Use Your Computer to Find ET

The massive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project headquartered in California is reconfiguring its Web site and revealing its detection program to make it far easier for amateur seekers everywhere to join the quest for alien life in the cosmos. "Soon it will be time for you to get involved," writes SETI director Jill Tarter for CNN. SETI's Web site setiQuest.org is now geared to those knowledgeable about digital signal processing. The site has also allowed amateurs to set up their computers to automatically help process data.

But SETI will soon publish its software detection codes, and will ask general users to help themselves to the program to devise creative new ways to process data and find signals that current detection algorithms may be missing. "I'd like to get all Earthlings spending a bit of their day looking at data from the Allen Telescope Array" on the Web site, and "get them thinking about their place in the cosmos," said Tartar. "That's the way we can change the world." (More ET stories.)