I have a confession to make

05:27:2003
It is possible that I have set back Humankind's first contact with an alien race by many years.
No, I haven't gone mad. For a while I had a screensaver called SETI@home which was developed by the people at SETI, which is short for "Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence". If you've seen Contact (the Jodie Foster film) or read the book (by Carl Sagan) then you know how they operate.

Anyway, the idea is that when your computer is switched on but not really doing anything, it can download a packet of raw data gathered by some radio telescope in Chile and while away the minutes scanning it for alien transmissions. When it's done its analysis it sends the results back to SETI and either downloads another packet or gets back to downloading porn or whatever important job you've given it.

It is estimated that the combined computing power of all the personal computers in the world is very high- and even the combined power of the computers currently idling is still quite a lot. So why not have them do something useful? Fine sentiments, but I downloaded the SETI@home screensaver for the less than altruistic reason that if life on other planets was indeed discovered from data that had been analysed by my own computer then I would enter the annals of Science without having to make much effort at all. Might even get a Nobel prize. Think of it as a kind of free lottery.

So to cut a long story short, I had some internet problems (see previous entries, though they only scratch the surface of it) and for a long time my computer couldn't download or send back any radio telescope data packets. It had a packet it kept trying to send back to SETI but when it couldn't find an internet connection it would whinge and pop up error messages. Eventually I just turned the screensaver off and replaced it with some scrolling text of a line from a Jimi Hendrix song. (not going to tell you which line or song. Bit embarrased by that actually)

I got an email this morning from SETI, thanking me for taking part and for my 16 packets of data so far analysed by my machine. No mention of lost or delayed packets. They said that armed with the data from public spirited individuals like myself they had booked time on the VLA (the Very Large Array which is a sodding big radio telescope and was featured in Contact) to study three portions of the sky that had so far yielded the most interesting data. Guess what? they found bugger all. So here's me thinking that however unlikely it is, it still remains a possibility that I had some crucial data locked up in my laptop that would have made all the difference.

If there's a moral to this story I'm fucked if I can see it.

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