The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities to detect intelligent extraterrestrial life. The general approach of SETI projects is to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet – an approach widely endorsed by the scientific community as hard science (see, e.g., claims in Skeptical Inquirer. The United States Government contributed to SETI early on, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources. There are great challenges in searching across the sky for a first transmission that could be characterized as intelligent, since its direction, spectrum and method of communication are all unknown beforehand. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, and thus no exhaustive search has so far been conducted. SETI@home is an extremely popular volunteer computing project that was launched by U.C. Berkeley in May 1999. It was funded originally by the The Planetary Society and Paramount pictures and later by the State of California. The project is run by director David P. Anderson and chief scientist Dan Werthimer. Any individual can become involved with SETI research by downloading and running the SETI@home software package, which then runs signal analysis on a "work unit" of data recorded from the central 2.5 MHz wide band of the SERENDIP IV instrument. The results are then automatically reported back to UC Berkeley. Over 5 million computer users in more than 200 countries have signed up for SETI@home and have collectively contributed over 19 billion hours of computer processing time. As of January 29, 2008 the Seti@home achieves an average throughput of 387 TeraFLOPS, making it equivalent to the second fastest supercomputer on Earth. Radio source SHGb02+14a is the most interesting signal analyzed to date.

The SETI Institute is now collaborating with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at UC Berkeley to develop a specialized radio telescope array for SETI studies, something like a mini-Cyclops array. The new array concept is named the "Allen Telescope Array" (ATA) (formerly, One Hectare Telescope [1HT]) after the project's benefactor Paul Allen. Its sensitivity will be equivalent to a single large dish more than 100 meters in diameter. The array is being constructed at the Hat Creek Observatory in rural northern California. The full array is planned to consist of 350 or more Gregorian radio dishes, each 6.1 meters (20 ft) in diameter. These dishes are the largest producible with commercially available satellite television dish technology. The ATA was planned for a 2007 completion date, at a very modest cost of $25 million USD. The SETI Institute provides money for building the ATA while UC Berkeley designs the telescope and provides operational funding. Berkeley astronomers will use the ATA to pursue other deep space radio observations. The ATA is intended to support a large number of simultaneous observations through a technique known as "multibeaming", in which DSP technology is used to sort out signals from the multiple dishes. The DSP system planned for the ATA is extremely ambitious. The first portion of the array became operational in October 2007 with 42 antennas. Completion of the full 350 element array will depend on funding and the technical results from the 42 element sub-array.

As various SETI projects have continued, some have criticized early claims by researchers now seen to be too "euphoric" or "optimistic." For example, Peter Schenkel, while remaining a supporter of SETI projects, has written that "in light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view ... We should quietly admit that the early estimates — that there may be a million, a hundred thousand, or ten thousand advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy — may no longer be tenable." SETI has also occasionally been the target of criticism by those who suggest that it is a form of pseudoscience. In particular, critics allege that no observed phenomena suggest the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and furthermore that the assertion of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has no good Popperian criteria for falsifiability. Science fiction writer Michael Crichton, in a 2003 lecture at Caltech, stated that "The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion." In response, SETI advocates note, among other things, that the Drake Equation was never intended to be tested, and is in fact not really an equation intended to be "solved" at all, but was merely a clever representation of the agenda for the world's first scientific SETI meeting in 1961. Further, SETI proponents note that the existence of intelligent life on Earth is a plausible reason to expect it elsewhere, and that individual SETI projects have clearly defined "stop" conditions. The collection and processing of data, the first order of business, and the refining of those data streams, in the case of SETI through algorithm optimization, has not been considered by many of these detractors. Concerning the latter argument, the justification for SETI projects doesn't necessarily require an acceptance of the Drake equation. Science proceeds through hypothesis. If one were only to take what was at face value observable, many scientific phenomena never would have been discovered. In addition it should be noted that the Drake equation by itself is not an hypothesis and hence it is not even supposed to be testable. The equation can serve as a tool in formulating testable hypotheses. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not an assertion that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, and conflating the two can be seen as a straw man argument. There is an effort to distinguish the SETI projects from UFOlogy, the study of UFOs considered to be pseudoscience by many. In Skeptical Inquirer, Mark Moldwin explicitly made the distinction between the two projects, arguing that an important discriminator was the acceptance of SETI by the mainstream scientific community and that "the methodology of SETI leads to useful scientific results even in the absence of discovery of alien life."

