[this review was slightly modified feb 7th to correct errors and to expand on some issues brought up in the comments area]

This is not a review of the seti@home software itself, but rather the entire seti@home project. The software is nifty, the screen saver looks pretty, and all platform clients are pretty stable.

However, the project is what I want to talk about. And before we get really started, in the past, when I talk about my problems with seti@home my opinions are usually met with anger and hostility. It's seems that our society needs to find some purpose to the Universe, some kinship with some extraterrestrial beings so badly that it's willing to forgo looking at the science anymore. I call it the X-Files Religion, and it's upsetting to me that people rarely even listen to what projects like seti@home are really doing. So don't be one of them, read to the bottom (sorry about the length).

seti@home is the largest distributed computing project ever attempted. You could say that it's the largest computer ever built by man.

And this computer is being used for a totally impossible task. Therefore, it's also the biggest waste of computer resources in history. Read on.

seti@home is very popular, mostly because:
1. it was the first popular distributed project that was more easily understood by the public than breaking some RSA encryption code.
2. communicating with aliens has been a primary theme in science fiction literature and film in the century
3. in recent decades many spiritual people have turned from believing in a Supreme Being to believing in superior beings and they want to find them or evidence of them
4. the uninformed media (and The X-Files)

There's no doubt in my mind that there is/was/will be intelligent extraterrestrial life. Specifically, super intelligent life, such as humans (the term super intelligence or SI is used to separate intelligences such as most mammals on earth, and the rare intelligences that develop true technology and are able to purposefully change their environment on a grand scale).

The seti@home project is based on the idea that SI's have sent radio waves into space and that by combing the radio waves that we receive on earth we may be able to identify these messages and find where they came from. The complexity of the identification requires tremendous amounts of computer time, hence the distributed nature of the project.

Let us examine why looking for SI's by examining the radio waves that traverse the Universe is such a waste of time and resources.

seti@home makes a lot of assumptions in order to make it's goals seems plausible (we're using very relative terms here, even seti@home says chances of finding ET's are incredibly low, but they do say the chance is there, my point, as you'll see, is that the chances are basically zero).

One such assumption is that every world that develops life within the so called life zone around a star will develop an SI. (see this discussion of Drake's Equation: http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/drake-bg.html; the numbers SETI plugs into this equation are inflated and naive in order to make the chances of finding something look a lot better).

The incredible series of events that created intelligence on earth is staggering in complexity and randomness. Although there are probably many other random even paths that could lead to intelligence, keep in mind that intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable. It's a strategy a small part of the animal kingdom happened to stumble across here on earth but it was all luck that allowed intelligence to survive. Intelligence requires large brains, and brains are expensive organs. If it wasn't for a couple of well timed asteroids, the proper amount of radiation, our position in the relatively stable galactic region that is the galactic arm, etc. the world would now be owned by insects (and maybe one day it will; after all only two forms of life have meaningfully rising populations, humans and insects) as they are a much more efficient organism.

Now, lets assume that intelligence is needed in sending a coherent radio message that we can detect. How long have we, as the human race have had the capability of generating strong radio waves. A century perhaps? And have we gone out of our way to send such messages? We've only sent two so far, and they were not omni-directional, nor were they particularly strong, and they only broadcasted for a very short time. So how can we assume that an SI would bother sending radio waves in enough volume that we could pick it up? Just imagine the energy costs required to do this.

If the universe has a finite age, we can assume that the development of intelligent life took some window of time and it's not an unreasonable assumption that any intelligent life in the universe had only evolved to the point of sending radio waves in say the last million years, and i'm being very generous here. It took 3 billion years for life to go from the molecular replicator to the firstmulti-celled organism on Earth.

Now, how long will an intelligent lifeform survive once it achieves the technology levels needed to send a radio message? We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already. Every year more ways of wiping out the intelligent population on our planet are developed. If anything, we're more at risk because most of us have relaxed since the end of the Cold War. How long do we have? Lets say 400 more years before something catastrophic happens (I think further out than that and we may have settled enough extra terrestrial worlds that we'll make it, but that's a big if). Maybe we'll survive. Lets hope. But frankly, the odds are pretty bad.

Star Trek fans will say "but no, there are peaceful ET's out there" and yeah, maybe there are, but the majority are certainly not (and the peaceful ones are probably hiding, and would be very unhappy to "find" an aggressive species like us). We have to assume that other SI's will face similar problems as we have; intelligence came about through evolution which is inherently competitive after all. So our ET's are probably grappling with the same territorial conflicts (war) and tribal differences (religious/racial genocide) as we have.

So lets say the average window during which an intelligent species can broadcast a meaningful radio message is 500 years (again, that's assuming they'd actually bother).

Combine this with the time to intelligence mentioned earlier and the fact that we have only been listening for 50 years and we have a very tiny portion of space that seti@home could possibly cover considering the limitations of light speed.

Lets say an ET developed radio waves a million years ago and sent a signal to the stars. Then they wiped themselves out 200 years later. This means that this system would have to be within 250LY of one million LYs from us. Not likely. And that's assuming that the signal actually ran for 200 years. Can you imagine any Earth government, or populace for that matter, allowing such whimsical expenditure of precious energy for 200 years???

I don't want to dwell on numbers tho, because they are easily diputable. Just think of the probabilities which dwindle down to zero.

And this is assuming that the intelligent species that happens to be in the perfect region actually bothered to develop radio waves (or equipment that sends radio off as a side effect) in the first place. Not every atmosphere will bounce radio waves the way it does on earth, maybe our otherwise perfectly located race never needed radio, they developed a different communication system (light or cable based) or have ESP or something.

Radio waves are actually a rather inefficient way to communicate across huge distances. Because of their low frequency they are easily disrupted, they fade, and, because the amount of radio activity in that frequency range, easily interferred with.

Focused laser beams are much better, in fact, we humans have been using laser beams instead of radio waves since the 70s.

My point is that yes there almost certainly is intelligent life out there, but this seti@home project is a pipe dream. we are using billions of CPU cycles for something that is impossible to find in this way. And think of another thing, pretty much 100% of these precious cpu cycles are used to analyze completely random noise that the Universe if filled with. At least if seti@home shared their massive numbers of cpus with other radio astronomy projects, that would be so much more worthwhile.

seti@home plays on our imagination and our dreams, but it's a dead end. If we want to find extraterrestrial SI's we must look for them in a totally different manner. What that is? I don't know. Examining gravity wells? (Stanislaw Lem said the best way to find ETs is to look for trash in space, but I hate to be so cynical).

But I do believe that examining radio waves for an intelligent signal is a waste of time.

Now you might say: hey, seti@home uses idle cycles on my computer, so what do I care? It's fun and the screen saver is pretty. Well, that argument may have made sense 3 years ago when seti@home was the only non-encryption related distributed computing project available to the public. However, since then, many other distributed projects have sprung up.

As an example, folding@home (foldingathome.stanford.edu) is using spare CPU cycles from participants as part of research into understanding complex proteins. The findings may lead to things such as a cure for cancer, AIDS, and many other deadly diseases, as well as leading us closer to realizing nano-technology, a technology that may very well help us get to the stars ourselves!

A final note (brought about by tibo's comment):
seti@home is not all bad. It brought the power, the excitement, the entertainment of Distributed Computing to the masses. For this we thank seti@home.

Look for much more worthwhile DC projects coming soon. One that I'm very excited about and am watching very closely is:
http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/index.html
aka Casino-21

This project will crunch on weather patterns to simulate our planet's weather in 50 years. Considering the recent spat of environmental concerns about Global Warming, I think this is probably the most important DC project to date.

Recommended: No