STARDUST?

For those of you who dont know what im talking about, SETI stands for (I think) Search for Extra Terrestrial Intellegence. Its like that movie "contact" where they are scanning portions of the sky and monitoring the signals that they get back for patterns, looking for some kind of communication... The thing is, this takes a TREMENDOUS amount of computer processing power.

Some ultra-genius devised a way that you can directly help the effort. It has been explained to me that it works like this: You download a program from SETI that is a screen saver. When your computer sits idle and goes into screen saver mode, your computer automatically downloads a chunk of the actual radio signal received from outer space, and looks for patterns in it while your computer is just sitting around doing nothing. Just like a regular screen saver, your computer springs back to life when you hit the keyboard or move the mouse. It just works when you arent. Its a very polite program. It chews on the code that you downloaded and then sends it back and gets some more.

The cool thing about this is that you are helping look for aliens and stuff. Another cool thing is that your computer, no matter how dumpy and old and screwed up, while it is taking part in this slow process it is actually part of a huge SUPERCOMPUTER made up of volunteers like yourself. The processing power of all of these computers combined is something to be mathmatically reckoned with, and is exciting for geekos like me, and you too!

Now that I have talked about a bunch of crap that I only 1/2 understand, go read about it on the SETI site and download the screensaver and join TEAM SEBADOH in the search for extra terrestrial intellegence!!!