SETI at Home, a moniker that contains the at symbol that you typically see in email addresses, in a manner that was a lot more

common in the late 90s and early 2000s, was initially released in mid-1999 as part of the larger

SETI program, SETI standing for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This particular facet of that larger effort, which was set up to, among other things,

listened for signals from potential intelligent life forms,

living on other planets elsewhere in the universe,

took the shape of a distributed software platform, by the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

What that meant in practice was that you could download a piece of software onto your personal computer,

and that software would plug you in to the larger SETI research platform.

As long as you had at least an intermittent internet signal,

this software would send you chunks of data collected by mainly telescopes, like the recently

collapsed Erecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, and your computer, while not being used by you,

would donate its processing power to the larger undertaking of filtering that

telescope data for signals that could not be attributed to natural noise from the universal

environment or the technology used to collect those signals, the telescopes, the cables,

and so on. The sheer bulk of data that needed to be worked through in this way

justified the creation of this sort of project, because although it had a halfway decent budget,

as alien-related projects go, SETI's main bottleneck at this point was the ability to filter

and parse all the raw data it was collecting for meaning.

It was almost like it had collected countless haystacks, and that was great.

It was part of what they needed to do.

But in order to search those haystacks for needles,

...