0.3 On the web, everyone can be a scientist

On the web, everyone can be a scientist

Did you know that you can fold protein molecules, hunt for new planets around distant suns or simulate how malaria spreads in Africa, all from an ordinary PC or laptop connected to the Internet? And you don’t need to be a certified scientist to do this. In fact some of the most talented contributors are teenagers. The reason this is possible is that scientists are learning how to turn simple scientific tasks into competitive online games.

This is the story of how a simple idea of sharing scientific challenges on the Web turned into a global trend, called citizen cyberscience. And how you can be a scientist on the Web, too.

Looking for little green men

A long time ago, in 1999, when the World Wide Web was barely ten years old and no one had heard of Google, Facebook or Twitter, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, David Anderson, launched an online project called SETI@home. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Looking for life in outer space.

Although this sounds like science fiction, it is a real and quite reasonable scientific project. The idea is simple enough. If there are aliens out there on other planets, and they are as smart or even smarter than us, then they almost certainly have invented the radio already. So if we listen very carefully for radio signals from outer space, we may pick up the faint signals of intelligent life.

Exactly what radio broadcasts aliens would produce is a matter of some debate. But the idea is that if they do, it would sound quite different from the normal hiss of background radio noise produced by stars and galaxies. So if you search long enough and hard enough, maybe you’ll find a sign of life.

It was clear to David and his colleagues that the search was going to require a lot of computers. More than scientists could afford. So he wrote a simple computer program which broke the problem down into smaller parts, sending bits of radio data collected by a giant radio-telescope to volunteers around the world. The volunteers agreed to download a programme onto their home computers that would sift through the bit of data they received, looking for signals of life, and send back a short summary of the result to a central server in California.

The biggest surprise of this project was not that they discovered a message from outer space. In fact, after over a decade of searching, no sign of extraterrestrial life has been found, although there are still vast regions of space that have not been looked at. The biggest surprise was the number of people willing to help such an endeavour. Over a million people have downloaded the software, making the total computing power of SETI@home rival that of even the biggest supercomputers in the world.

David was deeply impressed by the enthusiasm of people to help this project. And he realized that searching for aliens was probably not the only task that people would be willing to help with by using the spare time on their computers. So he set about building a software platform that would allow many other scientists to set up similar projects. You can read more about this platform, called BOINC, and the many different kinds of volunteer computing projects it supports today, at (External Link) .