January 29, 2002
All For One, And One For All ...
I love it when people just get together and make things happen, and it just do happens that the Internet is a perfect venue for it.
The kind of activity I'm talking about first came to my attention in 1999 with the SETI@home project. SETI, that's S-E-T-I, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has a single and simple premise: if intelligent life exists out there in the Universe, they would be sending us coherent and repeating radio signals ... just to let us know they're there. And if we think they might be sending signals, the next question is, shouldn't we be listening?
Well, it turns out, we are. The sky is actually being continuously scanned from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope.
Now, if all this sounds a bit familiar, think Jodie Foster in the 1997 film "Contact," which was based on the novel written by none other than Carl Sagan. And it's all fiction.
Every single day a tape containing 35 Gigabytes of data is generated. And every single day, that data needs analyzing.
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Now let's back to 1999. The computational resources needed to analyze this data were simply not available, but then someone came up with a clever solution.
It turns out that this type of computer problem can be "packetized." In other words, it can be easily cut into tiny chunks so small that just about anyone's PC can analyze them. Later on, these analyzed chunks can be re-assembled, and voila! The problem is solved.
The next challenge was, "So, where do we get all the PC's?"
Now, I don't suppose you've ever asked yourself what your computer is doing when your screensaver pops up? Well, the answer is: next to nothing. And that's where SETI@home took its cue.
Once you've downloaded their screensaver software and received your first packet of data, it lies in wait. When your screensaver comes to life, SETI@home goes to work. When you start typing again, it stops in its tracks. Eventually, all the work gets done, the analyzed data gets sent back, and a new chunk comes down the line.
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Now, this approach has subsequently been implemented for other programs -- some are supporting research in Leukemia and other cancers, and some are at work on Alzheimer's and similar degenerative diseases.
But today, there's a new challenge.
In response to the five Anthrax deaths here in the United States and the Anthrax threat in general, a new effort has been launched by Oxford University.
In simple terms, they're trying to match the internal structure of Anthrax against the internal structure of billions of molecules. When matches can be found, new approaches to antibiotics and innovative drug interventions can be acted on quickly. And better yet, the results will be shared.
While not all scientific challenges can be solved by this screensaver-packetizing approach, the power of the users of the Internet is astonishing. In the SETI@home project alone, over 3.5 million people from 226 countries have contributed their spare computer time.
Now that excites me. This is information created by the people, for the people. And that's a great idea.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
