Happy Birthday! SETI@Home turns 5

Chicago (IL) - The famous public distributed computing project turned 5 years today. SETI@Home, Search for Extraterrestrial Life by using the computers of almost five million users worldwide, was launched at the University of California Berkeley by David Anderson and Dan Werthimer in May of 1999 and has turned into the most comprehensive program to find life in space.

Anderson and Werthimer had no idea back in 1999, which dimensions SETI@Home could reach. The project, which is based on thought to send small digital packages of data, which are received from the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, to computers around the world. Data then is analyzed by the user’s computer and sent back to UC Berkeley for inspection persistent Gaussians, indications of possible radio transmissions from other planets.

The project has attracted millions of users in 226 countries who processed almost 140 million packages of data which required a CPU time of more than 1.9 million years, according to data published on the project’s website. The result : 2568 persistent Gaussians were found so far.

Anderson and Werthimer are supported by three programmers who divide the Arecibo data in smaller packages. Data actually is saved on common media and sent via mail from Puerto Rico to Berkeley.

While SETI@Home is the most comprehensive search project of its kind, Werthimer said that finding in fact extraterrestrial life would be "pure luck". The Aracibo radar is able to cover just 30 percent of the sky. The remaining 70 percent could not be searched. Also, only a small portion of the frequency range would be analyzed for irregularities. "If we were the aliens, we probably would not be able to find the planet earth with the technology available to us today," Werthimer said.

The project, which is based on an idea of Anderson’s students in 1995, originally was only expected to last two years. Anderson believes that it is unlikely to find life in space and considers it a gamble : "If you look at what you could win, it is just too attractive to not try it."

SETI by itself dates back to 1960 with the efforts when astronomer Frank Drake started Project Ozma as first modern SETI experiment in history at of Cornell University.