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SETI@home Reaches Two Million Users
By Andrew Bridges
Pasadena Bureau Chief
posted: 07:00 am ET
17 May 2000
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<a href=mailto:abridges@space Is there anybody out there? If there is, Earth now has more than 2 million people listening to find out. SETI@Home, an innovative program that uses idle computers around the world, is continuously scanning scientific data for traces of intelligent life among the stars. The project recently signed on more than 2 million users as it prepares to celebrate its first anniversary on Wednesday. The SETI@Home project relies on users downloading a free computer program to scan data collected by the mammoth radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico for signals produced by an extraterrestrial civilization. At launch, project leaders at the University of California, Berkeley expected to sign up anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 users. Instead, a whopping 1 million people joined the search after the first three months. As of Tuesday afternoon, the project counted among its ranks 2,003,425 users scattered across 226 countries and territories. The United States alone accounts for nearly half the participants. Sparsely populated Antarctica has an impressive 29. "It took a leap of faith to invest in the program because no one had ever before tried to create a distributed computer network of such size, complexity and sophistication," said Charlene Anderson, associate director of The Planetary Society, which supports the project. "We are amazed and delighted with the results." The program -- like a screensaver -- kicks in only when a computer sits idle. With its impressive roster of users, program members boast it is the largest distributed computing experiment ever undertaken. Collectively, the project has logged more than 279,000 years of processing time. It has yet, however, to turn up any signs of aliens.
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