My laptop’s searching for aliens….

Yep.

Here’s the way it works. There’s this group called SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – that uses big radio telescopes to listen for the sorts of electronic communications that tech-savvy civilizations broadcast.

If somebody was listening to us, for example, they’d be picking up “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.”

Ever wonder why they haven’t made contact?

Anyway, SETI winds up getting far more data than they can deal with. The computing power to sift though it all looking for something meaningful is enormous. So they farm the labor out to the rest of us.

Let’s say I’m sitting in class taking notes. My computer’s no mainframe, but it’s got plenty of brain power it’s not using at the moment. So I’ve downloaded a program from SETI, http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/, that runs in the background crunching numbers while I’m still doing my normal work.

And let’s say I don’t use my computer for a few minutes and it goes over to screensaver. I’ve got the SETI program set up as my screensaver with pretty colors, little stars flying at me, and at least somebody getting a little use out of the thing while I’m not needing it….

Best case scenario, you can help resolve one of the greatest wonders of time – are we alone.

Worst case scenario, you get a pretty screensaver.