BOINC means Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. This is a software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources. BOINC was originally developed to support SETI@home. However, other distributed computing projects may use BOINC. BOINC allows you to participate in multiple projects, and to control how your resources are divided among these projects. Projects are independent, and each maintains its own servers. The BOINC developers and the University of California have no control over the creation of BOINC-based projects, and in general do not endorse them. Some BOINC projects may make their application's source code available. For such projects, BOINC's anonymous platform mechanism lets you participate without running downloaded executables: you can examine and compile the source code yourself. When you participate in a BOINC-based project, you entrust that project with the health of your computer and the privacy of its data.

If you own a computer (Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix) you can participate in scientific research in many areas:

1) Climateprediction.net: study climate change

2) Einstein@home: search for gravitational signals coming from pulsars

3) LHC@home: improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator

4) Predictor@home: investigate protein-related diseases

5) SETI@home: Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life

6) Cell Computing biomedical research (Japanese; requires nonstandard client software)

To participate in a project:

1) Visit the project's web site and create an account.

2) Download and run BOINC software.

You can participate in any or all projects, and you control the percentage of your computing power that goes to each project. By participating in several projects, you ensure that your computer will be kept busy even when one project has no work.

I am participating since december 4th, 1999 in the following science projects :

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power. Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models (read more about this). By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists. The climateprediction.net experiment should help to "improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including long-term ensemble simulations using complex models", identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 as a high priority. Hopefully, the experiment will give decision makers a better scientific basis for addressing one of the biggest potential global problems of the 21st century. The results from climateprediction.net experiment will be fed into the work of the Quantifying Uncertainty in Model Predictions (QUMP) team at the Met Office and will form part of the UK contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. To help make participation in climateprediction.net more rewarding and fun, we are developing educational resources to help participants learn more about what their model is telling them. These include materials for schools, an Open University short course, and a lively, interactive web-based community where participants can compare discuss, analyse and learn about their model runs.

Einstein@Home is a project developed to search data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and from the GEO 600 gravitational wave observatory in Germany for signals coming from extremely dense, rapidly rotating stars. Such sources are believed to be either quark stars or neutron stars, and a subclass of these are already observed by conventional means as pulsars or X-ray emitting celestial objects. Scientists believe that some of these compact stars may not be perfectly spherical, and if so, they should emit characteristic gravitational waves, which LIGO and GEO 600 may begin to detect in coming months. Bruce Allen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's (UWM) LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) group is leading the development of the Einstein@Home project. Einstein@Home is one, small part of the LSC scientific program. It is being set up as a distributed computing project, which means that it relies on computer time donated by private computer users like you to search for gravity wave-emitting compact stars.

Predictor@home is a world-community experiment and effort to use distributed world-wide-web volunteer resources to assemble a supercomputer able to predict protein structure from protein sequence. Our work is aimed at testing and evaluating new algorithms and methods of protein structure prediction. We recently performed such tests in the context of the Sixth Biannual CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) experiment, and now need to continue this development and testing with applications to real biological targets. Our goal is to utilize these approaches together with the immense computer power that can be harnessed through the internet and volunteers all over the world (you!) to address critical biomedical questions of protein-related diseases. Predictor@home is a pilot project of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which is being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. When it will switch on in 2007, it will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate on particles proprieties. The LHC will take the place of CERN's Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, and will sit in its 27 Km long tunnel, about 100m underground. It will accelerate 2 separate beams of protons up to an energy of 7 TeV , and then bring them into head-on collisions (from here the name "collider"). The protons collision energy will then be of 14 TeV. But the LHC will not be limited to the study of proton-proton collisions as it can also collide heavy ions, such as lead, with a collision energy of 1148 TeV.

Before being injected into the LHC, proton beams will be prepared by CERN's existing "accelerator complex". This is a succession of machines with increasingly higher energies, injecting the beam each time into the next one, which takes over to bring the beam to an even higher energy.

To bend the 7 TeV protons around the ring, the LHC dipoles must be able to produce magnetic fields of 8.36 Tesla, a value which is made possible by the use of "superconductivity". This is the ability of certain materials, usually at very low temperatures, to conduct electric current without resistance and power losses, and therefore produce high magnetic fields. The LHC will operate at about 300 degrees below room temperature (even colder than outer space!) and use the most advanced superconducting magnet and accelerator technologies ever employed. 1,296 superconducting dipoles and more than 2,500 other magnets will guide and collide the LHC beams. They range from small, normally conducting bending magnets to large, superconducting focusing quadrupoles. When completed, the accelerator will be the largest superconducting installation in the world.

Five experiments, with huge detectors, will study what happens when the LHC's beams collide. They will handle as much information as the entire European telecommunications network does today!

---

Read more....: Alien contact by SETI@HOME?.

Seti@home Wallpaper

Download Seti @ Home wallpaper.....
( 2 Votes, Average: 5.00 out of 5 )