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    For 21 years, enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET. UC Berkeley scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found.
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    For 21 years, enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET. UC Berkeley scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found.


    For 21 years, enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET. UC Berkeley scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found.

    https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/01/12/for-21-years-enthusiasts-used-their-home-computers-to-search-for-et-uc-berkeley-scientists-are-homing-in-on-100-signals-they-found/

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    14 Comments

    2. throwawayhbgtop81 on

      Huh. Interesting! I’ve had SETI@Home on my computers for years but I never followed up to see if they actually found anything worth looking at.

    4. ofWildPlaces on

      My friends and I set up SETI@Home on all the computers in our High School computer lab back in 1999. It was the coolest thing.

    7. _steve_rogers_ on

      I remember something called folding@home on PlayStation 3, does anyone remember what that did?

    8. chewy_mcchewster on

      I ran Seti@Home for almost a decade when it was relatively new.. i remember a few possible hits way back, but just local stuff. Hoping for something interesting from all this work

    9. JohnDivney on

      What was the minimum strength of signal required to stand out among the noise?

      Do we have better telescopes today that could find a fainter signal?

    10. muzik4machines on

      so you mean that fan noise i’m hearing (cause the machine runs SETI@Home) for the last 20 years was actually useful? thank god!

    11. LittleCeizures on

      In the late 90’s I had to setup 70+ PCs for a new call center that wasn’t going to be staffed for few months. I put SETI@Home on ever single system and just left it. Over a year after the setup, and no employees, I moved on to another job and left the PCs as is.

    12. hondashadowguy2000 on

      If these signals were detected between 1999 and 2020 and are only now being investigated as of 2025, it seems highly likely that if they were artificial in origin then they only existed for a brief period of time before going away. I doubt many follow up investigations will be able to find the signal source again unless we’re talking about some constant source that has been oriented toward the Earth over the span of decades.

    13. HotNubsOfSteel on

      With the level of attenuation that any tiny signal would make after being transmitted compared to the monumentally powerful radiation of a star, I’ve always thought SETI is a waste of time. It’s quite literally like trying to parse out a whisper inside a roaring stadium. We’ve had a hard time even seeing gas giants until only the last couple of decades and the method of doing so is entirely different from that used by SETI. I would legitimately be shocked if SETI found anything… not that I doubt that there’s life out there, only the methods being employed by SETI to find it.