SETI@Home turned five years old on May 17. Five years yielding very little of interest. And as of today I have completed 520 data units. That’s more than 92.496 percent of their users and puts me in 374,784th place out of 5,000,834 users. Which means most people don’t do much but the top 10 percent crunch a lot of numbers.
Slashdot noted the anniversary and asked why SETI. Good question, it is rather pointless. The chances of us contacting ET life are slim, if any life even exists. That’s why I’m looking forward to the official release of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. This software will let you crunch numbers for several projects, not just SETI@Home.