Headline June 03, 2019/ '' 'EXTRA TERRESTRIAL ENNUI' ''

'' 'EXTRA TERRESTRIAL ENNUI' ''

WHILE IT MAY TAKE YEARS before nanocrafts are actually able to reach Alpha Centauri, you actually can start searching-

For signals from extraterrestrials from your laptops today.

One of that many initiatives that makeup Starshot is the effort to look for another civilizations who are doing what we're doing - beaming lasers into space.

The data that is found will be released to the public both on Breakthrough Initiatives website at  SETI@home - part of the SETI research center at the University of Berkeley.   

''THE FIRST THING THAT your computer does when it wakes up is connect  to our computers at Berkeley,'' Andrew Siemion, Director of the Berkeley SETI  Research Center tells Inverse.

''It requests a little piece of data and we call that a work unit. It's basically just a little bit of raw data   that we recorded from a large telescope.''

Then the computer begins to download little pieces of data, while it searches for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.

Through a screensaver and visual application popup, you can see a display of the different signals that the computer is looking for.

''It looks for pulsing signals. It looks for narrow signals, and it does all kinds of transformations on the data to do the research,'' Siemion explains.

''And then it sends the results of that computation back to our computers at Berkeley's where we organise them to a giant database along with the results of hundreds of thousands of other people, for different parts of the sky and for different parts of the radio dial.

You could even have your smartphone do that work, says Siemion. When the SETI@home initiative started in 1999, the Internet - in all of its commercialized social media wonder - was in its infancy,

Today, 78 percent of adults under 30 own a laptop or desktop while 86 percent of the same  demographic owns a smartphone.

SETI@home software is currently available for Androids, and SETI is currently working on an Apple model.

''We can process data from our telescopes on your cell phones,'' says Siemion,

''We don't really think of cellphones as being supercomputers but relative to the kinds of computers we may have had twenty or thirty years ago on our desks, our cell phones are actually more powerful.''

Why institutions like the Breakthrough Initiative and SETI need your help is that that they are trying to do a huge amount of computations on a huge amount of very weak signals.

These narrow band-width signals do not occur naturally, so that detection of one would be considered evidence of a extraterrestrial technology.

More computing power means being able to cover greater frequency with more sensitivity - meaning that they'll have a greater chance of encountering signs of a alien life.

Siemion hopes that SETI will have the same success as other volunteer computing initiatives, like  Einstein@Home.

This volunteer program, which uses computer's idle time to look for astrophysical signals from  spinning neutron stars, has so far resulted in the discovery of fifty new neutron stars.

''SETI@home allows us search for signals, which we couldn't search for any other way,'' says Siemion.

''We haven't yet detected any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence - otherwise it would have been a very different press conference yesterday.

But this absolutely allows us to search for a certain portion of the radio spectrum in ways that we could not do without the vast computer power of all our volunteers.

With respectful dedication to the Scientists, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

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