SETI no longer needs your idle computer to search for alien life

It’s always nice to feel useful, even if not much comes of it in the end. 

The millions of people who, over the past two decades, donated their home computers’ processing power to the SETI@home search for extraterrestrial intelligence no longer need concern themselves with such matters. The project, which launched in 1999 with the goal of using the world’s idle computing power to analyze scientific data and maybe find signs of alien life, will officially stop sending out work requests on March 31. 

For those who don’t remember the heady days of the early 2000s, the SETI@home project offered an exciting alternative to screensavers. Instead of having a bunch of random shapes dancing around your giant monitor, your computer screen could be occupied by the visual representation of all that possibly alien data your machine was churning through at the behest of SETI@home. It was a cool idea, and, as The Atlantic reported in 2017, a million people signed up right when the service launched. 

Well, twenty-one years later, the state of computing has changed a bit. 

“Thanks to the many volunteers who have helped crunch data for SETI@home in the last two decades,” wrote the SETI@home creators. “On March 31, the project will stop sending out new work to users, but this is not the end of public engagement in SETI research.”

The SETI@home site currently lists a “temporarily shut down for maintenance” message on practically every page, but Bleeping Computer was able to grab a statement from the site: 

It’s a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

Those who, over the years, donated untold hours of their computers’ time to SETI@home waxed nostalgic on Twitter and lamented the loss. 

Those wishing to semi-passively assist in the search for meaning and truth need not abandon all hope yet, though. According to the UC Berkeley SETI project, the public will still be called on in the near future to lend aid. 

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“Stay tuned,” wrote the group. “We have some exciting new ways for the public to contribute to SETI@Berkeley that we will announce in the near future.”

For some reason, we don’t think any Dells or Gateway 2000s will be required.