Ever watched the movie Contact or read the book? Interestingly enough, the organization behind those big “listening” telescopes featured in the aforementioned story recently open sourced a series of projects designed to help infer non-noise from noise. That is, they’ve released the code that attempts to find ET.
Indeed, if you want to help improve current searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (who doesn’t? Me, I’ve wanted to be Elliott since about 1982 and have my own little psychically-connected-beer-drinking ET) and better understand our place in the cosmos, setiQuest is a project worthy of your skills.
In this podcast, hosted by IBM developerWorks, I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Avinash Agrawal and Jon Richards, program manager and senior engineer on the setiQuest project — they talk about the program and the open source software behind it. Have a listen and while you are doing so, try not to day dream about “ET phoning home” or flying bikes!
