What is all this nonsense about aliens and radio telescopes and such? Well SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). These telescopes pointed at the sky, listening for potential communication signals from some distant civilization. I mean, hey, we got radio, so it is possible some other civilization also has it. Just as our radio signals escape from our planet and go off into the universe, so must signals from some other planet.

The SETI organization has many computers analyzing these signals, looking for one that may be created by some other life form. By loading the SETI@HOME software on hundreds of thousands of PC's, the SETI computes can, over the internet, use un-used CPU cycles to help analyze the radio telescope data.

You can visit the main SETI site for a complete rundown of how this all works, and how you can sign yourself up to do the same. Just click on the SETI@HOME here, or above.

Listen to Radio Signals from Space

We've taken ten seconds of data from the Arecibo telescope and converted it to sound. The original
data is around 1.42 GigaHertz (billion cycles/second), which is way too high to hear. We've
extracted a 10 KHz band and shifted it down to the audible 0-10KHz range.

Expect to hear a hissing sound. That's how radio signals from space generally sound. The type of
signal SETI@home is searching for would sound like a whistle. It would probably be too faint to
hear (although SETI@home could hopefully detect it).

Click here to download.