My SETI@home has 2,501,054 work done. Is there a newer project more likely to find ET that I can run instead of SETI?[/b] I've been hearing about planets around dark/dwarf stars.

There isn't anything to my knowledge.

We are not likely to find anything in your or my lifetime. The Universe is just to massive and radio signals use could be very short lived by an advanced race. Radio signal use my only last for less than 1000 years by any advanced species if they ever used it at all. Which means if they are more or less advanced than we are there just isn't any signal for SETI to receive. If they are at the exact same level we are at the signal may not reach us for thousands or millions of years. They will have to currently be far more advanced than us for us to have the time for the signal to reach us. It is literally going to be easier to find a needle in a haystack than find a signal from ET. Besides all of that we are looking at a very small percentage of the known Universe.

You are volunteering to help with a massive amount of data. I started crunching for SETI back in 1999 before BOINC existed. I am still crunching for SETI today. There may not be any discovery of ET in our lifetime if ever. It would be awesome if it did happen but the chance is just very very low if not zero. Just go into any project looking for ET with a realistic expectation.

If you want to have some tangible reward for helping you may want to help with World Community Grid, a protein analyzing project, or Asteroids@Home which have a much higher chance of producing a very tangible result that you may directly benefit from. That doesn't mean that SETI will not produce some valuable non-ET related information. You just may never be aware of the result.

BOINC was the best thing that ever happened to distributed computing projects like SETI. I stopped crunching for SETI for a time to do protein folding. I felt that a potential cure for diseases was more important. I can know give a little computing time to several of these projects without having to decide which one is the most important to me. I recommend diversifying your work load among several projects if you are not already doing so.

Until very recently SETI@Home was using a "scatter gun" approach to where it got the data being analysed, they just didn't have the money to buy time to do a selective search and just grabbed what they could by piggy backing off other folks work. Now with the Breakthrough Listening Project giving money to a number of organisations there is money available for selective searches, and the data is coming through. This new data probably has a far better chance per task of finding ET because is is collected from the areas where there are stars known to have planets.

World Community Grid, a protein analyzing project

Side note; WCG does a lot more than protein analysis, they'll take on any project from interested researchers who agree to their terms of making the results public.

I started at SETI pre-BOINC as well, though once BOINC came around I quickly migrated to other projects. It's not that I don't think we should be looking up, but there are many other problems that need fixing in the short-term here on Earth.

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