To learn more & participate, click here for SETI at Home web site.

(5/13/99)

Movie screens will be full of space aliens in the next few weeks as the Star Wars craze kicks in. But how would you like to use the screen on your home computer to help real scientists hunt for real aliens.

Beginning next Monday, you can actually do that, thanks to an ingenious new idea. News Specialist John Hollenhorst has the story.

Is there someone, or something, out there, trying to communicate with us? Is an advanced civilization somewhere beyond the moon, sending messages to This Island Earth?

In the movies, when scientists search for aliens, they find them.

But real scientists are searching with much less success. They use giant radio-telescopes to capture natural radio signals from deep space, and computers to analyze the data.

As the movies suggest, the whole effort is considered "far out" by some scientists.

Now, to increase the odds of success, alien-hunting scientists are turning to the public for help.

Patrick Wiggins of Hansen Planetarium and 400,000 other people have already signed up for SETI AT HOME, The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence with your home computer.

Wiggins says, "Judging from the incredible response, there are a lot of people out there, myself included, that want this to happen, who want to find out, are we alone?"

Scientists need help because they collect far more radio-waves from outer space than their computers can process. Beginning Monday, you download a chunk of data on the Internet. It installs itself as a screensaver. Whenever your computer is idle it starts looking for unusually strong signals or unexplained patterns.

Wiggins explains, "So there're a half-million little personal computers that will be churing through the data."

The odds against your computer actually finding anything are--well, astronomical. But you never know. Maybe you and your computer will make history.

Wiggins says, "I'll be very surprised if it happens soon, but I'll also be very surprised if it doesn't happen eventually."

When you upload the processed data back to the scientists, they promise, you'll get proper credit, if it contains the greatest discovery of all time.

To learn more & participate, click here for SETI at Home web site.