Recess World News

he truth is out there. I'm looking for it right now, and so are hundreds of other Dukies.

Gone are the days when alien hunting meant getting a camera and planning a four-week vacation in Roswell, New Mexico. Now the search for extraterrestrial life can be as leisurely as sitting in a chair, eating a sandwich, waxing your car or doing just about anything at all-as long as your computer's screen saver is running.

To do your part in the search requires an initial investment of only 10 to 15 minutes of time and a personal computer. That's because some ingenious folks at Berkeley have developed a screen saver program that allows personal computers to analyze data for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The product, SETI@home, is a publicly available program available on the Worldwide Web at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. At least 375 people at Duke, according to web site statistics, have taken advantage of this program and dedicated their computers' downtime to searching for sentient life elsewhere in the universe. In fact, the entire IBM computer lab in the Social Sciences Building has been fitted with this program and toils endlessly in the name of science.

What if I discover an alien?

Why should anyone help with this search? If contributing to the cause is not incentive enough, perhaps a promise made on the website will be: "Our software keeps track of where each piece of work is done. If your computer is involved in the detection [of alien life], you will, if you wish, be listed as a co-discoverer."

Of course, that begs the question of how the users of SETI@home will know if they've found aliens. Unfortunately, SETI has a monopoly on such information because all potential discoveries are double-checked and verified at their private facilities to determine whether or not the discovery is, in fact, alien.

Even David Anderson, project director, is not shy about admitting this. When asked if SETI had found any extraterrestrials yet, his terse reply was "Not so far." But how can the users of the screen saver be sure he's not lying?

What in the hell is going on?

The story begins with the Arecibo telescope, located in Puerto Rico. The powerful telescope receives radio waves from all over, including outer space, and is contracted for use by paying agencies. It is during the time between commissioned sessions that SETI steps in and uses the telescope at an immense discount. With this time, SETI accumulates about 35 gigabytes of radio transmission data per day-about twice the size of a hard drive on a typical new desktop computer. The received data is then broken up into small, manageable packets and automatically sent to the more than 1 million users of SETI@home for analysis on their computers. As each packet is completely analyzed, the software returns the information to SETI and downloads a new packet for analysis.

Many Duke students are helping SETI in its search. Trinity senior Andrew Elliston has gone through nearly 1,000 such packets over the course of the last year.

"One of my friends thought I had found aliens," Elliston said, but in fact that was not the case (at least according to SETI). Not only does he contribute at home, but also at work. In fact, sometimes analyzing data can get competitive-businesses, schools or even University departments strive to see who can analyze the most packets and, thus, do the most searching for extraterrestrial life.

"The lab I work in has, like, five or six computers that all run it," Elliston said. "It is sort of a competition between labs."

The program searches for exceptionally strong radio signals in the data packets, not just G105's morning show with Bob and Madison. SETI@home is looking for signals from alien civilizations that were, in theory, intentionally broadcast to be received by projects such as this one.

But they're not looking for spaceships.

What about The X-Files?

Strangely enough, it is likely that people working on SETI are at the same place Sunday evenings as a high number of Duke students-in front of their televisions watching The X-Files.

"I personally enjoy watching The X-Files, at least I did the first couple of seasons," Anderson said. "I think that the popularity of The X-Files is really symptomatic of how important the question is. People are interested in UFOs because that is really the next big question that we, as a race, have to answer."

To that end, the scientists hope to find that special radio signal containing the knowledge and discoveries of life beyond Earth. A conversation at such a great distance is, realistically, impractical. Scientists hope, however, to receive an encyclopedic amount of information in that one detected signal. But don't expect a personal delivery from Planet X anytime soon-according to the SETI web site, the amount of energy required for such an alien vacation to Earth would be beyond all practical means (if measured by our standards, of course).

"I personally doubt that aliens would really want to invade us," Anderson said. "There are plenty of stars out there, plenty of carbon and hydrogen.... What the hell do we have that they want?"

Well, we have pizza. And beer. And... well, whatever it is, the government is probably keeping it a secret.