Happy Birthday, SETI@Home

Audio

05/22/2009

May. 22, 2009

Happy Birthday, SETI@Home

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For ten years, people have been donating processing time on their personal computers to sift the cosmic radio spectrum for signals from extraterrestrials. The SETI@Home project began in 1999 and sparked a wave of similar 'distributed computing' projects studying topics from climate prediction to protein folding. In the ten years since it started, five million SETI@home volunteers in 226 countries have donated over three million years of computing time -- an amount that Dan Werthimer, lead scientist on the project calls "the largest computation that's ever been done, on this planet anyway." We'll talk with him about the hunt, and the field of SETI research in general.

Produced by Charles Bergquist, Director and Contributing Producer

Guests

Dan Werthimer
Director, SETI Program

Director, Center for Astronomy Signal Processing

Associate Director, Berkeley Wireless Research Center

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, California

Discussion

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