SETI at Home : Did an alien call you?!

This post is a response to one of the comments posted on a previous post. I wish to thank all those who comment on our posts since appreciation and criticism are both welcome and both drive us towards the improvement of the quality of this blog.

Firstly, let me get some things cleared out about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). When we speak of extraterrestrial intelligence, we completely rule out those forms of extraterrestrial life that have probably recently evolved and are in actual terms not really 'intelligent'. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, and no exhaustive search has so far been conducted.

SETI@home was launched by U.C. Berkeley in May 1999. It is a distributed computing project and anyone who wishes to contribute to the SETI projects can do so by downloading the SETI@home package available online. The purpose is to run signal analysis on individual computers all over the world to process the data collected and send it back to UC Berkeley.

The data is collected from the Arecibo radio telescope and these signals are then scanned for possible radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence. The process is somewhat like tuning a radio to various channels, and looking at the signal strength meter. If the strength of the signal goes up, that gets attention. The software looks for four signal patterns: triplets (three power spikes in a row), spikes in power spectra, pulsing signals that represent a digital transmission and Gaussian rises and falls in the transmission power. The details about these are extremely technical and are beyond my scope (sorry!).

Seth Shostak, an American astronomer and a prominent SETI figure believes that he will get proof of alien contact in the form of a signal between 2020 and 2025, based on certain calculations he made. Lets hope that really happens (or not! whatever!)..

I would also like to direct you to this link given below, which is an article titled 'SETI: Is it worth it?'. It very aptly and precisely explains why so much effort, time and money is being spent on something like SETI, which most people correctly (I think!) believe is such a long shot.
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/071108-seti-setiworth.html

-Mohit Gidwani