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SETI@home: a Progress Report

SETI@home: a Progress Report. David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory U.C. Berkeley. A short science lesson. Light. Ionians 600-400 BC. Ptolemy 140 AD. Galileo 1609. Newton 1666. Foucault 1849. Electricity/magnetism. Gilbert 1600. Oersted, Faraday 1820-1830. Greeks. Math.

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SETI@home: a Progress Report

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  1. SETI@home: a Progress Report David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory U.C. Berkeley

  2. A short science lesson Light Ionians 600-400 BC Ptolemy 140 AD Galileo 1609 Newton 1666 Foucault 1849 Electricity/magnetism Gilbert 1600 Oersted, Faraday 1820-1830 Greeks Math Leibniz, Newton 1670-1700 Gauss, etc. 1750-1850

  3. Maxwell’s equations (1862) “We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”

  4. The Electromagnetic Spectrum 1888: Heinrich Hertz generates radio waves 1901: Gugliemo Marconi uses radio to communicate across Atlantic

  5. The Extraterrestrial Life Conjecture:Is there life outside Earth? An early idea (Gauss 1820)

  6. Investigating the ELC • Hard to disprove • Likelihood estimation: Drake’s Equation N = R×fp×ne×fl×fi×fc×L • Milky Way: 400 billion stars • 100 billion other galaxies • To prove: detect life • Actively • Passively

  7. Planet discovery (1996 -) Doppler shifting of absorption lines

  8. How to detect life • Physical evidence • Synthetic EM waves • Radio • Beamed • Omnidirectional • Optical • Natural EM waves 100,000 light years

  9. What’s there to say? Civilization knowledge: • Scientific • Biology, math, etc. • Technology • Cultural • Art, literature, music • philosophy • Social • How to govern

  10. Benefits and dangers • Sending +: Share legacy; need to send to hear – : Get noticed, invaded • Listening +: Learn something; social benefits – : Destructive technology; computer viruses

  11. The latency problem • Distance may be 1000s of light years • How to speed up time? • “Contact”: instructions for FTL machine • Algorithmic communication: send an oracle

  12. The Galactic Internet • The Galaxy-Wide Web • http://gww.rigel.4/~kodos/index.html • Google • Commerce and ad campaigns • “Got Oxygen?” • Pyramid schemes • Galactic archive • Civilization as storage device

  13. Radio SETI • Observation • Sky survey, targeted search • Compute power spectrum • Pattern-match narrow-band signals • Eliminate man-made interference (RFI) • Rank and re-observe candidates • The “Declaration of Principles” We, the institutions and individuals participating in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,…

  14. SETI@home • Use distributed computing • Better data analysis: • Signal types (Gaussian, spike, pulsed, triplet) • Multiple frequency resolutions • Multiple drift rates, coherent integration • Tradeoff: smaller frequency band • 2.5MHz vs. 100 MHz

  15. tape archive, delete tape backup user DB science DB master DB redundancy checking DLT tapes CGI program acct. queue result queue RFI elimination garbage collector web page generator splitters repeat detection screensavers WU storage web site data server SETI@home Operations Data recorder

  16. Achievements of SETI@home • 1,000,000 years of CPU time in 3 years • Sustained 35 TeraFLOPs • 1.5E^21 floating-point operations • 3,600,000 users in 226 countries • 40 Terabytes of data processed • 3 billion “events” detected

  17. What’s next? • New SETI searches • Parkes observatory: southern sky • Multi-beam receivers • Expanded frequency range • Reanalysis of SETI data • black hole evaporation • Hydrogen map

  18. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) applications Many possibly applications: • Global climate modeling and prediction • Protein folding, gene mapping • Drug discovery projects Research lab X University Y Public project Z resource pool

  19. Conclusion • SETI is a basic unanswered question • ET contact might revolutionize all areas of human thought and activity • SETI@home approach can • Enable new computational science • Bridge science/public gap

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