Ten years ago this month, I signed up as a Seti@home volunteer. I might have mentioned Seti@home before; it’s a distributed computing project in which volunteers donate idle computer power to process chunks of data from radio telescopes to find potential signals from other civilizations. In that time, according to my account page, my various computers have performed 112.32 quadrillion calculations for the project. Multiply that kind of number-crunching by a couple million volunteers and you have one of the biggest computing projects ever undertaken. In an interview with Science Friday commemorating the project’s ten-year anniversary, one of the lead scientists notes that Seti@home is a success whether or not it pinpoints a signal. If we discover evidence of other civilizations, it will be a profound development in human history. If we eventually realize that we are indeed alone, that will be just as profound.
In the meantime, my computer will continue to crunch the numbers, if for no other reason than that it’s marginally more useful than most of the other things I make it do.
