There's been some hot discussion over search for aliens versus searching for cures in the here and now..... WCG on BOiNC has graphics for all its projects..... u look at them 5 minutes, u research the meaning if interested, then switch it off, as it eats CPU time....no (moving) screensaver for me. Sure we like them glossy, but still they bore after a while.... it's on the list though and they are getting better.

Now, think, who do u know who's got AIDS, Cancer, Alzheimer, Multiple Scleroses, Parkinson, Muscle Dystrophy? Who do U like to help first?

The search for a little blue "miracle planet" or a G.E.M in a vast empty void is a timeless sought after search in the grand scheme of things. Yet we might be more special then we ever hoped.

Optical infrared and visible spectrum analysis might provide the first glimmers of hope in the vast search. Maybe, they also have viruses, bacteria and illnesses to cure? Maybe, cancer and viruses is universal? Opportunistic diseases.

I agree with you that the concept behind SETI is an interesting one, SETI is NOT about finding habitable planets, merely "listening" for artificial signals in space. For finding habitable planets you should look at the future Boinc project PlanetQuest, which is about detecting exoplanets, but probably not of the size of Earth.
As far as I know, Venus is NOT in the habitable zone of our star, as all it's water has disappeared because of being too close to the Sun. Also, it is impossible to detect water because of it's color by spectral data, what you can detect is water molecules in the atmosphere, along with whatever else the atmosphere might be made up of.

Sorry if this topic has drifted too far, I'll get back to watching my PC crunch WCG

People
We have to tell about FiA@Home to the company owners, managers and majors. The companies has a lot of computers that are bad-used. So think in this Idea.
see you

I have worked in the financial services industry in NYC for 6 years and I have tried to get the companies I worked for to join this type of project. The problem you run into is that they feel it is a security issue. The reality is that there is minimal security risk according to my colleagues in IT. But to get a large corporation to devote a team of professionals to bringing such a project online and maintain it is impossible. It's a hard sell to a business of client servicing that is very dependant on technology for critical day-to-day function.

There is enough computing power in NYC alone to run an entire project faster than any of the current ones running now. The only way this can happen is for someone at the top to be approached and convinced that it would be a noninvasive, low-risk, cheap and tax deductible project that could be very beneficial and kept low-profile. We need to be better at networking in order to bring high-profile corporate individuals into the loop. Success in this realm would mean petaflop performance for all distributed computing projects.