SETI has just invited the citizens of the world to join the search for extraterrestrial life. All you need to do is log on to the new SETIQuest.org site.  SETIQuest is the result of astronomer Jill Tarter’s TED Prize wish. Tarter wished that they would “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. With SETIQuest, the TED Conference and Tarter are making that happen. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public, making the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm an open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to tweak it and take it to new levels of discovery:  “Today we do a very good job at finding very narrowband signals buried deep in noise – a good guess for what a deliberately transmitted signal might look like.  But we have only limited sensitivity to signals that are more complex.  With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can provide digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data from the ATA and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing.  We’ll take the best of those algorithms and work with the designer and the OS developers to make them run in real-time so that we can add them to our observational quiver.   “And finally for everyone else that doesn’t happen to have coding or algorithmic skills, we’d like to involve you by using your eyes to find anomalous patterns in data coming from the ATA.  These patterns aren’t ones we can define right now, or develop algorithms to detect, but your eyes and your brain can find them anyway.  True, most of these anomalies will turn out to be interference generated by terrestrial technologies, but we want you to become part of a global community that can rapidly sort through all the possibilities and perhaps turn up that needle we’ve all been seeking.” So, non-coding “Citizen scientists” can visually search the data for anything that looks like something other than white noise. Should you spot something anomalous, you can alert the global community. If enough citizen scientists agree that something looks like a real ET signal, their collective concern will direct SETI’s telescopes to zoom in on the signal source. This time, the “WOW!” might just be the real thing. Casey Kazan via SETI.org

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SETI Invites Citizens of the World Join in the Search for ET