Astrophysicist Laurance Doyle wants to get the world discovering worlds — and in the process get children jazzed about science and maths.
With record low test scores in the sciences in the United States, American schoolchildren are lagging behind youth of other nationalities and causing concern about the future of the country's thought leaders and astronomical discoverers. That concern has driven Doyle and his team at non-profit PlanetQuest to develop software to harness the computing power of millions and help people discover new planets and stars.
"Students are losing interest because they don't know enough to know what they don't know. So the idea is to get them interested in participating in speaking the language of the universe, which is maths," says Doyle, PlanetQuest co-founder and a principal investigator at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute.
Seems altruistic enough, but the yet-to-be-released software is grounded in an already widely deployed experiment in distributed computing, the SETI@Home program. SETI@Home allows desktop and workstation users to contribute computer processing time to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI@home software has been installed on more than 5.4 million desktops, according to the SETI@home Web site. Still, people have yet to successfully find extraterrestrial life.
The idea for PlanetQuest is to harness the same computing force of the public, but to give people a real chance to find and name their own planet or star. Only 1 percent of the stars in the galaxy have been classified or looked at in-depth, and there's roughly a one in a 5,000 to 10,000 chance that people will find one, according to PlanetQuest Executive Director David Gutelius.
"It's better odds than the lottery, but everyone will discover something about stars," Doyle says.
