Computer search of universe under threat from lack of little green men

The world's biggest computing project, seeking radio signals from aliens, faces a funding crunch because of the high-tech crash.

That, in turn, could imperil researchers' wish to check a number of promising "signals" from outer space which might have come from alien species.

The technology companies which have provided most of the sponsorship for the three-year-old SETI@home project, which uses idle time on people's PCs to analyse data from outer space, are so strapped for cash that they are cutting back on donations to the project.

Despite having more than four million users worldwide who run its screensaver program, SETI@home still needs more than $400,000 (£258,000) annually to cover its costs. But with sponsor companies like Sun and Hewlett-Packard laying off thousands of people in the economic downturn, the project is having to seek out brand new sources of revenue – and finding it difficult.

"Our current funding will see us through the next four to five months," said David Anderson, the project leader. "It has been hard to get money donations from companies" – though he added that "this has been true from the outset".

SETI@home started in 1999 and is a "distributed" version of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which scans space for radio signals with patterns suggesting they were generated by an alien intelligence. Anyone can download a small program from the SETI website which will connect to the internet, download a small piece of recorded radio data and then analyse it when the computer is not being used. Once finished, it sends the results back.

So far, the project has used the equivalent of 1.1 million years of processing time, and performed 2 million million "gigaflops" – each gigaflop is a billion calculations. That dwarfs anything available or expended commercially.

Significantly, it has thrown up a handful of "candidate" signals, and the team wants to book time on one of the world's biggest radio telescopes to check whether there are still signals coming from those locations. But without further funds that will be impossible.

A second stage of the overall project, called SETI@home II, would start a new session, recording signals from space in Australia.

But earlier this month Dan Werthimer, SETI@home's chief scientist, told Australian colleagues in an e-mail that: "Our funding is drying up and we are very uncertain about the future of SETI@home I and II ... I'm working hard trying to raise more funds, but as you know, it's not an easy time to raise money."

Dr Anderson admitted that "like any academic research project, we live from one grant to the next".

He said he was encouraged by new funding from the US government, which previously banned any funding for SETI-style research.

"We recently received a $900,000 three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop software for future projects," he said. But that funding could not be used for the current project.

"In the worst case, we'd cut back to a skeleton staff: one or two people rather than our current five – and complete the analysis of all the signals we've collected so far," Dr Anderson added.

That could take another 10 years. Each signal is checked at least three times, which has only been done for 20 per cent of the data collected.