Let me explain. Fifteen years ago, NASA decided to mount a serious effort to find out whether we were alone in the universe. They began scanning the heavens for radio signals which, in their order and regularity, would suggest they had been created by an intelligent life form.

Over the years, the Seti Project short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- has gathered billions of bits of data from the darkest, dustiest recesses of space. Indeed, they now have far more than they can analyse.

Happily, technological advances have come to their aid. The computers that we have on our desks are grossly overpowered for the thingswe want them to do. We use them to write letters, but most of them have enough memory and processing power to make the railways run on time by themselves.

The Seti team has now created a programme that utilises all this spare computing power. It can be downloaded from their website, along with a mass of data.

Then, whenever the computer is not being used, it kicks into action as a screensaver. Once your lump of data has been processed, your computer logs you back on to the website and retrieves another lump. So far, over four lakh people have joined in the search.

As the radio signals are processed, they cascade down the screen in pretty peaks and troughs. You can stare at them for hours, willing a regular pattern to appear, announcing the discovery of ET.

The programmers have recognised that people might behave like this. They have produced one of the best software licensing agreement statements ever to appear on a computer screen. ``I understand that strong signals will occasionally be detected,''it says. ``I will not get alarmed and call the press.'' The only disappointment is if a genuine signal is ever detected, it is likely to have originated so many light years away that the intelligence which created it will have died centuries ago. Still, a dead alien must be better than no alien at all.

NOTE: To download, go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and follow on-screen instructions.

-- The Observer News Service