I used to run a SETI@Home group. But following the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen in late 2007 I decided to invest my computer’s spare processing power in a practical BOINC project to do with protein folding, climate prediction or disease control, rather than the fun but slightly silly search for aliens. But you can see how I would have found the idea of a SETI@Home group searching for Stockhausen’s homeworld humourous. After all, he believed in his extraterrestrial origins himself, as you can see…

“It is an inner revelation that has come several times to me, that I have been educated on Sirius, that I come from Sirius….”

“Music will be the universal language one day when we are more developed. And I clearly see Sirius, the heart of the local universe, the mother sun, as the school and main centre of music and musical education.”

— from Towards A Cosmic Music by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen was one of the heavyweights of composition of the last fifty or so years, so we must give these quotes their due. Who was Karlheinz Stockhausen? Click here and find out!

The SETI project uses radio telescopes to scan the skies for signs of extraterrestrial transmissions (just like in Contact.) The problem is that one ends up with huge amounts of data to process. A few bright guys came up with the idea that many computers working together could crunch more data than the most expensive supercomputer. SETI@Home is the first and largest distributed computing project, running on millions of computers the world over.

Now there are many BOINC projects (a clever backronym for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). Many of these projects have much more practical and positive use than looking for aliens. You should check it out and see what your computer can do in its spare time.