A new citizen-science project will improve the chances of finding ET

Ever since 1993, when funding from America’s space agency, NASA, was cut, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which scans the sky looking for radio signals from intelligent aliens, has been inventive in its methods. In particular, it was one of the pioneers of the field of citizen science.【小题1】

In 1999 it started SETI home, an application that uses spare processing power on volunteers’ computers to filter the information generated by its radio telescopes. These days, SETI home boasts more than one million users.

On February 29th the SETI Institute launched another citizen-science project. This time, though, its researchers are less interested in the digital computers on volunteers’ desks than in the biological ones between their ears.【小题2】It is expected to distinguish interesting signals from the noise of interference generated by the inhabitants of planet Earth—and to do so in real time.

【小题3】To do this, the SETI Institute use san instrument called the Allen Telescope Array—a group of 42 small radio-telescope dishes in California, partly paid for by the co-founder of Microsoft.

Unfortunately, some parts of the radio covering scope are full of signals created by Earthlings, rather than aliens. Everything from passing satellites and space junk to ground-based radar and even the starting systems of nearby cars can generate fake radio waves that confuse the software.【小题4】

But SETILive will bring them into play.【小题5】It is hoped that they will be able to filter out the noise and spot potentially interesting signals buried behind the radio mass from Earth. “Those interesting signals will not necessarily have come from alien civilisations.” says Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at Oxford University who helps to run Zooniverse, a citizen-science website that manages several projects, including SETILive.