History of SETI@home

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside of earth. SETI@home uses millions of computers around the world to analyze radio signals.

Radio SETI: an approach using radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. To our knowledge such signals do not exist naturally. A discovery of those should therefor be caused by extraterrestrial technology.

Before SETI@home radio SETI projects used special-purpose supercomputers which usually were located at the telescope to do the bulk of data analysis. In 1995 David Gedye the project manager at Starwave Corp. proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer consisting of large numbers of Internet-connected PCs. SETI@home was born to explore this idea.

SETI@home did not find signs of extraterrestrial life until now, but together with related projects it established the viability of p-r computing. Nevertheless p-r computing is not limitless or free. Huge computing power causes huge data traffic which is either expensive or limited or both. This limits the frequency range searched by SETI@home, greater range means more bits per second. Compared to other radio SETI projects, SETI@home covers a narrow frequency range, but does a more thorough search within that range.

--Ertelt 14:37, 31 Oct 2005 (CET)

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