Ball Lightning

I said, “There are similarities between the digital models of ball lightning and nuclear tests. They’re both simulating an energy release process, and in some respects, the former is more complicated. So at some point we’ll need the kind of computational power they’re using. But even right now, I don’t see any way out for us.”

For the next few days, I concentrated on the lightning location system Gao Bo had passed down to me, and I didn’t have any contact with Lin Yun. One day I received a phone call from her, telling me to look at a website. She sounded very excited.

I opened up the website and saw a black outer space background topped by purple radio waves floating over the Earth. The page title was SETI@home, short for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home.”

I’d heard of it before: a huge experiment that harnessed the idle power of tens of thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI@home program was a special screen saver that analyzed data from the world’s largest radio telescopes to help in the hunt. When you have a fire hose of data coming at your ears and you need to sift through it to find the information you need, a giant supercomputer is a necessity that comes at a huge cost. Scientists with tight budgets found an expedient solution: rather than use one large machine, they shared the workload among many smaller computers. Every day, data received by Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was recorded onto high-density tapes and sent back to the research base in California, where it was divided into chunks of roughly 0.25 megabytes and distributed by the main SETI@home server to different personal computers. All Internet users around the world had to do was visit the website and download and install the screen saver. Then, when they took a break from work, the screen saver would start running, and a computer that appeared to be at rest would join the ranks of those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, receiving and analyzing chunks of data from SETI@home, automatically returning the results to base when complete, and then fetching another chunk.

I downloaded the screen saver and started it running. It also had a black background, and in the lower half, the signal received by radio telescope was displayed in three-dimensional coordinates, like a bird’s-eye view of a megacity composed of countless skyscrapers, a magnificent sight. The upper left displayed a dynamic waveform—the portion of the signal under analysis—as well as a completion percentage, which, after five minutes, displayed just 0.01 percent.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed, drawing startled looks from my officemates. At the realization of how those wealthier scientists had, on encountering the same problem as us, come up with such a creative and frugal solution, I felt a sense of embarrassment. I went to New Concepts immediately, where Lin Yun was seated at a computer and, as I had expected, working on a web page.

“I’m almost done, and we’ve located a server. The key thing is, under what pretense?”

“Modeling ball lightning, of course!”

“Absolutely not! How many people are interested in that? I say we look for aliens, too.”

“We can’t trick people.”

“It’s not tricking them. Ball lightning’s behavior is difficult to explain using purely physical laws, but most of the problems are easily resolved if you think of it as a life-form.”

“That’s going a bit woo-woo.”

“I’ve thought about this before. A world composed of atoms and molecules has evolved life, so if the Big Bang theory is correct, then in the long evolutionary history of the universe, the invisible electromagnetic world would have been in existence far longer than the world of atoms and molecules. Why wouldn’t it have evolved an electromagnetic structure akin to life?”

“That settles it. Let’s look for aliens!”

“We’ve got an advantage over SETI. They’re looking for aliens tens of thousands of light-years away, but we’re looking in the atmosphere,” she said as she showed me the home page, with SETI@home’s background replaced with blue sky, and the title changed to “SML@home”—“Search for Magnetic Life at home.” The screen saver displayed a faint blue fireball that drifted slowly across the screen, dragging a purple tail of light and emitting a deep hum.

The next thing to do was to divide the model we needed to calculate into two thousand chunks in parallel. That was a lot of work that took us half a month—the programming was more complicated than SETI@home’s since the chunks had to transmit data to each other. Then we hooked the chunks up to the screen saver and put it on the web page. Finally, we put up the web page and hopefully awaited the results.

Three days later, we realized we’d been a bit too optimistic. The website had received fewer than fifty hits, and only four people had downloaded the screen saver. Two comments were left on our guestbook warning us not to engage in pseudoscience.