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Every day, the SETI researchers at UC Berkeley receive dozens of gigabytes worth of radio signal data collected from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Filtering through all this cosmic noise for some small indication of an intelligent signal is a big task, even with state of the art computing technology—there's simply too much to look through. But by linking together the processing power from individual laptops and PCs all around the world, the task has become infinitely more manageable. It also means that anyone can help look for aliens while they sleep.At the same time, advances in optical telescope technologies have also revealed a universe overflowing with potentially habitable planets orbiting other stars, which are known as exoplanets. The first exoplanet discovery occurred in 1995 and several thousand others have been discovered since then, although most of these were far larger than Earth and unlikely to support life."Maybe 5 to 10 percent of stars have an Earth-like planet in orbit that is also in the habitable zone"
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