INDEX

Home

Weapons

Photo Galleries

News

Humor Pages

New Stuff

Contact Me

Arthur C. Clarke and SETI's Dan Werthimer Sent Me A Letter
Dear Mr. Rogers,

Dan and I would like to thank you for your role in the SETI@home success story.

We would first like to thank you for your participation in SETI@home

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

During the first SETI@home project you personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 5658 data chunks and providing 5.737 years of computing time. We want you to know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.

When we started, people thought our projection of 100,000 users to be overly optimistic! You helped us prove that public participation in scientific computing could work. You also helped us to see that this type of community effort deserved to be more common. That's why we developed the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC. BOINC has the benefit of allowing our volunteers the option of sharing their processing power with other worthy projects in addition to SETI@home.

These projects range from looking for gravitational waves to searching for cures to diseases.

But all these successes are just a beginning. As you are aware, SETI@home has successfully transitioned to operating under BOINC. Because of this, new searches are on the horizon for SETI@home. We are releasing a new version of our processing software that increases the sensitivity of our search by a factor of two or more. We are building and installing a new data recorder at Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with a newly installed receiver that has the capability to observe seven places on the sky simultaneously. It also increases our sensitivity by another factor of five. These increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will have capability of detecting signals that are three times more distant than we could before. The region of space we can search will expand by a factor of thirty. That's thirty times the chance that your computer will detect that faint signal from another star.

This increase in capability isn't without cost. Following the "dot com" bust, the commercial support that kept SETI@home running has largely disappeared. Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count on matching funds from the University of California. We are rapidly approaching the end of what funds we do have. We we will need to raise about $750,000 to pay for these new capabilities and to keep SETI@home operating for the next year.

You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Thank You,

Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist, SETI@home)


I replied:

Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Mr. Werthimer:

I will donate $250 to your effort, and I hope that others who see my website follow my example and donate whatever they can to your organization. The SETI program is active and underfunded, and I want to see it succeed.

5.737 years: Wow, that is a lot!

Sincerely,

Tony Rogers

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html