Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - SETI@Home Turns Five!

Episode Date: May 17, 2004

SETI@Home Turns Five!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SETI at Home turns 5 and 5 million this week on Planetary Radio. Hello again, and welcome back to the Planetary Society's weekly radio call to the cosmos. I'm Matt Kaplan, and a special welcome to any alien civilizations catching our show as part of their own search for extra Betelgeuse-ian intelligence. David Anderson directs the SETI at Home project. He'll give us a progress report as the world's largest computing effort hits its fifth birthday. Bruce Betts has even more comet tales on What's Up, along with a Name Those Comets contest. And we'll start our journey as usual with Emily Lakdawalla's Q&A.

I'll be right back with David Anderson. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, is there lightning on other planets? Yes, there is. Spacecraft images have shown us the ammonia clouds of Jupiter lit up by extremely bright lightning flashes. Analysis of these images indicates that the lightning is not actually happening inside the ammonia clouds, but instead in water clouds deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere. The detection of bursts of radio waves has provided a second line of evidence proving the existence of powerful lightning flashes at Jupiter. The lightning there

is common and intense, with about 10,000 flashes happening every second. The same kinds of radio pulses that have been observed at Jupiter were also found at Saturn by the Voyager spacecraft. But the Voyager's equipment wasn't designed to study lightning, so it wasn't even possible to determine whether the lightning was occurring in Saturn's atmosphere or elsewhere in the Saturn system, possibly even in its rings. Evidence for lightning has also been observed at Venus, but this conclusion is really controversial. Luckily, a new spacecraft was equipped to study lightning at Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. To find out about this multi-planet mission, stay tuned to Planetary Radio.

David Anderson, happy fifth anniversary. Thanks very much, Matt. I was just on the website, and I noticed that you are either nearing, or you said you may have even surpassed, 5 million users. Yes, that's a little deceiving. Those are the number of email addresses in our database, the number of people who have ever participated in Steady at Home. The number currently running it is somewhat lower, probably about 500,000,

which is still a lot of computers. I'll say. Just as, and maybe more impressive than that, some of the other statistics I saw, about 1.4 billion results delivered. say, just as and maybe more impressive than that, some of the other statistics I saw, about 1.4 billion results delivered, you know, not quite the number of hamburgers and McDonald's, but pretty impressive, and 2 million years of CPU time. 2 million years of CPU time. Could you ever have hoped to come anywhere close to that in a traditional computing environment? No, it's completely mind-boggling.

It's the biggest computation ever performed by a very large factor. And you guys, and this is something that I hope we can talk about as we look back over the SETI at Home project, you guys or your immediate predecessors basically invented something which has become, in recent years, one of the hottest topics in computing, and that is distributed, or I guess it's now being called grid computing? Yeah, there's a few different varieties of this type of computing. What people normally mean by grid computing is using computers within organizations. So let's say a company has a lot of desktop computers or a

university has computer labs. Grid computing is kind of controlled sharing of these computers, which are secure, they're managed, they can all run the same software. What we do is kind of the extreme end of grid computing, we actually have a different name for it, which is public computing, because we're using the PCs that are in people's houses all around the world that introduces a lot of uh... complications and technical problems that that don't exist in these controlled environments you know people's computers are turned on and off uh... the network connections may be flaky or slow

and we also have to be worried about the extremely small fraction of participants who who try to hacker system in some way enough that's not we also have to be worried about the extremely small fraction of participants who try to hack our system in some way, and that's not something you have to worry about in grid computing. But yeah, we're sort of the poster child for this new paradigm of public computing, and there's a bunch of other projects out there. Yeah, I've heard of one, the protein folding project, which I think points to you guys as the folks who got all this started.

Yeah, Folding at Home from Stanford is another really good project, and they're doing good science, and they publish papers in science and nature. Another real interesting one is ClimatePrediction.net, which is from Oxford University, and they're using people's home pcs to study global warming and predict how climate's going to change over the next hundred years now the fact that you're mentioning these other projects indicates that you're not stingy with uh with the people out there who would be opening open to helping with a project like this yeah actually um one of our one of our big directions in the past of years has been to try to set things up

so that these projects can all kind of band together and share the same users, the same set of computers. There's a bunch of reasons for doing this. SETI at home, for example, we go through periods where the telescope isn't working and we don't have any new data to distribute. We've been forced just to keep our users happy to send out extra copies of old data. And we'd be much happier if that computing power could be used to study global warming or do whatever people think is important with their computers. Share the wealth.

