After another year spent spinning around the sun, it’d seem we’re still keen to get out of this place. With 5 billion years of sunlight still up our sleeve, people are already tripping over themselves to pay for space travel. Despite an abundance of crazy events on the earth’s surface, and a bubbling population of homo sapiens, the skies and beyond still mesmerise us in unspeakable ways. At least if you’ve just finished watching the BBC series ‘The Planets’.
While yes, Virgin Galactic has raised 100 million in deposits from people wanting suborbital rides, and 34,000 have registered to fly aboard their rocket planes, the SETI project remains a more modest way to stay involved with space exploration. The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has used the spare processor time of gazillions of home computers for years now, to share the computing load of analysing potential signals from space. While they haven’t had any significant results yet, it’s a significant technical achievement whose merits are being mirrored in many other online projects. Noteworthy on the same tip – www.worldcommunitygrid.org – who aim to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity.
by Sean Healy, December 19, 2005 2 Comments
Alongside books about the 
