I was just wondering if you guys were actually an official part of the SETI organization. I am happy to help, just curious about whether or not you are actually a part of SETI. Please excuse my ignorant inquiry.

I was just wondering if you guys were actually an official part of the SETI organization. I am happy to help, just curious about whether or not you are actually a part of SETI. Please excuse my ignorant inquiry.

AFAIK SETI Institute and SETI@home have nothing in common except the name SETI.
Tullio

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SETI@Home is an official science project, but they are not part of the SETI Institute. Actually, there are about a dozen different SETI projects and none of them are inter-related, but that doesn't make them unofficial.

So yes, they are actually a part of SETI - SETI@Home.

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But you are trying to do the same thing as the SETI institue, right?

But you are trying to do the same thing as the SETI institute, right?

Yes it's all in the title (The) Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence @ home
AFAIK this is the only one that uses volunteer(ed) computer time and not necessarily just at home.

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Old enough to know better(but)still young enough not to care

But you are trying to do the same thing as the SETI institue, right?

Essentially. The main difference is that SETI@Home uses volunteer computing while the SETI Institute does not (hence, @Home), and the very important fact that SETI@Home does not see any of the funding that the SETI Institute receives from any of its sources, such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

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OK. Thanks for clearing that up!

Same goal and same premise:


SETI@Home and the more famous SETI Institute are both listening for radio signals transmitted by an extraterrestrial civilization.

While both used to piggyback the giant Aricebo radio telescope, the SETI Institute eventually received enough funding (from Microsoft's Paul Allen) to build its own radio telescope; the Allen Telescope Array (or ATA).

SETI@Home still piggybacks Aricebo; whatever Aricebo happens to be "looking at" (or listening to as the case may be), SETI@Home records and sends out to computers throughout the distributed network. Your computer and mine then process this data, revealing any interesting detections that may have been made, and send it back to the SETI@Home team. They ultimately review the data to see if a detection is a good candidate for a genuine signal from ET.

Well, Arecibo (not Aricebo) is also a planetary radar that gives images of the Moon craters, visible on the NASA site, and is also capable of monitoring Near Earth Objects. Other planetary radars are the NASA Goldstone antenna and, probably, a Russian military radar. So there is more than one reason to maintain Arecibo working, besides supplying data to SETI@home.
Tullio

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Yes, we are official. To clarify:

SETI is a science, like biology, chemistry, etc.

The SETI Institute and the Berkeley SETI Project are two separate entities both involved with SETI (and not the only two such entities in the world).

SETI@home is one of the Berkeley SETI Project's endeavors, among many (including SERENDIP, Optical SETI, Astropulse, etc.). The entire staff and infrastructure for SETI@home resides in a couple labs on U.C. Berkeley's campus.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude