The search for extraterrestrial life has always captured the imagination of humanity: are we alone in the universe? Nobody knows for sure. At least as of today! It is not an easy task. Anytime I think about this question, a quotation from Jill Tarter always comes to my mind: “If you took a glass of water from the ocean and didn’t find a fish in it, you wouldn’t conclude that there are no fish in the ocean. Yet that’s how little we’ve searched the skies”. It is a powerful way to highlight in simple terms the scale mismatch between what we could detect and what might be out there.
At the dawn of the new millennium, a project aiming at finding an answer to this daunting question made its first steps. Its name? SETI@Home. The name itself was bold and carried a lot of meanings – it captured both the project’s scientific goal and its innovative approach.
The name SETI@home cleverly fused together two ideas: the acronym for the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence and the concept of distributed computing done from the comfort of your home. The revolutionizing idea beyond this project was that anyone, anywhere could join the search for extraterrestrial life just by donating a bit (or more!) of their computer’s processing power!
The active phase of this project lasted for a little bit more than 20 years, until March 2020, but its legacy endures as of today. The project not only advanced the search for extraterrestrial life but also showed the immense potential of distributed computing: using a network of volunteers to tackle a problem that required an immense amount of computing power.
I began contributing to this project during my university years, in March 2007. At that time, I was living in Italy in a small apartment with other students, and I remember keeping my PC on all day, running BOINC whenever the system went idle. Yes, even at night—sometimes the fan would start spinning loudly, but the stress and exhaustion of the university exams were enough to put me to sleep anyway. Beyond the core idea of the project, the software for processing radio data included an optional screensaver that visualized the ongoing analysis. I no longer have a screenshot of it, but I remember how mesmerizing was to watch it. It made me feel like I was part of something much bigger than the usual projects I worked on at the university.
In the following years, I eventually started using a cluster at my university that—at least initially—was sitting there almost unused. With the help of a classmate, we set up the 8-node cluster to run the BOINC manager on each node during the night. Everything went smoothly until, one night, the cluster administrator noticed the power consumption ramping up... and politely asked us to remove the setup! We didn’t complain, of course, but we tried to make a point about the university’s potential involvement in such a groundbreaking project! After that brief interruption, I resumed using only my computers (yes, plural!). One day, I discovered that it was also possible to use the GPU for processing—that was a big step forward in my contribution! I was quite tech-savvy at the time - and still am today - so my natural reaction was: let’s build a computer with all the spare parts and dedicate it entirely to the project!
And so the years went by—until one day when I noticed that my system had stopped processing data. After some searching online, I came across the news that the Arecibo telescope—the primary source of data for the SETI@home project, located in Puerto Rico—had suffered a catastrophic failure. On the morning of December 1st, 2020, one of the supporting cables snapped, causing the receiver platform to fall into the dish and, ultimately, leading to the collapse of the telescope.
I was deeply disappointed, but there was literally nothing I could do. As the days passed, I came to the realization that the project I had contributed to for so many years had reached an unexpected end. There was always a part of me that thought, “What if my contribution is the one that leads to a groundbreaking scientific discovery?” But since that hadn’t happened up until that point, I began to accept the idea that it likely wouldn’t happen moving forward. I continued thinking about the project in the following years and eventually considered contributing to other projects based on the same idea of volunteering personal resources. However, I never followed through with that idea. I suppose I was still grieving that loss.
Eventually, I decided to download the certificate of my participation and move forward with other projects. Every now and then, I look at that certificate hanging in my home office, and I can’t help but wonder what could have come out of that amazing project. But life goes on, and with the lessons and experiences I gained from SETI@home, I might decide in the near future to contribute to new ventures and continue exploring new frontiers.
Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of anybody else.