Hi all. Oh yes I do. And I'll tell you what I believe in, or at least one of the things I believe in ... But ... Just a notice before I share my thoughts on this. If you're easily irritated when someone (like me ;-) is rambling about life on other planets, little green men, or stuff like that you should skip this post. For the rest of you: Thanks for sticking around! I apreciate it. Here goes ... I think it's foolish to think that we are alone in enormous this black space all around us and maybe even more foolish to think that we're the smartest ones out there. I believe that we're NOT! So mainly because I am no scientist and do not see me making any progress in discovering the 'little green men' all by myself I like the SETI program. SETI @ home. It translates as Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence @ home. Why search in space for something we (seem to) have so much of, right here on earth? Well I won't argue about IF we have so much of it on earth and how we use it and stuff (oh, we humans are so clever aren't we?) but I'll try to explain why I like the idea so much. At the Aracibo Radio Observatory there are a number of satellite dishes setup (the really really BIG ones I mean) and they receive all sorts of radio signals from space. These radio signals can be both natural and (yes you guest it!) from for example an alien civilization, who knows. The second one is the one they're looking for of course. To filter out what is usable and what is not, they (from SETI) need to look at all the signals carefully. This takes up so unimaginable much computing power, that they cannot do it alone. And that is were we come in. The SETI program we install downloads a little bit of data from SETI and then calculates the peaks and other usable data. Then it returns the result and receives a new package. And so on and so fort, this way helping out the SETI project using my own PC's. The whole idea is to hopefully get some sort of confirmation that there actually is something out there sending signals to make a contact of some kind. Something like E.T. calling us instead of his home again :-) Click to get to SETI and sign up. The program has 2 ways of working, namely either as a screensaver or as a fulltime running application. The first modus only works when you're screensaver is active. So more or less only when you are not using you're machine. The second one, which is my favorite, runs always, thus achieving the most packages. It's not a race of course, but it is nice to see the progress from time to time. At the moment I've given allmost five years of CPU time to the project which has resulted in over thirty eight hundred packages. In all honesty there wasn't a sign from E.T. yet, but you can't say I'm not trying. For me this is the ideal (and maybe only) way to contribute my bit at this department. Which I think is very cool, but then again ... who am I? So please read the stuff @ the SETI website and then make your own decision.