SETI@home: 12 Billion Detections Narrow to 100 Promising Targets
Over two decades, the SETI@home project used millions of volunteers’ idle computers to analyze Arecibo data for technosignatures, producing about 12 billion detections. A decade-long Nebula back-end pipeline compressed those into roughly a million candidate groups, which were then manually reviewed to yield around 100 sky locations for follow-up with FAST. No confirmed alien signal has been found; the work illustrates that detections are software events, and that careful filtering and cross-observatory verification are essential before any claim of detection. The study also highlights that the bottleneck is expert interpretation and follow-up, not processor power.