Making even more of a difference!

You may remember from my earlier blog posting 'The Star Thrower' (May 11^th 2014) how much of a difference any one of us can make by the choices we make and what we do every day in seemingly ordinary ways. This proved to be a very popular piece. Here I want to point out that there are also unexpected opportunities these days to take part in things that may in the past have been out of reach for most people. For example, have you ever thought that you could make a contribution to scientific and medical research? Well here’s the good news – we can now do this through an ever increasing range of 'citizen science' projects in which there is a massive amount of data to process even for a supercomputer and so the load is distributed over the internet to thousands of individual volunteers with their own participating computers located all over the world.

I have been involved with one such scheme, BOINC – the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing – for some time now. It sounds rather off-putting and geeky, but all that happens is that spare cycles on your computer’s processor are used to analyse data for the scientific and medical research projects that you choose – it doesn’t interfere in any way with what else you are doing on your computer and it costs nothing at all. This represents a real democratisation of science and provides an opportunity for people in all walks of life to contribute towards major discoveries or improvements.

After downloading and installing the BOINC software (Google BOINC) you can choose the research projects (one or several) that you would like to support. There is a list of over forty projects available to choose from including finding cures for diseases, studying global warming, joining a quake-catcher network and much else besides. The blocks of data are downloaded, analysed on your PC and then uploaded back automatically to the university in the background.

The project that I’m involved with is SETI – the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence – which is now very much a citizen science project since official support was cut back. With SETI the analysis looks for a candidate signal from civilisations elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy!

Yes, I know that we could do with a good deal more terrestrial intelligence down here! But projects like this might help to gain a wider perspective and SETI really is a noble quest and represents one of the most fundamental questions that humanity can address. As I write this piece my computer is processing data from the huge radio telescope at Aricebo in Puerto Rico (which you may have seen featured in the film 'Contact') and it makes me aware of what a privilege it is to be involved with this work. You get a great screen saver and notional credits too!

This is just one of the many ways in which we can all make another difference every day of the week – you may, of course, choose a very different project and could be part of an international team that makes an important breakthrough in your chosen field. Best of luck!