SETI @ home was one of the first scientific projects that involved the common citizen in its development; it was the prehistory of what is now known as citizen science. To do this, you downloaded a program with which your computer, in the idle times when you were not using it, used to look for patterns in the signals received by the Arecibo (Puerto Rico) radio telescope during its daily operation. The underlying idea was very simple: if on a regular basis we dedicate ourselves to observing celestial objects in the range of radio waves – which is one of the simplest and cheapest forms of interstellar communication – is it not possible that by chance we ‘ strain ‘some broadcast of an extraterrestrial civilization and we do not realize it because we are attentive to something else? If so, to locate it we only need a very powerful computer that is capable of analyzing the large amount of information that is received. Or better yet, lots of home computers dedicated to that task: SETI @ Home thus became the third largest distributed computing project dedicated to celestial affairs .
The project began in 1999 and the reception by the population was impressive: just two years after its launch it had carried out a total of one billion floating point operations, something was recognized in the Guinness Book of Records 2008 as the largest computation in history . But despite the millions of followers, on March 31st the project, directed from the University of Berkeley, pulls the blind . The reasons, as stated by those responsible on the project website, are two: one, that “we have analyzed all the data we need for now”, and two that “it is a lot of work for us to manage distributed data processing. We have to focus on completing the analysis of the results we already have ”, and write an article with them.
SETI @ home closes its doors without having detected a signal of extraterrestrial origin
To understand the decision you have to take into account several things. The first is that maintaining SETI @ Home costs at least half a million dollars a year , and someone has to pay for it. Second, there is a lot of data that needs a fine analysis and for this you need personal and computing time that you do not have if you have to continue maintaining and managing the project. And third, when it was born there were not many projects of this style, but over the years citizen science has grown and all new projects need the same limited resources that SETI @ home has at the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, where is hosted. And the new ones must be given an opportunity, the same one that SETI @ home has had for more than twenty years.
And this is key: What other scientific project that has lasted more than two decades has not produced a single result? None In fact, the entire search program for extraterrestrial intelligences, in all its forms, is one of a kind: there is no solid science behind it, only the hope that what its advocates claim is true. Since it began in the middle of the 20th century, the SETI program has not provided any evidence, not even circumstantial, that these so-called extraterrestrial civilizations exist . Its defenders respond with a well-known saying: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And it is true, but how does SETI differ from other fields that border on, at least, the pseudoscientific, such as extrasensory perception or spiritism? In both cases there is no solid science to back them up and after more than a century of research their defenders have not been able to prove the existence of these phenomena beyond a reasonable doubt. Or is it that thinking that there are extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe sending signals through space is a less ‘colorful’ idea than believing that there are ghosts roaming the castles of Scotland?
