Look for extraterrestrial life from the comfort of your desk

Well, not look, not really, but "look"... as in, give part of the horsepower of your PC to the good guys at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), going to this page and following the instructions.

Will he phone home?
Essentially, you download a little program that, when the PC is idle, uses the unused CPU power to collaborate with the central servers of the University of Berkely to find ETs.

And there you thought that you couldn't be at the forefront of extraterrestrial investigation. You're welcome.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This type of software resembles a lot that of some viruses, doesn't it?

Massa said...

Well, it does and it doesn't. The most important characteristic of a virus is that it takes over the system without the user's knowledge. Having said that, it does have the "collaborative" type that some viruses (spam viruses) have.