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Ten years ago today, on a whim, I got involved with the SETI@Home project. It was something a certain kind of geek did at the time, and the result was that you had an interesting-looking screen-saver running on your computer.

As you may or may not know, SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life. And the project involves a few million people donating the use of their computer when they’re not using it, to the analysis of data taken from radio telescopes. This is something that used to be handled by supercomputers, and usually on the US Government’s nickel, that is until funding was cut in the mid-1990s. Those radio telescopes are basically listening for any hint of radio signals from somewhere else in the universe — that is evidence of intelligent life.

It’s one of those big questions that people ponder from time-to-time: Are we alone in the universe? I first began to think about it seriously when I was eight or nine. I read “The Star Wars Question And Answer Book About Space” cover-to-cover several times. It contained a section on radio astronomy that was rather sophisticated for a kid’s book. Among other things it covered a basic explanation — but notably no illustration — of the Arecibo Message sent to the star cluster M13 located 25,000 light-years away. It also included sections on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and the golden record placed on the Voyager probes, but for obvious reasons, no pictures of the message engraved on the Pioneer plaques.

By the time I was 12 or 13 I had a subscription to Discover Magazine, had seen the film ET, and had also watched much of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on public television. The March 1983 issue of Discover had Sagan on its cover, trumpeting the launch of a new effort to search seriously for life in space. (Summary of the issue here.) Within its pages I first learned about Frank Drake who predicted that we would find intelligent life by 2000, and was first exposed to the concept of a von Neumann space probe. It arrived in the mail on a day when I was home sick from school, and I devoured it, learning more from it than I probably did in any science class I would take.

In his TV series, Sagan made an argument (which I now know was borrowed in part from Drake) that fascinated me. When you consider the number of stars in the galaxy, which is about 400 billion, the chance that there’s life out there, and that it’s intelligent isn’t unspeakably far-fetched, but by a reasonable stretch of argument, plausible. (Though Sagan’s own math is off on one point: In the clip below he says our solar system has 10 planets, when the accepted orthodoxy at the time was nine. It’s now eight. In the early 80s, when Cosmos was made, Pluto was still considered a planet, rather than a Kuiper Belt Object. Thank you, International Astronomical Union.)

In any event, the thought that I could help out in even a small way with the effort of finding a signal from somewhere out there, however remote the chance of success, has kept me mildly entertained these 10 years. As of today my computers have contributed 229,235 work units, comprised of 198.06 quadrillion floating point operations to the effort. (That’s 198,060,000,000,000,000 or an average of 54.2 trillion operations per day.) Plus I’ve earned credit for another 3,053 work units under the original “classic” SETI@Home program, which works out to 33,319 hours of computing time.

By SETI@Home standards, my numbers aren’t impressive. I rank somewhere at about 38,000th place among its base of users. A team I’m involved with, SETI.USA, has a few members who have reported more than 10 million work units, and many more who have stats north of the 1 million and half-million mark. I’ve never been quite as disciplined about keeping my machines running the program as I might have been. But when I learned that the 10-year anniversary of my participation was coming up, I had hoped to push my machines to the point of having finished 250,000 units, and have paid close attention to my progress in recent weeks. I have four computers running SETI@Home: Three at home, including my newly purchased MacBook Pro, and one at the office which runs it only when I’m not there. Obviously I didn’t hit the goal I had hoped for, but will probably see that number before the end of the summer.

I was interested to see the video below of a talk by SETI’s chief scientist Dan Werthimer, and for once to see a face on the other end of the SETI@home process. It’s been fun to have been a small part of the biggest supercomputer on the planet and the largest computation that’s ever been done. Still, no signals yet.

Not that anyone other than myself would care to count, but this domain has just moved to its fourth Web host. The whois database tells me that it was nearly a decade ago that I first registered this domain name. At the time I hosted it with Earthlink, which was about as good at Web hosting as a fork is for scooping dry oatmeal. So I moved it to 1and1.com in mid-2004, which turned out to be highly complicated, and for some reason unable to support Blogger, which was what I wanted to use to manage the home page. Later that year I found Websitesource, which has lately had some serious stability issues, and no fewer than three recent failures of its DNS servers, and which turned out not to be terribly friendly to WordPress, which is my current site management system. So as of today this site is hosted with Mediatemple, which has come highly reccommended. We’ll see. As recounted by thousands on Twitter today, the site crashed for a good half hour just as I was getting things underway. I’ll do my best to hope that is not a bad omen. It does however seem to be far more competent a host for all things pertaining to WordPress. I was able to upgrade the installation to the latest version easily, which had been a problem at Websitesource. As they say, so far, so good.

I don’t do the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, and as long as I’ve lived in New York I never have. I do however work very near where the ball does drop, and in fact can see it from my office. Last night I saw some rehearsal drops, and decided to meander down to Times Square before heading home. I shot this video. Tonight, given the weather, I think the picture on television will look rather different.

Times Square, Night Before New Year’s Eve from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

This is a test posting. What I’m testing is whether or not Writely, the Web-based word processor, is a suitable method for writing and posting blog entries. Typos and proofreading are a real hassle in the traditional Blogger interface, and often I write first in Microsoft Word, then cut and paste to Blogger. But since writely lets you publish directly to Blogger (both are owned by Google after all), I figure why not try and save myself a step. So here goes.

You may notice changes underway, that have a little something to do with the little badge at the lower left of the page. With luck this once-static page may actually see some regular updates starting now. You might say this is arik.org version 2.0.