"And Ellie Here Will be Looking For..."

"Little green men.*"

Seti@home, the project using personal computers to search for radio signals from alien civilisations, is calling for more volunteers to help crunch a vast surge of new data. An extensive upgrade at the world's largest radiotelescope, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, means that data is flowing 500 times faster than before.

When Seti@home began eight years ago it was the first internet computing project that harnessed spare capacity on private PCs for scientific work, and it is still the largest such network, with 320,000 computers involved. They analyse radio signals from space, looking for patterns that might come from intelligent beings rather than natural sources such as quasars, the distant celestial bodies.

If enough new PC volunteers come forward, "we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original Seti@home", said Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist of the project, which is based in Berkeley, California. "We're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimised for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."

If you, too, perhaps would like to help find the little green men, well, go here and volunteer your home's computing power! It's not like you're going to find anything, but really, you've got some spare gigs of memory that can help the cause, right? Donate them! So we will definitively know that we are alone!

*spot the quote. And it's easy peasy, so I fully expect someone to chime in, in a sing-song voice, with the answer.