| Dear Mr. Rogers,
Dan and I would like to thank you for
your role in the SETI@home success story.
We would first like to thank you for your
participation in SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
 During
the first SETI@home project you personally assisted us
by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 5658 data
chunks and providing 5.737 years of computing time.
We want you to know we appreciate your efforts and the
efforts of the other 5.4 million volunteers who have donated
over 2.4 million years of processing time.
When we started, people thought our projection
of 100,000 users to be overly optimistic! You helped us
prove that public participation in scientific computing
could work. You also helped us to see that this type of
community effort deserved to be more common. That's why
we developed the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
Computing or BOINC. BOINC has the benefit of allowing
our volunteers the option of sharing their processing
power with other worthy projects in addition to SETI@home.
These projects range from looking for
gravitational waves to searching for cures to diseases.
But all these successes are just a beginning.
As you are aware, SETI@home has successfully transitioned
to operating under BOINC. Because of this, new searches
are on the horizon for SETI@home. We are releasing a new
version of our processing software that increases the
sensitivity of our search by a factor of two or more.
We are building and installing a new data recorder at
Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with
a newly installed receiver that has the capability to
observe seven places on the sky simultaneously. It also
increases our sensitivity by another factor of five. These
increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will have
capability of detecting signals that are three times more
distant than we could before. The region of space we can
search will expand by a factor of thirty. That's thirty
times the chance that your computer will detect that faint
signal from another star.
This increase in capability isn't without
cost. Following the "dot com" bust, the commercial
support that kept SETI@home running has largely disappeared.
Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count
on matching funds from the University of California. We
are rapidly approaching the end of what funds we do have.
We we will need to raise about $750,000 to pay for these
new capabilities and to keep SETI@home operating for the
next year.
You can check on our fundraising progress
by visiting our main site at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Thank You,
Sir Arthur C. Clarke and
Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist, SETI@home)
I replied:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Mr. Werthimer:
I will donate $250 to your effort, and
I hope that others who see my website follow my example
and donate whatever they can to your organization. The
SETI program is active and underfunded, and I want to
see it succeed.
5.737 years: Wow, that is a lot!
Sincerely,
Tony Rogers
|
