ST. PAUL, Minn., Jan. 30 (UPI) -- One of the longest-running searches for extraterrestrial life is coming to end this year as U.S. scientists wrap up a popular program that enlisted millions of home computer users to analyze radio signals received from space.
After years poring through immense amounts of generated data, the program's co-founders at the University of California at Berkeley told UPI this week they are probing 100 detected signals deemed to be the best candidates for messages from "ET" before the effort is wrapped up for good, 27 years after it was launched.
But even though the "SETI@home" project has so far failed to record a "first contact" from an alien civilization, its leaders say valuable lessons have been learned that can be applied to the continuing hunt for beyond Earth.
SETI@home, short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was launched in 1999 by scientists at UC Berkeley who over the course of two-plus decades enlisted more than 5 million "crowdsourced" volunteers willing to donate their home computers' processing capacity to analyze data generated by momentary energy blips picked up by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
It was one of the pioneering efforts at distributed computing in an era before supercomputers and high-speed Internet connections. Under the project, home users downloaded and installed free software that could pick out signals deemed to be "ET" candidates from raw data supplied by the 1,000-foot radio telescope at Arecibo, which collapsed in 2020
