a working unit of the radio signals and ground away from them. When done, it returns the results and get another package. The screen saver, instead of displaying the flying fish or toasters, shows the work in progress.

If you wish to donate spare cycles of your computer to the cause of SETI, you can join SETI @ home! Take these two steps:

1. Go to the homepage of SETI @ home and download it. The file is about 800 kilobytes, so it does not have much time to download.
2. Install the program. It takes about 30 seconds – these are two of the easiest installations I’ve seen!
3. Join Our News Weird group by going to this address: News Sience isn’t Weird
You will be surprised to see how the team chugs away, trying to find other intelligent life forms!