Seth Shostak…you are my new hero. What an event on Monday night! There was an incredible blend of science and humanity represented, as we continue to search for an answer to the question: “Are We Alone?”

40 years of the scientific search has been fruitless so far, but that does not daunt the hopes of our crowd last night. Almost everyone believed life exists out there, though not everyone was convinced we’ll find something considering we’ve only been broadcasting for 200 years. In either case, the search remains important as this seems to poke at a fundamental curiosity most of us share.

SETI is currently 100% privately funded. If you’d like to learn more about contributing to SETI, check out TeamSETI’s page for more info. Beyond sustaining the search, there are many fantastic perks including signed copies of Seth’s Book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

KQED/Nova Clip we watched to begin the evening:

Podcast of the Event:
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Links:
Nova Q&A with Seth
Seth’s SETI Podcast
SETI’s YouTube Channel
Nova Podcast featuring Seth

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).