Searching For Aliens

Maybe some of you may heard of the term SETI. It stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that is dedicated to search for aliens that may exists in other planets or solar systems. It is kind of interesting thing to do don't you think so? You may ask, how do check for alien presence in other planets or solar systems? They can't be using telescope can they?

Instead of using telescope, they deployed satellite dishes to detect signals emitted from other planets or solar systems. These are not the ordinary satellite dish like the one ASTRO uses. It is a bigger version of a normal satellite dish. These satellite dishes are used to detect infra red signals, radio signals, electromagnetic signals and etc.


Project Phoenix, the largest satellite dish in the world.


Satellites dishes used by SETI.

They also initiated a project known as SETI@home. The reason behind this project is to distribute data to computers around the world in order to compute them and then send the results back to SETI mainframe for further process. This method is known as distributed computing or cloud computing. This project is necessary because the amount of collected is huge and in order to compute the data, a high-end computer is needed. Instead, of buying a more powerful computer, SETI actually distribute these data to volunteers to computer them. This can totally save cost of buying a more powerful computer.

Anybody who is interested in helping SETI to compute their data, can actually register and then download a software to download and compute the necessary data. Don't worry, this software will not eat up all of your internet bandwidth. You can set the preferred settings. By default, it will run as a screen saver when your computer is idle for a period of time. The software will then do its job. If you are interested, you can visit this website, SETI@home.

Sources:
SETI
Wikipedia