Yeah. What is it about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that cried out for this kind of approach? It's hard to say. There's definitely something special about it. These other projects, even though they're very meritorious, really have gotten only a small fraction of the participants and the computing power that SETI at home has received. I think one big factor is that study the the this scientific area of of trying to answer the question of whether there's intelligent life outside earth it's just so important and and it's uh... kind of viscerally important to people all over the world

and yet it really happened received uh... a proportion amount of research funding in amer, the federal government currently doesn't spend anything on it. So I think it's, in part, it's the public's way of saying, we think this is something that should be studied more carefully, and we're going to put our money where our mouth is and use their computers to help participate. Or put our CPUs where our mouths are, so to speak. Exactly. There is certainly a drama, even a sense of romance, to being a part of this search.

And that hope that your computer sitting on your desktop might just be the one that finds that bit of code or decodes that bit of a signal coming from God knows where that says we aren't alone. Right. Yeah, I think another aspect of SETI is that it's kind of a species-wide activity. It's a global activity. It has no connection with products or profit motives or discovering drugs that are going to be patented by some company. It's very altruistic and idealistic and maybe a little fanciful. I think everybody understands that the odds are pretty

small that we're going to find anything in the near term, but people think it's worth working on anyway. And while it's an individual sort of an effort, you have a community that has grown up about this, a community, competing teams. Online, I saw yesterday's user of the day, a lovely woman named Elle, and we had this very intriguing description that she had posted of why she's part of SETI at Home. Did you have any idea that it would develop into this kind of communal activity? That's been kind of an ongoing surprise. We've basically attempted in the project to give people tools for these community-type activities. We came up with this mechanism where you could write a profile of

yourself and attach a picture, and we'd show these things online. We'd pick a user of the day and give tools for searching other people's profiles. But we didn't anticipate the way that things would go. In particular, this team idea really took off. And actually, the competition between teams has, I think, spurred our participation as much as almost anything else. People start teams, and then to boost their team, they recruit new users. They get their family and friends who have computers to sign up for SETI at home and join their team. And there's teams all over the world.

Some of them have thousands of members and their own websites. It's this whole kind of subculture that we would have never predicted at the beginning of the project. And, of course, you guys keep score. I mean, you can check on the results, the performance of your team compared to everybody else. And it's got to be the most interesting way to score points of any game on the planet in terms of the number of, what, hours of processing or calculations done. Yeah.

So in the case of Steady at Home, it's just the count of the number of work units that your computer has done. In this project that I mentioned going forward of putting all the different projects in a common software platform, we have to actually define sort of a new unit of currency, kind of like the euro, which is standardized between the climate prediction and the protein folding and steady at home. So we have this standard measure of work, and people can compare computers and teams and individuals. It's fascinating, and as is the project, of course, and the project is not static. The project is expanding.

I'm hoping that maybe we can talk a little bit about new directions that you guys are going in when we come back from a break. Okay. David Anderson is our guest on this week's Planetary Radio. He is the project director for SETI at Home. We're talking to him at his home up in Berkeley, California, and we'll be back right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin.

When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine.

It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. David Anderson is the project director for SETI at Home. We're going to continue our conversation with him about what that project is up to.

It and its, over the last five years of its existence, five million users, five million people who have chosen to join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through SETI at home. David, before we go on to what you guys are up to nowadays and how the project is expanding, you want to recap some of your accomplishments? Yeah. What has all this computing been used for, these two million years of computer time? Well, we've been building up a giant database of what we call candidates, little events, certain frequencies that were found

coming from particular places in the sky. In the past two years, our main accomplishment has been to collate all these things, to notice, for example, when we heard the same frequency coming from the same place in the sky two different times, kind of making a note of that. And we actually made up a list of what were the most interesting candidates

and got 24 hours of computing time down at Arecibo to go re-observe those. Now, we should say that one of the reasons this is important is that you piggyback on Arecibo. You don't get to direct it most of the time. Right. We don't control where the telescope points. Our signal kind of sweeps randomly over the sky, and eventually we see every point in the sky that's visible from Arecibo. It's in the northern hemisphere, so it sees a band in the northern celestial sphere. So, yeah, we basically see these random points.

