The project to search for alien life stopped working after 20 years

After 20 years of trying to find alien life, the SETI @ Home project has officially set the time to stop operating.

'Scientifically, the effectiveness of SETI @ Home is decreasing. But that doesn't matter because we have all the data we need. Now is the time to complete the back-end analysis process for the information gained - an indispensable stage in any project ', the project coordinator SETI @ Home said in a statement.

SETI @ home (SETI at home) is a public internet-based volunteer project that uses the BOINC soft platform. True to its name (SETI stands for English phrase meaning 'Find extraterrestrial civilization'), the main purpose of the project is to analyze radio signals, look for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence land, and is one of many activities carried out as part of the global SETI plans.

Since its launch on May 17, 1999 until now, SETI @ Home has never found any evidence of alien life, but it is still an important project for the planet. The legacy is, at the same time, one of the first and most successful examples of distributed computing. Initially, SETI @ home set out to try to reach about 100,000 home PC users, but the actual number achieved was much larger, reaching 5.2 million participants worldwide. gender.

SETI @ home has demonstrated to scientists that distributed computing projects using the internet connecting millions of computers are workable if used as a powerful computing, analysis, and maybe even surpass supercomputers. To participate in the project, volunteers only need to own a computer with an internet connection and install on it a free program that automatically downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

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Basically, SETI @ home looks for extraterrestrial civilization through reliable evidence of radio transmission, based on data collected from the Arecibo Radio Telescope. This amount of digital data is sent to the processing center of the SETI @ home project. Here, it continues to be broken down into smaller parts according to frequency and time, used to analyze, search for any signals, see if they contain any valuable information. Such an analysis requires a great deal of computational power, now SETI @ home sends millions of pieces of data to personal computers for offline analysis, then receives results from them. . This is also the reason why it is called distributed computing network.

Data collected during SETI @ home's 20 years of operation will become an important resource for future space research projects. The project will stop distributing work for several more weeks, on March 31, 2020.