Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover the history of science and exploration. SETI@Home gave rise to an active online community of volunteers and enthusaists.

Fun facts: SETI@Home launched on May 17, 1999 and gathered millions of participants from hundreds of countries to concentrate their computing power on crunching data obtained from radio telescopes. In ...

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a series of projects that scrub the background noise of the universe to look for alien life. One of the most famous ventures under the name was ...

The year was 1999, and the people were going online. AOL, Compuserve, mp3.com, and AltaVista loaded bit by bit after dial-up chirps, on screens across the world. Watching the internet extend its reach ...

Last week we posted news about rampant cheating in the SETI@Home project. A ZDNet Australia article, an 800+ signature petition, and the resulting flurry of activity across the web elicited a response ...

SETI@Home down The following announcement has been posted to SETI@Home's web page: "At about 3:30 AM PST on 27 February an optical fiber cable connecting the U.C. Berkeley campus with the Lawrence ...

The search for E.T. has been put on hold, apparently by low-tech vandals. The servers for SETI@Home, which coordinates the search for extraterrestrial intelligence via members' PCs, have been ...

It was about 21 years ago that Berkley started one of the first projects that would allow you to donate idle computing time to scientific research. In particular, your computer could help crunch data ...

After a long delay, the first stage of the SETI@Home project will soon draw to a close with official release of a new client based on the BOINC platform. The new client offers better security, easier ...

Users of the popular SETI@Home distributed client have been reporting connection problems over the past few days. These problems come from the fiber connection between the University of California ...

The SETI@home project is about to be inundated with data from an upgraded telescope, and the scientists need your help to process it. The eight-year-old distributed computing hunt for extraterrestrial ...

You’re probably aware of the SETI@Home project, enabling the spare processing power of home computers to help process chunks of radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ...