After 21 Years And 12 Billion Signals, Scientists Zero In On 100 Possible Signs Of Alien Life

by Aaron Leong — Thursday, January 15, 2026, 10:16 AM EDT

After two decades of quiet data processing on millions of crowd-sourced home computers, the SETI@home project has narrowed down billions of space whispers to 100 signals. Could one of these point to intelligent alien life?

Launched in 1999, SETI@home turned the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a global phenomenon by allowing ordinary citizens to loan their unused computer power to UC Berkeley scientists. After the project officially stopped collecting data in 2020, researchers have spent the last 10 years making sense of the massive 21-year archive.

From an initial pool of 12 billion detections, i.e. momentary blips of energy, the team used the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics supercomputer in Germany plus software called Nebula to eliminate terrestrial interference from satellites, cell phones, and even microwave ovens. The filtering process eventually left a refined list of roughly one million candidates, which has now been whittled down to a final top 100 that cannot be easily explained away as Earthly noise.

These remaining signals are unique because they appear as persistent narrowband transmissions, the kind of techno-signature an advanced civilization might use to be noticed against the chaotic background of the cosmos. To investigate these targets, scientists have recently been pointing the world’s largest radio telescope, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), at specific points in the sky where the anomalies were first spotted. Ultimately, the goal is to see if any of these blips repeat or exhibit patterns that suggest a deliberate origin rather than a random astronomical event.

china fast1 — *China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), a.k.a. Sky Eye*

Project co-founder David Anderson noted that the computing power donated by volunteers would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase on the commercial market. By harnessing the collective brainpower of over 5 million PCs, the project effectively created a virtual supercomputer that scanned one-third of the entire sky multiple times. Even if these final 100 signals eventually turn out to be natural phenomena, the project has already succeeded in establishing a new level of sensitivity for radio SETI, proving that if a signal above a certain strength exists in our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we now have the tools and community support to find it.

For the enthusiasts who kept their screensavers running for decades, the search isn't over; it has simply moved into its most focused phase yet. As FAST telescope data is analyzed, the world waits to see if one of those 100 blips will finally answer the age-old question of whether we are alone.

Since its retirement, SETI@home has become the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) project. Once again, BOINC uses the CPU/GPU power of home computers to help find cures for diseases, studying climate change, and map the universe.