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Why you should join the Search

    SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a science organization that scans the sky for signs of alien life using your computing power to do so. Citizen Science projects are projects which heavily rely on help from the general public. These projects can range from anywhere from researching the folding of protein which can be used to advance medical technology to SETI. There are thousands of Citizen Science projects and even more ways you help out with them. It is important that everyone spends some time looking at research projects and finds ways that they can help out with the pursuit of human knowledge, either for the many things that knowledge lets us do for merely the knowledge itself.

    Dating back to 1996 GIMPS (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) has been searching for incredibly large prime numbers. They are attributed to finding the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1. This knowledge can be used to increase data security and is also just cool to have. GIMPS is incredibly supported by BOINC, a program from Berkeley that allows people to donate their computing power while they aren't using it to help out with research projects. There are many other projects that are supported by BOINC such as Rosetta@home which attempts to fold RNA shapes to figure out how they work, World Community Grid a program that researches Cancer, HIV, AIDS, and a bunch of lesser known disease, or SETI@home which lets you help out with the search for aliens because aliens are cool and even if we don't find any it's cool that we tried. If any of these are at least a tiny bit interesting to you look through the BOINC project list and find one to support.

    There are also lots of projects that are more hands on if you want to actively contribute. A game called FoldIt was released in 2008. It teaches to basics of protein folding then lets users attempt to figure out proteins that have yet to be solved. Computers often struggle to brute force these proteins which makes it necessary to do them by hand. If you enjoy puzzle games check out FoldIt even if you don't progress science you'll have a good time. The government also has a list of citizen science projects which can be found at citizenscience.gov these are usually a bit more active but can be nearly anything. A lot of these that I find cool are from the national park service which has programs for pretty much everyone who enjoys the outdoors. Over the summer highschoolers can participate in the Youth Forest Monitoring Program or many of the other listed programs, there is something for everyone.

    These projects and programs are incredibly easy to join in on and with the sheer number of them there is going to be one that both interest you and matches the level of effort you want to spend. No matter what you do it will progress something. Shoot for the moon because even if you miss you will clear an area from the list of possible places for alien life.



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