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When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I downloaded a special screensaver.

It had lots of pretty colors and graphs, but that's not why I wanted it.

My goal was to humbly contribute to humankind search for intelligent life in the universe,

a.k.a. aliens.

This effort is officially called the Search for Ext for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

The screensaver I downloaded, called SETI at Home, was part of a large-scale community project to use people's everyday PCs to comb through radio signals that hit Earth from space, mostly from stars.

These signals have particular patterns.

So if astronomers find a signal that doesn't quite fit those patterns, it could mean

some intelligent life is sending them.

Within a few years, the SETI-at- Home Project recruited 3.8 million people.

I hijacked my parents' little Gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it, trying to contribute

to what seemed like the thing, right? It seemed like the one opportunity, living in the middle

of nowhere, and sort of like rural eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this

journey that humankind is on. It was amazing.

That's my friend James Davenport.

He's an astronomer at the University of Washington, and his focus is on stars.

And I talked to him recently because, importantly for this episode, he's a collaborator with the SETI Institute,

a nonprofit research organization that combs through astronomical data in search of signs of life outside

of Earth. It's a search that goes way back, way before James and I took control of our family's

computers, in 1924. When many researchers were excited about Mars, and Mars's orbit was close to Earth,

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