I know what you're thinking: "Woo woo! Another of those mysterious blobs I'm supposed to click on that takes all day to load and tells me nada. Get a life, Unc!" Glad you brought it up. Getting a life (in a manner of speaking) is actually what SETI@home is all about. SETI, in the event you aren't aware, is the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. As in Jodie Foster and the huge Arecibo telescope in "Contact." As in the occasional use of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facilities at Greenbank, WV. As in your computer.

"SETI@home" was created by a small project crew (with lots of volunteer help) at the University of California, Berkeley, and is sponsored by, among others, the Planetary Society. It operates on several levels; its obvious and most primary level is as an incredibly neat dynamic screen saver. Ok, so you don't need screen savers any more with current monitor technology. But SETI@home's primary function is one of the more brilliant ideas I've ever heard of.

The underlying premise of S@h is simple: there is currently more unsorted raw reception data available from current observational sources than there is computer power, time, funding, and personnel to review it. The one clue to what will undoubtedly be an epochal event, should it happen, may already have been received, and may be sitting in raw, unsorted data as we speak (or read, in this case). S@h was created as what might be described as the ultimate "shareware" program, wherein a small (727k), resident sorting and analysis program is downloaded to a huge number of personal computers (like yours and mine), where it uses the idle computing power of our small units to accomplish small segments of what would otherwise consume expensive time on a gajillion dollar supercomputer.

Rolled out to the public in May of 1999 and now installed on more than a million PCs, it's small, unobtrusive if you choose it to be, easily disabled if you think you need to, and very polite, as befits a program designed by academics eager to borrow your computer time now and again. After sensing an idle period, the delay of which you can configure, S@h basically starts reviewing the data module downloaded with it, looking for exceptional events, patterns, anomalies, Burger King commercials, whatever. While you're off getting a cup of coffee, S@h is looking at numbers and saying "Nope, nope, nope, nope... " or whatever it is binary devices say to themselves when nothing interesting is happening.

Uh huh, you're thinking, but so what? Why download it? Consider this: Infinitesimal though the chances probably are (and we're talking about a decimal point and several volumes of zeros before we get to that lonely "1", I'll grant you), when was the last time you looked at a screensaver program that could possibly attach your name to perhaps the most important scientific discovery in the history of the human race? And for free, yet? Bet you buy lottery tickets now and then, don't you? So think of this as a really big lottery where you have almost no conceivable chance of winning, but what the heck, the tickets don't cost anything. And, just for the teensiest moment, imagine what it would mean if you - or anyone - did win...