SETI@home is a nonprofit educational and research organization that relies significantly on donations to continue operations.
The SETI@home team has achieved much progress in the past year. They have successfully started the next phase of SETI@home by distributing data recorded with the new seven beam data recorder. This data is being analyzed with a new “Multi-beam” version of SETI@home, which was released this past July. With the new data recorder, they are looking at seven places in the sky simultaneously while recording fourteen times as much data as before. This means SETI needs more volunteers like those who are fans of Slice of SciFi to help them process this data. So please, if you can help it would be much appreiciated and also tell a friend about SETI@home.
But there is still far more to be done. Although they are pleased with the success of last winter’s funding drive, and grateful for the generosity of all those who donated time and money, SETI@home is still operating with minimal funds. These budget constraints have forced them down to less than 3 full time employees. With more funds they hope to hire an additional person to maintain the servers and Website. This also would free their existing employees to work on a method of sifting through the results returned by volunteer computers in order to identify candidates more rapidly so SETI@home can re-observe them. This rapid response validation system would also give you, the volunteers, the ability to see the results your computers have returned in more detail.
To keep SETI@home operating throughout 2008, and to provide these new capabilities, they will need to raise approximately $476,000. Currently SETI@home is entirely funded by donations from people like you. All of us here at Slice of SciFi hope that you will consider making a donation to SETI@home.
You can make a secure donation by credit card by clicking on this LINK. Instructions for donation by check or money order are there as well. Unless you specify otherwise, your donation will be noted by a star icon next to your username on the SETI@home pages and your username will appear on their list of donors. If you do not wish to have this recognition you may indicate that as well. Please be assured that regardless of whether or not you choose to have your donation be anonymous, SETI@home will not share your address with other organizations.
You may check on the SETI@home fundraising progress by visiting their main site at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu . You can also learn more about their many exciting projects by going HERE.
Although SETI@Home is cool, it’s not the only distributed computing project out there, and at least in my opinion nowhere near being the most important.
I did the SETI thing for a while, but for several years now my PC’s “unused processing time” has been applied to Folding@Home instead, as I personally feel that finding a cure to cancer and other diseases is a bit more of a pressing issue than finding aliens.
Unless, those aliens have the cure for all forms of cancer that we have been unable to so far find. I think there is enough money in this world for both.