We got 24 hours in which we controlled the telescope and went back and pointed it at about 200 or so of these and got new data. Then we re-observed that using the same study at home framework and checked if we actually heard the same signal again. We finished the results of that analysis. Unfortunately, we don't think we found any ETs this time around. That's all recently been posted on our website. We've kind of wound up the first phase of the project. So you're hardly done. You have already talked with me and on the website about what you're up to now and the new directions that you're going in. Give us a quick, in the five minutes or so we have left, give us a quick review of what the project's up to.

One thing we've been working on kind of behind the scenes, and it's not visible yet, is switching over to new software technology that'll make it easier for us to deploy new programs. Until now, if we wanted to make a change in the Steady at Home algorithm, even to tweak it a little bit, it was kind of a big deal because we had to release a new version and all of our users

had to download and install that. And it was very cumbersome for everybody. We switched to this new software platform that we're developing. It's called Boink. You said Boink. Right. B-O-I-N-C. It stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. And we'll go down in history as one of the great acronyms. I hope so, along with Unix. BOINC will allow us to deploy new versions that kind of get installed automatically. Users won't have to click or reinstall anything.

So we'll be able to change our algorithms to add new applications, and that's going to make it a lot easier for us going forward. So one of the first things we're going to use that for, of course, Steady at Home itself will be the first application. We're starting a new project called AstroPulse. It's actually going to analyze the same data set that Steady at Home did. We've stored all the data on magnetic tape so we can go back through it again. This time, instead of looking for long, narrowband signals,

we're going to be looking for very short, broadband signals, completely kind of the orthogonal type of signal. That could be evidence of a bunch of different interesting things. E.T. is one. Another possible source of this type of short, pulse signal is what's called an evaporating black hole, a very exotic phenomenon that has never been observed. Oh, yeah, something Stephen Hawking, I think, predicted.

Exactly. So his physical theory predicts that tiny black holes kind of evaporate and go poof and give off this click of EM waves. Fascinating. Yeah. Another project we're working on in collaboration with NVIDIA, the company that makes graphics chips, is to figure out how to use these graphics chips to accelerate AstroPulse and Steady at Home.

These little chips that you use to play Quake and Doom and to do your graphics at 30 frames per second actually have so much floating-point computing power, they're now much faster than the central processing, the Pentium chip in your computer, if you can figure out how to program them right. So we're trying to do that. So all these gamers with their state-of-the-art PCs out there may be able to accelerate the search even greater.

That's right. Or maybe they can be analyzing radio telescope data on their graphics chip while their CPU does climate prediction. What's happening at Arecibo? Any changes there? Yeah. Arecibo recently installed what's called a multi-beam receiver. Until now, the receiver at Arecibo basically sees one pixel, this one kind of fuzzy round dot in the sky. A multi-beam receiver is similar, except it sees a bunch of different dots, in this particular case, seven, a central one, and then six around the sides. That has some big advantages for doing

SETI, because if you hear a signal in more than one of those receivers, more than one of those dots, the chances are good that it's not actually coming from space, but instead is man-made interference or RFI. Rejecting RFI is one of the big difficulties of doing SETI. Using this new multi-beam receiver is actually kind of next on our list of SETI projects. It recently got installed and is being tested at Arecibo. We've built a new data recorder. Of course, we have to record data at many times the rate since we have these multiple pixels. We hope to ship that down to Arecibo and start recording data as early as late summer, I would say.

Now, is this also part of what may be a longer-term plan to begin to get a look at the southern skies? Yeah. Actually, our original motivation in building this multi-beam receiver was to take it down to PARCS, the radio observatory near Sydney in Australia, which has a 13-beam receiver. And we hope to eventually do that. It has numerous advantages.

