When Pete Worden was passed the microphone at the Breakthrough Starshot announcement, he emphasized that at the heart of the new space exploration initiative is one very real sentiment: This is really cool.
Worden, the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center and currently the executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, also mentioned another very cool fact as he explained why the nanocraft project meant that Tuesday was “the day that space explorers have dreamed about.” While it may take years before nanocrafts are actually able to reach Alpha Centauri, you actually can start searching for signals from extraterrestrials from your laptop today.
One of that many initiatives that make up Starshot is the effort to look for other civilizations who are doing what we’re doing — beaming lasers into space. The data that is found will be released to the public, both on the Breakthrough Initiatives website and at SETI@home — part of the SETI research center at the University of California, Berkeley. While Breakthrough Initiative continues to develop its own software to search for extraterrestrial life — which it plans on offering to the public as an open source — it has joined forces with SETI@home, which already consists of a platform of 9 million computers around Earth. These computers — which could include your laptop — are considered to form “one of the world’s biggest supercomputers.”
SETI@home is essentially a volunteer computing software system, which uses the “spare resources” on volunteer computers to process information from radio telescopes. This means that, if you download the software, when you’re not using your computer, SETI@home uses the machine’s CPU power, disk space, and network bandwidth to go through signals derived from radio telescopes like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico or the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia.
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