Past Imperfect, Future Tense #3: Starsong on my desktop
© 1999 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved
Sometimes, life turns out better than you ever anticipated. Even if you’re a science fiction writer who fancies himself an optimist.
Classic example: 24 years ago this month, I married my wife Jeanne in an outdoor triple-wedding, in a sunny field in Nova Scotia. Hippies came from hundreds of miles around . . . and so did a vacationing video crew from New York. More or less for the hell of it, they set up their gear--golf-cart sized battery packs, massive cameras, trunks of peripherals, a whole truckload of stuff--and taped all three weddings. Afterwards they showed us all an instant replay. And then we thanked them kindly and bid them farewell. It never occurred to any of the six of us--and especially not to me, the professional futurist--to ask them for a copy of the tape, or even get their names and addresses. This was 1975. What could you do with videotape? Bring it to your local TV station and ask to use their equipment after signoff? Home VCRs were beyond imagining . . . a whole two years away. (And a lot further than that from affordability.) How I wish I’d been more prescient!
I’ve been a science and technology buff since I read my first Robert A. Heinlein novel at age 6. But if I could go back in a time machine and tell my six-year-old self that one day he will see, with his personal eyeballs, a spaceship taking off a mile away . . . that before he dies the innermost secrets of genetics will be understood, and the entire human genome mapped . . . that in his lifetime, perfect music reproduction will become trivially cheap and small enough to clip to his belt . . . I suspect he’d flatly refuse to believe me.
And if I got my younger self to swallow those whoppers, he’d surely choke on the preposterous notion that he will one day own--carry like a purse--a computer over a thousand times more powerful than the one that will carry three men to the Moon and bring them back alive (another prophecy he’d find too good to be true).
And this sort of thing is accelerating . . . for if you had told me, even as recently as ten years ago, that one day I would use that selfsame computer, the one I’m typing on now, to search for intelligent life in space--seriously, usefully--I’d have said you were crazy. If you’d persuaded me you were both sane and correct . . . I believe I’d have gone mad with joy.
Well, now I have--for today I have honest-to-God starsong on my desktop. It crossed countless lightyears and reached Earth last March 5, just over an hour before midnight. I’m combing it for signs of sentience, right now. Really. WHEEEE!
If finding other sentient races out there in the Big Dark doesn’t thrill you, you may as well stop reading this column now, for we’ll never understand each other. Still here? Prepare to be thrilled. If you own any reasonably modern computer, you can now be a meaningful part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence . . . and it won’t cost you a dime, or a lick of effort.
Simply surf to <http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu> Downloading the Seti@home software takes five minutes with a 28.8 modem; installation is utterly painless. With it comes a chunk of raw data from the SETI radio observatory at Arecibo--the actual sound of the stars. Over the next week or two, whenever you’re not using your computer it will quietly chew away on that data, doing Fourier transforms, hunting for signal (the right KIND of signal: a “chirped pulse”) amid the noise. You can watch it working, if you wish. When it’s done, in a week or so, it’ll ask permission to log on, upload its results to the University of California at Berkeley, and download new data. You get credit for each chunk you process. If an information-bearing signal is detected in a chunk you handled, you go down on record as one of the co-discoverers of mankind’s First Neighbors. Think of it as the biggest Lotto in human history . . . for although your odds are terrible, how many names will be more immortal than yours if you succeed?
Be advised the competition is exceedingly industrious! The Macintosh version of the software only came out two months ago--yet Mac users have already logged nearly 2,500 years of CPU time. Pentium/Windows users have put in over 30,000 years.
But what does it cost you to try? Nothing . . . except processor cycles you were already paying for, and wasting. If you’re a real enthusiast, you can let Seti@home operate constantly, in the background--which on my Powerbook 540c slows overall performance roughly as much as a spooled print job--but it can also be configured as a screensaver, using your CPU only when you’re not.
Statistical breakdowns are updated daily: to date, US volunteers have logged 23,000 years, Canadians about 2,300, an unsurprising ten percent of the American total. Interestingly though, of the “top 50” US helpers, 24 are individuals, the rest groups or institutions; whereas of the Canadian top 50, 31 are individuals. Where are our institutions? Drained south?
Windows users will need 32 MB of RAM, the ability to display 8-bit graphics in 800X600 resolution, 10 MB of disk space, and an Internet connection. Mac users will need the above plus a PowerPC processor and OS 7.5.5 or later. Many versions of UNIX and Linux are supported, with **/2 and BeOS (but NOT WebTV) soon to come. And it’s available in 20 other languages.
Since Hitler ranted at the Munich Olympics, our species has been braying electromagnetic signals at the stars, as if we were sure we’re the only carnivores in the jungle--and it cannot be denied that most of what we’ve broadcast to the universe has been blather. Might it not be an excellent use of our powerful new cybertechnology, our mighty Internet, to shut the hell up and listen together, once in awhile? Governments are too dumb: it’s up to us.
