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Richard Cochrane is trained in chemistry and metallurgy but is far more interested and practiced as a political and fund raising consultant, writer and amateur historian. He grew up in a Navy family and with his two younger brothers carried on its 500+ year tradition of naval service to Great Britain and the USA then enjoyed a career with one of the largest advertising and public relations agencies working with numerous Fortune 500 companies and many of America's premier educational institutions. He maintains friendships and acquaintanceships around the world. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

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Ten Years Later Still Not Even A Squeak From ET

May 20th, 2009 • Richard Cochrane
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etThe 1982 movie “E. T. The Extraterrestrial” featured a cartoonish creature marooned on earth who jerry rigged a way to phone home for a rescue ship. But, so far E. T. has not phoned back although millions of people are listening worldwide.

The world’s largest and longest-running volunteer computing project, SETI@home, celebrates its tenth anniversary this month with 140,000 participants and 235,000 computers powering the search for intelligent signals from space. No extraterrestrials have been found yet.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory will celebrate SETI@home 10TH BIRTHDAY on May 21 that has spurred the development of dozens of similar volunteer distributed computing projects.

Launched May 17, 1999, SETI@home uses home computers to sift through radio data acquired from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in search of patterns that might indicate an intelligent source.

The at-home Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) quickly attracted a worldwide following: Three months after its debut, 1 million people had signed up in 223 countries, running the software on home and work computers and in grade school classrooms, universities and even government offices.

Over the past decade, more than 5 million people have signed up, and today, despite more than 80 competing volunteer computing projects, SETI@home still has the largest core of dedicated users.

A big draw is being able to participate in a search that conceivably could detect life elsewhere in the universe - and to get credit for helping find ETs.

During its 10 years of operation, SETI@home has steadily improved the capture of radio signals from the Arecibo radio telescope and subsequent signal analyses. Today, more frequencies are covered and more points in the sky are scanned simultaneously, and, as of March, the SETI@home software also searches for one-time pulses in addition to repeating signals.

ThE project links desktop computers through the Internet into a virtual supercomputer able to perform complex signal analysis of Arecibo data.

Other projects are using BOINC software to study disease-related proteins (Rosetta@home), search for gravitational waves (Einstein@home), and predict the Earth’s future climate (ClimatePrediction.net).

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