Want to help in the new massive hunt for alien life announced by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and famed physicist Stephen Hawking? You can: just break out your smartphone, tablet or computer.
The planned 10-year Breakthrough Listen project will collect such massive amounts of data using two of the world's most advanced radio telescopes, there will be no way to analyze it without the aid of crowdsourced processing, project leaders acknowledge.
They say they want to link into the extensive SETI@home initiative, which already has three million members of the public contributing their spare computing power for scientific research.
Experts say crowdsourcing is a valuable way to increase the chances of any large-scale scientific research project succeeding.
"In searches such as this, the more eyes you can get on the prize the better," says Todd Thibodeaux, president of the tech industry association CompTIA. "Harnessing the personal interests of possibly hundreds of thousands of people makes sense and couldn't be accomplished cost effectively any other way."
Breakthrough Listen will use radio telescopes in the U.S. and Australia to listen in on a million stars within the Milky Way and nearby galaxies for radio signals that might be evidence of alien civilizations.
They will be able to scan five times more of the radio spectrum and do it 100 times more quickly than has ever been possible before, the project founders say.
To crunch the massive amounts of data expected, the project will rely on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or Boinc, a collaborative processing platform already helping a number of research efforts in astrophysics, mathematics and medicine.
Owners of Android smartphone and tablets can download a free Boinc app to join the Breakthrough Listen endeavor.
The app connects your device to the collaborative computing process only when it is connected to a charger and the battery has reached full charge, so it won't be a drain on your battery.
Additionally, it will send and receive data only when connected to Wi-Fi, with no impact on your phone plan's data limit.
Computer users can join the Boinc effort through a UC Berkeley website.
The project founders say they are committed to making all data open and expect it "will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public."
"Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks," says Milner.
