But of course this doesn't really go on today does it? we all hear of area 51 and reports of alien craft sightings and even the odd abduction but the most likely way we will find extra terrestrial life will be through one of the many scientific projects being run by the worlds governments or by the scientific community.

So how can we mere earthlings help find ET without resorting to Smash art in your mums living room?

Try SETI the search for extra terrestrial intelligence and in particular the SETI at home project which is run by Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley who have access to a large volume of data gathered by the  radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico. In effect the scientists at UC Berkeley are sifting through the background noise of the universe looking for things that stand out and radio astronomy offers the best way of doing this.

Now even with a good deal of processing power available the SETI project could only process a small amount of the total available data in any real depth and of course a wider search may well lose a very faint signal hidden amongst background noise. So the SETI at home project was created to use the distributed power of home computers and make the most of unused CPU cycles when PC's are left on but dormant and what better way to do this than to use a screensaver.

A scan of the entire sky at the centre bandwidth of 1,420 MHz accounts for 39 terabytes of data and so the "grid" computing model seemed to be the only practical way of checking all this data. Tapes of 35gb of recorded data from the telescope are split into much smaller work units at UC Berkeley and then distributed to SETI at home screensaver users.

Meanwhile your PC with it's SETI at home screensaver installed collects a unit of data (typically about 300k) from the server and stores it ready for analysis, then whenever you leave you PC so that the screensaver activates (depending on how long your timeout in windows is set for) the SETI at home screensaver starts processing data. And its jolly pretty too, almost as pleasing to they eye as a good Smash sculpture and you can watch the progress of your part in the search for ET, or more likely you'll wander off and do other things safe in the knowledge that your PC is being put to good use.

Downloading the SETI screensaver is easy and the install takes seconds, you then need to sign up for an account which just requires and email address (we'd advise not to use a hotmail account) and then you're up and running, you can visit the SETI website to check your stats and see how you are doing against the thousands of others and you can even join a team!

So if you want a funky screensaver that helps find ET we think this might just be what you are looking for and if any of us help discover ET you can be assure that SETI will make sure you get some of the credit, sure beats having to remember those hand signals to go with the Jean Michel Jarre music doesn't it!

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