It's the largest radio telescope that can see the southern hemisphere of the sky, and that part of the sky includes the center of the galaxy and other very exciting places to look at. It's really, at this point, it's sort of an issue of what we can do with the resources that we have, and it'll be easier for us to record data at Arecibo first. Probably take the same data recorder down to Arecibo perhaps a year from now, down to parks, rather. David, we're just about out of time.

Your sense of adventure still sounds very strong. Well, this whole thing has been an extremely exciting kind of a wild ride. You know, it started off as, for me, as just kind of a thing I was doing on the side in addition to my day job. Little by little, it's sort of taken over. And now it's what I do, and I'm excited about being involved with this and with all the other distributed computing projects going on. How can people learn more about SETI at Home?

Now, of course, they can go to planetary.org, the Planetary Society website. There is a whole SETI at Home section there where they can learn more about the project and learn about how they can support it. But I would think they might want to visit the SETI at Home site as well. I should say that the Planetary Society has been really critical to getting this whole thing off the ground. They provided us with the seed funding and have funded us along the way. And they've also, as you point out, done a lot of news and educational material on their website. If people want to participate, they can go to the SETI at Home website,

which is SETI at Home with just letters, not the at sign, setiathome.berkeley.edu. Just follow the instructions for downloading the program. And one of the things that you'll find there is a lovely essay by one of my all-time favorite writers, favorite human beings, Philip Morrison, the great physicist who is also a pioneer in SETI. And, David, I'll leave you with his words. Good hunting.

Thanks very much, Matt. David Anderson is the project director for SETI at Home, which is right now passing its fifth anniversary with 5 million users, 5 million people who allow their computers during their downtime to not be down but be looking for an intelligence in the galaxy beyond our own. I'll be back with Bruce Betts and what's up right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. There's lightning on Earth and Jupiter, but the evidence for Saturn and Venus is inconclusive. Luckily, a single spacecraft, Cassini-Huygens, was able to investigate lightning at Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. Cassini-Huygens is a Saturn orbiter and Titan probe due to reach the ringed planet in July of 2004. But in order to build up enough speed to get to Saturn, she had to take two swings by Venus and one by Jupiter to receive gravity assists.

Cassini-Huygens spent two years studying Venus's atmosphere with powerful radio instruments, but failed to reveal any evidence for lightning there. When she sped by Jupiter, she had no trouble observing bright lightning. Cassini-Huygens will soon turn her radio on Saturn to study lightning in that planet's clouds. And during her many orbits of Saturn, the Cassini orbiter will also be able to search for lightning at Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a significant atmosphere. An exciting moment in the mission will come in January of 2005, when the Cassini orbiter will release the Huygens probe

to descend through Titan's atmosphere. During the three-hour descent, Huygens will search for lightning not only with radio instruments, but also with a microphone that may actually be able to hear the thunder on that distant world. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

Well, the search for terrestrial intelligence ends here with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who has joined us again for What's Up. Welcome, Bruce. That was a positive discovery. Of course, yes. We found terrestrial intelligence in you. again for what's up welcome bruce that was a positive discovery of course yes we found terrestrial intelligence in you that was kind of a compliment it was yeah that was a compliment sorry delve too deeply sorry you really boy threw me off thanks man you're welcome what's up bruce oh well night sky fun stuff got those planets but let's start talking about those comets. There are two comets out there.

Comet NEAT, C2001Q4, which is nicely viewable in both hemispheres right now in the evening skies. The west-southwest, basically. And if you come to our website, planetary.org slash radio, we'll give you some links to places where you can get more details on where to look for these comets. Know that they're out there, and it is visible from a moderately dark site, even suburbs of big cities, with the naked eye. You can definitely see it nicely in binoculars. But it is fading. It is getting higher in the sky.

That's the good news, but it is fading while it does that as it moves away from us. So go out sooner rather than later. And then comet Linear C2002 T7 is currently out of sight for mid-northern latitudes, but the southern hemisphere can see it right now. And we'll be coming up in the northern hemisphere as well in a couple weeks, and you'll be able to see that as well, so in the evening sky. Can I make a suggestion for a trivia contest? If not, not this week, but maybe next week?

We need better names for these comments. And I think our audience is the right group to ask. You're right. No one will ever approve the names we select, but let's run the contest anyway. It goes without saying, although we'll say it anyway, and so will they. I'll bring it up again.

