Carl Sagan is perhaps one of the earliest influences on me for the wonderful hobby of Astronomy, especially the aspect that works on exploring for life which may exist beyond our planet. As a child I used to watch some of his highly infectious ideas on good old Doordarshan in programs which used to come few and far in between.
By the time I was in my early teens, Astronomy as a bug was there to stay for life. I was fascinated by one of the most ambitious programs of all times – SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). At a time when the scientific community was (and still is) searching for evidence for just a single cell of organic life outside of our planet, Carl Sagan went one step ahead to look for “Intelligent life”, life which was not just living and reproducing itself out of a single cell, but had evolved into intelligent beings just like us and perhaps were also on the lookout for life outside their own. The theory was that intelligent life form would have figured out basics of science as we know it and would have been able to use their scientific capabilities to make radio waves which would have found their way in to outer space for us to pick up. In the same way that our radio waves are inadvertently broadcast out to the universe. It is highly probable that if intelligent life forms exist, it is a matter of time that they would intercept all our news, soap operas which have been on the air since the radio was invented. SETI started off by using the world’s largest readio telescope at the Arecibo Obsevatory to capture samples for the project.
The SETI@Home project involves the simple technique of pointing giant radio telescopes in to the night sky and take in all the radio waves which are out there, filter out known sources from our own planet (human origin) and then look for radio signals which were perhaps from an extra terrestrial intelligence. Perhaps from another planet in a galaxy millions of light years away.
Simple ? Not quite, considering that at a radio frequency level, our planet is quite polluted with a huge array of signals which are man made. From simple commercial radio, to classified military communications to other sources which could be definitely from our own sources. This is an enormous task, coupled with the fact that after such filtering, the left over frequencies could be dying stars, normal star, galactic activity etc.
SETI struck upon an interesting idea of using modern computers and the all pervasive internet to make one huge giant computer. Enthusiasts at home, office could download a program on their windows and UNIX machines. The program then downloads a block of the enormously huge chunks of data collected every second using giant radio telescopes around the globe and use “spare” computing power of each individual processor to perform enormous computation.
This sounded like an amazing idea to use the internet to bind people across all nations to a common cause. I was hooked.
The first PCs I started using Seti@Home in 1999 were 386, 486, early Pentium computers. By today’s processor standards they were like bullock carts compared to fast ferraris. I used many spare computers on my office network, which I knew to be up 24×7 and free for 90% of the time, idling away as some non critical file or dial-up server. I made secure and efficient use of those machines as well to forward the SETI cause. I used to simply love watching those computers use idle CPU power to download chunks of data from the central SETI servers and perform hours and hours of intensive number crunching and floating point operations looking for signs of intelligence. Who knows, perhaps some obscure, humble dial up server on my network would crack the first signs of an ET communicating ! The thought gave me a kick like nothing else.
After quite a few years, an article on digg about SETI, revived memories and I decided to revisit it at home using my Ubuntu laptop which has a core 2 duo processor. The project has gained and progressed so much from its single idea more than 10 years back. Moore’s law has ensured that processors are many times more powerful and efficient than what they were 10 years ago.
The mind blowing OS that Ubuntu is, I simply had to go to the Add / Remove program and do a search for SETI. A package was present in the repositories ready to download and install. I was up and running in 5 minutes. It was however quite a challenge to revive my old SETI account from the years gone by which had an aggregation of all the work (CPU power) I had put in to this project since 1999. Thankfully I could retrieve the password and my account and associate my new Ubuntu laptop to it.
The SETI site was also kind enough to give me a certificate which attests the contribution I have put in to the project. Although it is just a drop in the ocean, it is a lot of pride that I display this certificate here today.
As I type away this blog in OpenOffice.org write, my CPU monitor is busy with its two cores at 75% crunching away at blazing speeds, the search for ETI.
I strongly advocate use of your PC for the SETI projects or many projects like SETI which might appeal to you. A list of many projects is here.
