The SETI@home project, which for over 20 years has allowed people to donate the computing power of their computers to the search for extraterrestrial life, has helped analyze 12 billion signals from space.
The SETI@home project, which for over 20 years has allowed people to donate the computing power of their computers to the search for extraterrestrial life, has helped analyze 12 billion signals from space.
The project’s goal was to help scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, in their search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), analyze data collected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico for unusual radio signals from space, Futurism reports.
SETI@home ended in 2020 after 21 years of operation, which resulted in the detection of 12 billion signals, making it «one of the most popular crowdsourcing-based research projects,» Berkeley notes.
Over the years, researchers have selected just 100 signals that were «worth double-checking,» removing radio frequency interference and noise with a supercomputer. Since July, they have been using China’s 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in the hope of seeing the detected targets again.
Researchers are still analyzing FAST data, but preliminary findings about the project and its effectiveness have already been outlined in two scientific articles.
«If we don’t find aliens, we can say we’ve set a new level of sensitivity. If there was a signal above a certain strength, we would have found it,» said project co-founder David Anderson.
The team hopes to inspire successors to continue this crowdsourcing research project by applying the knowledge gained.
«One of our conclusions is that the project didn’t quite work as we expected. And we have a long list of things we would have done differently and what future sky exploration projects should do differently,» Anderson said.
Astronomer and SETI@home director Eric Korpela also noted that a significant amount of radio interference, which can come from other sources, including radio and television broadcasts and even microwave ovens, can seriously corrupt the data.
Given the lack of conclusive evidence after examining «billions and billions» of stars in the Milky Way, the project has been somewhat disappointing to the organizers of the search for aliens.
«We are, without a doubt, conducting the most sensitive narrowband searches over large swaths of sky, so we had the best chance of finding something. So yes, there is a little disappointment that we didn’t see anything,» Korpela explained.
According to him, it is possible to get much more computing power than SETI@home had and process more data thanks to the wider bandwidth of the Internet.
«There is still a possibility that aliens are in this data, and we missed them literally by a hair,» the scientist believes.
