SETI screensaver: search for extraterrestrial life
Screensavers are usually just made up of cutesy pictures or something that the user likes. However, there’s a screensaver out there that not only looks good, but your computer will be used to search for life in other planets:
“The program can be downloaded and installed on a home computer,” Wertheimer said. “It works as a screensaver, performing analysis on the data received from SETI at home.”
He said each home PC is sent a small chunk of sky data to analyze.
“With 2,000 computers looking at their own piece of sky data, it is the equivalent of the biggest computation on the planet,” he said. “Once you’ve got the data in your computer it will start sifting through hundreds of millions of different radio signals, looking for some faint signals from a distant civilization.”