"SETI at Home": how does it work? Your opinion, please? (link below)?

Question

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

What do you know about this project? Is it worth it? What are the drawbacks of personally participating in such a project? Can I trust it?

Thx Kris :-)

Answer 1

I believe you can trust it. It is run by the Berkeley University. I don't know of any drawbacks except a slightly higher electric bill from the increase cpu usage. If you search for BOINC, you'll find that there are several other similar projects that you can participate in, using your computer for other research calculations.

Answer 2

This is a project run by reputable scientists at major Universities.

You can trust it not to be malicious, and since it's been running for a few years now it's been pretty well debugged.

Looking at radio data for SETI signals is a very computer-intensive. The idea behind SETI at Home is to use the idle time of people's home computers. You load the SETI at Home software, and it downloads and processes SETI data from the setiathome website when your computer would otherwise be idle. If your computer finds a possible signal, the information is transferred back to the SETI at Home website, and those data are looked at in much greater detail. You could become famous as the person whose computer found a SETI signal.

Answer 3

This is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a Bona Fide search for radio waves emitted by extra-terrestrial life forms using the giant Arecibo radio telescope. What your computer will do is run a functional screen saver when you're not using it which searches through the collected radio signals and tries to identify possible patterns which indicate that the radio signal might be from an intelligent extra terrestrial origin.

There aren't any draw backs and yes you can trust it....you won't get any adware or spyware on your computer. Maybe your computer will be the one to find an interesting signal, or at the very least you'll have an interesting screen saver.

Answer 4

You can trust it. There are no drawbacks that I know of - it just runs on your computer when you're not doing anything (when the screensaver comes on). I've had it on my computer for years (just about since when they started it). I also have one for a climate prediction study, and there's one out there dealing with proteins that could some day find cures for cancer or other diseases.