Extraterrestrial

Long-running SETI project hones in on final 100 'signals of interest'

By T.K. Randall
January 15, 2026

Image: OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope
Credit: Salvor Hardin / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) Launched all the way back in 1999, SETI@Home invited millions of volunteers across the world to help find potential alien signals in data collected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Participants could join in by offering some of their own computer's processing power to analyze the data - it was a unique approach and one of the first project's of its kind anywhere in the world.

Sadly, the observatory itself collapsed back in 2020, but that wasn't the end of the story, as over the prior two decades the SETI@Home project had managed to identify a whopping 12 billion signals of interest.

Now, as the end of the project draws near, researchers have narrowed down this enormous list to just the 100 most promising candidates and are using China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to check out each one for signs of alien life.

So far, nothing has been found, but the team won't give up until every one has been checked.

"If we don't find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level," said project co-founder David Anderson."If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it."

"We have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently."

Whatever happens, SETI@Home will go down in history as one of the earliest and most influential examples of volunteer distributed computing.

Its founders had expected around 50,000 volunteers, but they ended up with over 2 million.

We even had a SETI@Home group here on our forum back in the early 2000s.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the final data reveals.

Source: Live Science

Tags: SETI, Alien, Extraterrestrial