...We keep talking about technologies. Did you know that, if you have a personal computer, you can contribute finding evidences of extraterrestrial life? There's a scientific project, the SETI project, that is devoted to this since 5 years ago, in which a huge amount of volunteers participate: More than 5 millions of people spread all around the world. Since this collaborative project has had such a success, now they want to extend it to other research programs.

Jordi Portell is one of the catalans working in Holland on the Gaia european satellite. This week he has taken profit of his visit to Barcelona in order to meet with collaborators of SETI Catalonia. SETI is the english acronym of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a project that analyzes signals received by the Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico, to see if some of them belongs to an alien civilization. Since this implies a huge amount of data, 5 years ago the Berkeley University asked if some volunteers could offer unused resources of their computers. The success was enormous. In one year they had 2 million collaborators, and now it has more than 5. Both in long-term capability and computation power, the SETI project can be considered as the largest computation effort done ever. More than 2 million years of CPU utilization have been accumulated, and every second it performs 65 trillion [10^12] operations, almost twice as the better supercomputer. Even the people at Berkeley realized that so much power couldn't be applied only to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so they created BOINC, a distribute computation platform where SETI will also be integrated. "...to expand it to other projects for medical research, protein calculation, environmental prediction, to astrophysical research or physical research itself..." Now the user can decide the projects in which to participate, and how much resources are assigned to each of them. For the moment there are four projects, and soon a protein calculation project will be added in which a million computers participate.