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http://www.economist.com/node/21549905
Will NASA announce discovery of extraterrestrial life before 31 Dec 2013 ?
Josef Biesenberger in
Science
» Discoveries
Currently Open, suspends 12/30/2013 22:10 (in )
Background
http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2012/04/30/are-we-alone-in-the-universe/
http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-life-viking-landers-discovery-120412.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
http://www.economist.com/node/21549905
EVER since 1993, when funding from America’s space agency, NASA, was cut, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which scans the sky looking for radio signals from intelligent aliens, has been inventive in its methods. In particular, it was one of the pioneers of the field of “citizen science”, in which interested amateurs are recruited to help professionals crunch data. In 1999 it started SETI@home, an application that uses spare processing power on volunteers’ computers to sift the information generated by its radio telescopes. These days, SETI@home boasts more than 1m users.
On February 29th the SETI Institute launched another citizen-science project. This time, though, its researchers are less interested in the digital computers on volunteers’ desks than in the biological ones between their ears. SETILive, as the project is called, hopes to use the pattern-recognition capabilities of brains to distinguish interesting signals from the cacophony of interference generated by the denizens of planet Earth—and to do so in real time.
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