Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

SETI Project

Ever since ancient times, man has wondered about the existence of intelligent life on other planets. Speculation about what that life might be like has fueled the entire science fiction literary genre, as well as a substantial number of movies, some of them excellent. Now, in the 21st Century, the search for extraterrestrial life has moved from the realm of science fiction into the realm of real science. New discoveries, new tools, and cutting edge technologies have made the search for extraterrestrial life systematic, scholarly, and intense.

One of the most prominent efforts dealing with this search is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project launched in May of 1999. SETIÆs mission as recorded on the home page of its web site is ôto explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe (1).ö SETIÆs primary focus is on searching for radio signal fluctuations collected by the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico (the world's largest radio telescope) that may indicate a sign of intelligent life from space. When first launched, the project received more data every day than its computers could process, so the project directors solved the problem using a unique approach. They created a screensaver called SETI@home that could perform chunks of the analysis on home computers, then made the software available for download so that volunteers could allow the project to use the idle processing time on their home computers. This allowed the project to catch up with the huge volume of backlogged data. Now the telescope pulls down approximately 40 gigabytes of data per day and sends it to volunteer computers all over the world to be analyzed, where it is processed and returned via Internet. SETI now has over 2,000,000 people, öthe largest number of volunteers for any Internet distributed computing project to dateö using SETI@home (2). SETI would have had to spend millions of...

Page 1 of 7 Next >

More on SETI Project...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
SETI Project. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:53, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1713061.html