Students Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence via the SETI@home Project

Possibly you, or your students were inspired by the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book, Contact, but wouldn't participating in a real search for extraterrestrial intelligence be even more exciting?  As fantastic as this seems, it is now possible to join in the search, at school or at home.  The SETI@home project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a grand experiment to harness the spare power of hundreds of thousands of computers via the Internet. The SETI@home software works automatically when your keyboard is idle, much like an ordinary screen-saver.  This is when it receives and analyzes data captured by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world.  Along with the software, the download will include a batch of data from Arecibo.

• PowerPoint presentation on the SETI@home Project.  This has been presented at several conferences for science teachers.
• Schack, Joining the Search ... (2006 article in The Science Teacher, a journal of the National Science Tearchers Association)
  
• Schack, In Search of... (1999 article in Science Scope)
  
• The Drake equation with my annotations.
• Morehead State University Space Science Center.
• The SETI@home website at UC Berkley has more information.  Also, this is where you can download the software.
• The Planetary Society:  SETI
• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC):  An open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources
• Other popular distributed computing projects