SETI@home This is NOT foolishness, but a real scientific project. Data from the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, are broken into manageable chunks and parcelled out to over 3,500,000 participants whose computers analyze the signals during idle moments. As a result, the equivalent of a huge supercomputer has worked for over a million hours of computer time. My husband and I were two of these participants and I'm proud that together we logged almost four and a half years of computer time.