A year ago, long-time SETI scientist (and advocate) Dr Jill Tarter received a $100,000 TED prize to “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.” Tarter – who served as the inspiration for the character of Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s Contact – has now put her plan into action with SetiQuest, described as “a community – or if you prefer, a tribe – to actively involve the world in the ultimate search for cosmic company”:
If you are good at writing efficient code and like to participate in open source projects — we need you. If you are knowledgeable about digital signal processing and pulling signals out of noise — we need you. If you are eager to use your eyes, ears, and mind to help us find anomalies in the data streaming from the Allen Telescope Array — we need you. We need your help to manipulate and explore the real-time data from the telescope, and to create the environments that will allow global participation by Earthlings of all ages.
…One of the goals of setiQuest is to start streaming real-time data captured at the Allen Telescope Array so it can be used to feed a number of software clients that allow Citizen Scientists to screen the data by looking for interesting features that our existing algorithms might otherwise overlook. We’ll be publishing sample data and draft APIs in the second quarter of 2010 so you can get started and we’re hoping to start pushing real-time data not long after. We’re hoping to see several clients (visual and otherwise) spring up over the next year or so.
After a long-time struggle to get telescope time and be taken seriously back in the 90s, it’s great to see SETI moving forward with resources at their disposal and plenty of goodwill. Hopefully they’ll come to their senses soon and stop consorting with one of the most anti-scientific organizations in modern history as well…
