You know the deal with Down to a Science, the cafes are meant to serve as a launching point for a conversation…at home, at work, on the MUNI….wherever.

SETI@Home is the posterchild for getting peeps involved in scientific research, at least while your screen saver is active. The project started back in 1999 to help explore the huge amount of data (requires teraflop/s of processing power)….the solution posed was a distributed computing concept. After a few attempts, SETI decided upon a background processing client that could be installed on a home computer.

Fast forward to the present, SETI@Home boasts 4 million participants with ~200K active users. All thrilled to be the first to find ET (or they just want to beat the compadres across the world).

So if you’re interested in finding ET (but more likely just watching a pretty screen saver), download the software from SETI@Home and install away.

Watch Dan Werthimer talk about SETI@Home in front of the mad scientists at the Maker Faire. And scroll down further to check out Dan’s presentation (which he recently gave to those crazy Bay Area Skeptics)

Dan’s Presentation
To advance to the next slide, click on the right side of the image. Click on the left side to go back.

Download Dan’s Presentation (~9 MB).