Alien Call Screening
01/06/1999 . Source: Jessica Martin 

Those wild funksters at SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence institute have not had a good time of it over the last few years.

First they had their dosh line cut by NASA and the US government, then their private funding went though a bit of a rocky patch too.

Why, our hopes of discovering ET signals were practically down to slipping in pennies in those coin operated telescopes you find on the end of Brighton Pier.

It was a bloody ridiculous situation. Something as important as scanning the heavens for an intelligent footprint was getting less funding than keeping a single branch of McDonalds open.

But now SETI are bouncing back, stronger than ever. And you can help too! They are rocking with the power of distributed processing over the Web.

Mosey on over to SETI@hom and you can download a rather innovative screensaver. In your spare time when you are off at lunch and the like, the screensaver kicks in and starts processing raw radio telescope data from SETI over the internet.

Thousands of downloads have now been registered by SF fans eager to claim the mantle of first person to discover sentient life outside the solar system.

Cool idea. Now all we need is something similar to process near-earth object data and catalogue anything bigger than a VW van, before some rogue 'roid slams into Terra and pulls a dinosaur killer on humanity.

Anyone game?