Millions Helped Hunt Aliens, Found 100 Promising Signals

Imagine turning on your computer and knowing that while you sleep, it's helping search for alien civilizations across the galaxy. That's exactly what millions of people did through SETI@home, a groundbreaking project that just wrapped up after more than two decades of cosmic detective work.

The project asked everyday people to volunteer their computer's spare processing power to help UC Berkeley scientists analyze radio telescope data from Puerto Rico's famous Arecibo Observatory. Together, this network of home computers created a supercomputer powerful enough to process an incredible 12 billion detections from deep space.

The massive collaborative effort paid off in an unexpected way. Scientists used supercomputers to eliminate interference and noise, narrowing those billions of signals down to just 100 that deserve a closer look. Since July, researchers have been using China's massive FAST telescope to investigate these promising targets.

"If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it," said project cofounder David Anderson. Even without discovering ET, the team established a new sensitivity benchmark that future searches can build upon.

The project also produced two published papers in The Astronomical Journal, documenting what worked and what didn't. Turns out, regular radio interference from TV broadcasts and even microwave ovens made the hunt trickier than expected.

The Ripple Effect

The lessons learned from SETI@home extend far beyond alien hunting. The project proved that distributed computing could tackle massive scientific challenges by harnessing collective power. Millions of participants became part of real scientific research, democratizing space exploration in a way never done before.

The team now hopes to inspire successor projects that can take advantage of today's faster internet speeds and more powerful computers. Project director Eric Korpela remains optimistic despite not finding a definitive alien signal yet, noting there's still potential that evidence of extraterrestrial life exists in the data, just waiting to be discovered with better analysis methods.

The Arecibo telescope that provided the original data collapsed in 2020, but the treasure trove of information it collected continues to fuel humanity's search for cosmic neighbors.

"There's still the potential that ET is in that data and we missed it just by a hair," Korpela said, keeping hope alive for future discoveries.