Let’s be honest, unless you are a super-bright super-fit scientist from an Ivy League university or a super-rich billionaire with a taste for travelling in less than comfort circumstances the chances of you making a voyage into space are a bit well, remote.
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
If on top of this you also fancy discovering an alien life form your chances range from zilch to zero, until now that is. The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project needs your help.
SETI scans the skies searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe but funding cuts mean it has had to become more and more creative in how it conducts its research. In 1999 it set up SETI@home in which spare processing power on volunteer’s computers was used to sift through information gained by its radio telescopes. So far this has attracted more than 1m users.
Buoyed by this success on 29th February SETI took the notion of “citizen science” a stage further, this time it’s not our computers they want to put to good use but our brains. SETIlive hopes to use the human ability to recognise patterns to distinguish between the background noise of space and the possible sound of alien communication.
The idea behind SETI is to look for artificial radio signals which are not generated from Earth. To do this they use 42 small radio telescopes known as the Allen Array. Unfortunately, certain parts of the spectrum of radio waves are inundated by noise created by human activity which could drown out any alien attempts at communication.
SETI hopes to send pictorial representations of the noisy spots to its supporters in the hope they can filter out the noise and spot any unusual signals. Users will log on to setilive.org and view the information hot from the Allen Array, every 90 second this telescopes will change their direction and a new image will be produced. Should someone spot something within just three minutes the telescopes will be realigned to study that wavelength further.
This is important because when users found interesting signals in the past they were looking at information which was already months old and by the time the scientists turned their attention to the relevant sites the signals had vanished.
One of the most famous of these occurrences known as the WOW signal pre-dates SETI@home and occurred in 1977. Scientists trudging through reams of data come across a powerful finely tuned broadcast of a type astronomers theorised aliens might use. Sadly, by the time it had been spotted and the instruments recalibrated to take a more in-depth study the signal had disappeared.
SETI live means should another should another signal be found scientists could turn their attention to the correct area immediately. Just imagine it, the discovery of alien life which would unquestionably be the greatest moment in human history might not depend on interstellar travel and spacesuits but on someone sitting in their home looking at the internet. Could that person be you?
Video Psychics
Why not try out my all new Video Psychics service? You can chat for FREE to the Psychic and because you can see them talking, it can help you to decide which reader you would feel most comfortable with. Available 24/7 Worldwide.