Many of us leave our computers on when we’re not looking at them. Quite a few modern computers take more than just a couple of minutes to start up and shut down, so if we’re going to go back and forth, it generally makes more sense to leave everything running throughout the day and sometimes through the night. In a sense, though, you’re wasting much of the computer’s power as it’s sat there doing nothing but playing your screensaver over and over again. A whole host of organisations have sprung up asking computer owners to donate their downtime to good causes. Instead of wasting energy, you could be helping to further human knowledge.
One of the most interesting programs, which has just made a discovery using spare computers whose owners donated their downtime, is attempting to prove Einstein’s theory that celestial events, like exploding stars or black hole collisions, create waves which then alter space and time. These computers didn’t quite prove that, but they did discover a rare celestial object.
This project is run by the University of California Berkeley, is called BOINC, and you can participate in many other programs as well. As long as you own your PC, the software is free to download here, and you can contribute to a vast number of science projects. You might use your computer’s downtime to help cure cancer, detect earthquakes, or look out for aliens.
The search for aliens was the initial project for the BOINC program and has been going for almost eleven years. The project, called Seti@Home, uses spare computers to more quickly analyse data from radio telescopes looking for signals of alien life. They’re searching primarily for narrow-bandwidth radio signals, which as far as we know do not occur in nature, and as such would imply that there is some life out there.
You’re only permitted to use the program on computers you own, however, so while you might choose to install the software on your home computer, ask permission from your IT support before placing it on your work or school PC.