I’ve been running Seti@Home on my computer for a few years now and have managed to crank out a few thousand work units for the cause. Its seems like an easy-enough contribution to science: donate unused computer cycles to some giant distributed-computing project. I like the screensaver—it’s spiffy-looking and gives me some idea of the progress my machine is making as it crunches data from stellar signals.

So, why not try it? If you’re interested, you can sign up and get started over at
Seti@Home.

If searching for signals from ET isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you’d like to help out with some astrophysical researchers trying to detect gravitational waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space and time, emanating from such violent events in the cosmos as black hole collisions and supernovae, the action around rapidly rotating compact stars, and between active members of binary systems. These ripples travel through space, carrying information both about their source and about the nature of gravity itself. And there are two groups of astrophysicists trying to detect them: the LIGO and the GEO-600 collaboration. Their measurements are producing data that needs crunching, and why not use the world’s desktops as a powerful tool, just as the Seti@Home folks do with their distributed computing? If you’re interested in that project, you can visit the Einstein@Home project.

These are two of many other distributing computer projects that make solid contributions to science every day. I think it’s pretty cool that people and their home computers can be a part of Big Science!