BYTE MARKS
How will aliens view human race?

By Burt Lum

Have you ever pondered the thought of extraterrestrial beings watching our newscasts and radio broadcasts, trying to make sense of what is going on here?

I wonder what they would say about Earth and the creatures that inhabit it. Would we be considered exploitative, destructive, intolerant and hostile? How would we be judged if we were put on trial for the proper stewardship of this planet and the ability to work well together as a species toward that end?

These questions pop into my mind, triggered by current events and an e-mail I received from the SETI@Home project. As you may recall, SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The SETI@Home project, at setiathome.berkeley.edu, is a program that enlists the help of home computers in the analysis of data from the Arecibo radio telescope on Puerto Rico, www.naic.edu.

An immense amount of data has been collected. Analyzing it requires either a supercomputer or a means of distributing the problem amongst many individual personal computers. Hence, the SETI@Home project. Since May 1999, home computers have been crunching data produced by the SETI team — make using of times when the computers' owners aren't using them.

Four years later, the team had whittled the problem down to a few hundred potential locations in the sky. This was no easy task. They begin with more than 5 billion potential candidates. Their method for selection is outlined in detail at planetary.org/stellarcountdown.

March 18-20, the SETI team took this list back to the Arecibo telescope to gather more data on the most promising candidates. Their results, if successful, may provide proof of the existence of intelligence beyond our planet. I always have thought that if we could only realize our place in the broad scheme of things, perhaps we could do more about protecting our blue planet.

I think back to visionaries like Carl Sagan, who help found the Planetary Society. In his words, this is "a search for a cosmic context for mankind." In that context, how will mankind be viewed? ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net.