Help wanted to hear ET’s call

AN APPEAL has gone out to computer owners to help scientists trying to get in touch with ET.

Astronomers involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence group are being flooded with new data from the world’s largest radio telescope.

Buried somewhere within it might be the alien signal scientists have been looking for since 1960.

However, not even the world’s most advanced computers are fast enough to sift through so much information. So scientists are calling on the owners of desktop computers to add their combined number-crunching power to the task.

More than five million volunteers have already signed up to the SETI@home project launched eight years ago. Based at the University of California at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, it boasts 170,000 users and 320,000 computers, making it the largest internet project in the world.

But that is not enough to cope with processing all the data pouring out of the upgraded Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico. New and more sensitive receivers fitted to the giant telescope are generating 500 times more data than they were before.

Harnessing many small computers together via the internet to process huge amounts of data was a technique pioneered by the project. The same method has been used to investigate the three-dimensional shape of proteins and model alternative universes.