Your computer might find them. I’ve had Seti@Home running in the BOINC distributed computing platform for a while now. My Mac Pro eight-core beast has been chewing through radio telescope data for a while now, and I recently came across a nifty website-badge that shows my progress:
Wow, I’m up to 84,155th place!! To give you an idea of how far away from 1st place I am, my “credit” score, which indicates how much computing time I’ve contributed, is currently 60,669. The top contributor has 458,338,508 credits. As of January 2008, the SETI@home project by itself has amassed 3.4 million years of computing time from its contributors. An incredible achievement!
Be sure to check out this list of BOINC-supported distributed computing projects. There’s some interesting stuff in there. Go sign up and put your lazy CPU to work while you sleep. FOR SCIENCE!
