Dan Werthimer presents a public talk at UC Berkeley on March 21st, 2009, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, as part of the series described at astro.berkeley.edu/iya . He discusses the possibility of life in the universe, the search for radio and optical signals from other civilizations, and how you can help in the search for ET. The SETI@home project analyzes data from the world's largest radio telescope using desktop computers from millions of volunteers. SETI@home participants have contributed three million years of computer time and have formed one of Earth's most powerful supercomputers. Users have the small but captivating possibility their computer will detect the first signal from a civilization beyond Earth. Dr. Werthimer is a researcher at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, and the project chief scientist of SETI@home.
Videography and editing by Chris Klein. This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us