E.T.’s Home Phone UC Berkeley’s SETI@home, one of the most significant citizen-science projects of the late 20th century, brought the search for intelligent life to PCs. It hasn’t yet found what it set out to, but there’s still hope.
Around the time the movie Contact came out in 1997, Kevin D., a governmental IT support and procurement employee in Toronto, saw a notice on a technical news site about a piece of software that was being developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The scientists were interested in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and courtesy of Contact, so was Kevin D. The moment he heard about the program that would eventually come to be called SETI@home wasn’t as dramatic as Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Dr. Eleanor Arroway discovering a message sent across the universe, but it would make a major impact on the next two decades of his life. It also signaled the advent of a productive and unprecedented citizen-science project that continues today, 20 years after it launched in May 1999.
