It must have been nearly twenty years ago but I used to have a piece of software on my computer that searched for aliens.

It was not actually that unusual, either. Free to download and install, the SETI@Home^[1] screensaver software popped up when your computer was idle and used the spare computational cycles from your desktop machine to do analysis of radio signal data captured by the SETI group from telescopes like Arecibo and others. Instead of displaying bouncing text or flying cartoon toasters, your monitor would glow with a little graph checking for potential signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

It was a global experiment in distributed, crowdsourced computing.

We found nothing, and the project shuttered in the early 20s. 

It comes to mind in the age of AI because it reminds me that once we—humanity, that is—seemed to have had idealistic goals for how we would use vast amounts computational power. Sure, searching for aliens is perhaps a paranormal pipe dream, but too it was something of an aspirational human effort asking the question: are we alone, and if not is someone out there trying to connect with us?

We didn’t seem to be using that power for the thousands of nefarious and questionable uses for which we now seem to turn to daily to generative AI, vastly more powerful and so chock full of potential it seems we could have cracked that alien question a lot sooner had we tackled it.

What have we lost? What have we missed out on because we’re making jokes and scams and filtering our selfies? And what would the aliens think that we’ve stopped looking for them?