Thehottestnewhardwareacrosstheuniverse
Incoming
AllimagesusedwithpermissionThesearchforextraterrestriallifehasoftenpreoccupiedthe staff of this
magazine, positioned as we are in an office next to the strange, slender,
glowing beings that work on our sister title MacFormat.
It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that we saw the distributed virtual
supercomputer that is the SETI@home project, trawling through telescope
data for signs of intelligence using your leftover CPU cycles, go into
‘hibernation’ at the end of March. The reason was that “we’re at the point of
diminishing returns; we’ve analysed all the data we need for now”. Which is
a shame, because we hoped it meant they’d found something.
Elsewhere, though, we were overjoyed to see the search for little green
men continues, with a new project from University of California San Diego,
PANOSETI, that will use hundreds of new radio telescopes to painstakingly
scan the entire visible sky for alien signals. Unfortunately, “we have no idea
on the likelihood of detection,” says UC San Diego physicist Shelley Wright.PANOSETI
£Astronomical setiathome.berkeley.edu
10 |^ |^ April 2020