Let's bring Chuck and Wilson home
For quite some time I've been a fan of the concept of distributed computing. Stripped of all the jargon, distributed computing means taking a job that could only be done by a single very powerful computer, of which there are fewer in the world than there are jobs for them, and breaking it up into many tiny little pieces. Then, via the Internet, you send the pieces out to participating computers worldwide. Each of those computers works on its piece of the job, then returns the data to the central location.
My first distributed-computing project was SETI@home, which I got involved with about eight years ago. SETI@home uses computers around the world to analyze data collected from deep space by radio telescopes. The analysis is looking for the kind of nonrandom electromagnetic signals that might indicate the existence of intelligent life on other planets. If your computer is the one that finds life on other planets, you get the credit, although if I were going to score that much luck, I'd rather put it to work on a Powerball ticket.
(What might such a signal look like? We might, for example, broadcast repetitions of Pi into space on various frequencies. One argument against doing so is that it might be interpreted by a more advanced, and hostile, civilization, as, "Hey! Here we are! Come enslave or eat us!" But no pain, no gain, say I.)
SETI@home, based at Berkeley, eventually became part of a larger program called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC. (Another pointless aside: In addition to its more salacious connotations, the word reminds me of "Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink,'" a collection of my all-time favorite comic strip, "Calvin & Hobbes." Hey, I told you it was a pointless aside.)
BOINC is a piece of software that lets you participate as much or as little as you want in one or more of several distributed-computing projects based at Berkeley. My home PC currently is running not only a SETI@home project but also projects from ClimatePrediction.net and Einstein@Home, a search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars.
Well, this is all well and good, you're thinking, but what in pluperfect heck does it have to do with ... well, anything?
For the answer, you need to visit my new current favorite Web site, Google Earth. You can use the free program, or some of the free tools developed by users, to get a map, a satellite photo, or both (separate or overlaid) of pretty much any address on Earth. Even better, you can drag the map around on your computer screen to see adjacent areas, and you can zoom in (up to a point) or out so as to look easily at things whose exact location you don't know but are NEAR things whose exact location you know.
So here, finally, is my idea.
I'm not sure how we could get computer technology to do all the heavy lifting -- it seems to me as if human judgment would almost certainly have to be involved here -- but what with the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" and the popularity of the TV show "Lost" (not to mention the gazillions of "Gilligan's Island" reruns we've all watched), I wondered whether it might be possible to combine the power of Google Earth with distributed computing to find every last speck of land on the globe and look for signs of (shipwrecked) human life. I don't know what that would be, exactly -- the word "HELP!" spelled out on a beach in fallen coconut palms, I guess, or "HI! MY NAME IS AMELIA EARHART!" -- but if there's a relatively cost-effective way to do this, imagine what would happen if we found even one cast-away person.
Maybe we call it Project Gilligan.
OK, it was just a thought.