All right. We'll come back to that. Also, up in that night sky, in a similar part of the sky, in fact, you can see very bright Venus after sunset in the west, the brightest object up there. If you look to its upper left, you will see dim reddish Mars and then Saturn beyond that looking fairly bright but not nearly as bright as Venus. And then Saturn beyond that looking fairly bright, but not nearly as bright as Venus. And if you continue up in the sky, you will see Jupiter on the other side of Comet Neat appearing very, very bright. We also have some nice, pretty moon passes by the planets. It doesn't actually, but as viewed from our skies, you can see a beautiful thin crescent moon near Venus on both May 20th and May 21 21st it will then move up and progress past mars and saturn so a pretty view in the night sky let's go on to uh this week in space history 35 years ago

may 22nd 1969 apollo 10 descended to within 50 000 feet or about 17 kilometers of the lunar surface and a dry run for apollo 11 i remember feeling so sorry for those guys yeah so near and yet so far i mean was it would did that ever apply better to any three or two people i should say i i just god i know they were dedicated and they said all the right things because they of course they got asked by reporters when they got back well didn't you just want to you know tell nasa the hell with you guys we're going down uh and they said oh no we would never do that but you had to be thinking they had to be thinking that but but but then they also probably knew that nasa didn't give them enough fuel to get back up so is that right just making that part up a short leash yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sure, guys.

Go ahead and do it. If you want a one-way ticket. Anyway, on to Random Space Fact. Speaking of comets, I may have used this before, but it's something people need to know. Comets have two tails. Sometimes more, but at least two tails. You get one from the light pressure from the sun actually pushing things out, and another from the solar wind, which is moving not quite directly out from the sun. So you end up spreading out a couple different tails.

Often one with the ions has more of a greenish or bluish tint to it. Which one's bigger? Is it the light one or the particle one? Yes. I haven't done that to you in a long time. You haven't. You haven't played Stump the Other Guy. So much for the terrestrial intelligence thing.

Okay. So anyway, moving right along, we'll ask our listeners to name the comments and talk about tail length. I don't know. Let's go on to last week's trivia contest. We asked a simple question for a change, and that was, which moon in this solar system has the thickest atmosphere? Which satellite orbiting a planet has the thickest atmosphere? What did we find out?

Everybody. Everybody had the right answer. Everybody who went to— Better ever, I was just going to stop doing trivia contests. Yeah, I mean, this was... You did say last week, we're going to give you a fairly easy one.

And the answer, of course, was Titan. Titan! Titan, yeah. Moon of Saturn. Being approached by Cassini right now. Our winner

is Dan Fleischer. Dan Fleischer of Pittsburgh, New York had the correct answer. He even told us that he wants a large Planetary Radio t-shirt.

I'm wearing my large as we speak. And,'s that? I'm sorry. It's a call from Iron Butterfly. Just a moment. Oh, look at that. In a gata de vida on his cell phone. Don't you know that I'm loving you? Stop. Not now. Oh, please continue. Oh, please continue. Dan, lest we forget you, you're going to get that shirt. You're going to get a large shirt. Bruce, what do we have for next week? For next week, let's go with your idea, Matt. I had a trivia contest, but clearly it's inferior compared to yours.

You think? I think so. Let's challenge our listeners. We haven't done this in a while. Please submit to us the names that should be given to Comet Linear2-T7 and to comet neat C2001-Q4. What would you name those two comets? Go to planetary.org slash radio, enter, and we will probably give the prize to the one that we think is the funniest. We may feel serious, but it hasn't happened yet.

And you will win a glorious Planetary Radio t-shirt in large or whatever other size you can dream up. Okay, so... Are we going to accept entries that people who say Bruce and Matt? That was why I said we might choose something serious. Yeah, okay. I'm sorry. Are we done? I think we were done a long time ago, Matt.

All right, look up in the night sky, everybody, and think about what it would be like if dogs had two tails. Thank you, and good night. Stick a fork in them. That was What's Up for this week with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He'll be back next week, I promise, right here. We'll all be back next week with more news from the ever-expanding final frontier.

Thanks for joining us.