IP: Discover Alien Life With Your PC And SETI

From: Richard Sampson <rjsa@sprintmail.com>
Subject: IP: Discover Alien Life With Your PC And SETI
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 08:09:03 -0500
To: "ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com" <ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com>

****Discover Alien Life With Your PC And SETI
 TOKYO, JAPAN, 1998 NOV 5 (Newsbytes) -- By Martyn Williams, Newsbytes.
The SETI@home project, which hopes to harness the idle processing power
of thousands of desktop personal computers to help in the search for
intelligent life in the universe, is back on track with an April 1999
launch date.

The project was launched in mid 1997 and was scheduled to begin
operations early this year (Newsbytes, August 18, 1997) but the launch
was delayed after funding problems slowed research and development
work. Now, with new funding and hardware donated by Sun Microsystems,
the project is back on track.

Hoping to attract the millions of computer users that believe in the
existence of intelligent life in space, the project will be based
around a special screensaver. Like any screensaver, the software kicks
in when you aren't using your PC but unlike other software, the
SETI@home application won't present you with a banal selection of
flying windows of swimming fish.

Instead, it will be doing something much more useful: analyzing radio
frequency spectrum data captured by the Arecibo radio telescope in
Puerto Rico. The analysis is searching for a signal out of all the
noise from space - a signal that may reveal the existence of
intelligent life.

The project team estimates that once 50,000 PCs are enrolled in the
project, the SETI@home program will rival other similar SETI (search
for extraterrestrial intelligence) programs that are looking for
signals from space and may turn up signals that would otherwise be
missed.

The program works like this: data is collected from SERENDIP, a SETI
project based at UC Berkeley, on magnetic tape and transferred to
SETI@home servers. This data is then distributed to participating PC
users as they log onto the Internet and the data is analyzed on their
PCs. Once finished, the results are returned to the project servers via
the Internet.

First tests of the system, with 100 volunteers, has just begun and
the project hopes to make available the first generation SETI@home
screensavers in April 1999. These will be available for Windows, Apple
and Unix based platforms.

What's in it for the user? Apart from helping science, the team says,
"There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will
detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth."

For more information on the project, how to offer your spare computer
capacity and how to donate money, check the SETI@home Web page at
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu . Numerous foreign language versions
of the page are also available.

Reported By Newsbytes News Network, http://www.newsbytes.com

-0-

(19981105/WIRES ONLINE/)


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Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems to me that if I were an alien
civilization and wanted to send out a beacon, in as wide an angle as
possible, across the vast reaches of space and overcome as much of the path
losses as possible using the least energy I certainly wouldn't use a narrow
band signal. Quite the contrary, I'd want to spread a low bandwidth
information signal across the widest practical spectrum. Its much easier to
increase process gain (the ratio of the baseband information signal to the
final carrier bandwidth) than transmit power.

While a narrow band signal from Arecibo's powerful transmitter/antenna
combination can be detected at a distance of about 300 light years. It
subtends a very small angle greatly reducing the likelyhood of contact.
Switching to a spread spectrum approach could allow broadening the antenna
pattern, and thereby its chances of detection, significantly without
reducing its effective range. Notice how 63 dB (or over 2,000,000 fold
effective increase in transmit power) of process gain enables handheld GPS
receivers to pull in signals from satellites, sent using only a few watts
of transmit power, without much of an antenna.

If all this seems to make sense, then why are the SETI people apparently
seaching the skies with lots of narrow band receivers? They don't seem to
be employing any broadband correlator techniques, so spread signals will
probably be missed.

--Steve