The search for alien life is over... for now

At the end of this month, SETI@home is closing down after two decades of alien hunting. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was an early example of distributed computing, using spare processing cycles from computers around the world to analyze signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Now the project has gathered enough data and is going into hibernation, rendering the famous screensaver useless. This, sadly, does not mean that SETI@home has managed to locate extraterrestrial intelligence. The project has been able to gather a colossal amount of data, and now… [Continue Reading]