Slashdot Mirror
SETI@home Explained, From Inside
eheien writes: "The IEEE currently has an article detailing SETI@home, written by the project founders. The article goes into a great deal of detail on how SETI@home works, how sensitive the search is to signals (it can detect a cell phone on Saturn's moons), how successful it has been, and so on." It's a good read, and has some impressive numbers about the project that most SETI@home participants may not have realized.
it can detect a cell phone on Saturns moons
:-)
Hang on, the only way to be sure of this is to have tested the hypothesis. That means they're picking up cell calls on Saturn's moons. Doesn't this strike anybody else as being perhaps odd? I know Vodafone are on a campagin of world domination, but I didn't know they had bought out telcos out there!
Los Angeles - Jan 12, 2347
After burning through approximately 2.12E678 CPU hours of computer time in over three centuries of existence, SETI@Home is finally calling it quits.
Their search for extraterrestrials has foundered, producing only a few candidate signals per year, none of which has ever been proven to be of extraterrestrial origin. Says Lars Pendelson, current project president: "Yeah, we just can't see going on when they are more practical applications of the technology".
Those more practical applications were discovered recently when the SETI@Home team discovered a promising possible alien signal was actually a cell phone call placed by an astronaut on the Saturn space station. Lars comments, "Yeah, we were really pissed about that one - we had the code geeks working overtime decoding that one, only to discover it was some bloak talking dirty to his girl on the Saturn space station. But at least we found a practical application for the technology".
Beginning next month, the SETI@Home space array and orbital server farm will be redeployed routing cell phone traffic for Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and the asteroid belt.
Users of the SETI community were understandbly dissappointed that their pet project was going away. The slashdot community in particular was in an uproar, having just recently narrowly edged out Team Microsoft in a heated, centuries long stats battle.
Lars knows that the user community will be let down, but hopes that they realize that finding ET is an "utterly hopeless and wasteful quest." He continues, "It's just plain stupid to waste all this equipment, when cell phone service in the outlying solar system is so poor."
If "communicate" means a dialog, then obviously we aren't -- it's forbidden by the laws of physics. But even if we lucked out and found aliens 5 or 10 light-years away, the speed of light wouldn't be the important thing. The important thing is that we'd have nothing in common. The galaxy has existed for billions of years, so there's no reason to think we'd both happen to discover radio technology at almost the same time. A randomly chosen intelligen species is likely to be either millions of years ahead of us or millions of years behind us in development. If we were a million years ahead of them, they wouldn't be doing radio. So most likely they'd be so far ahead of us in terms of development that it wouldn't be a two-way dialog where we both have profound thoughts to offer each other.
Is there any point? Don't be silly. Discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be the most important intellectual event of the last thousand years.
maybe we should work on traveling these kinds of distances in space first.
What's your logic? Radio is fairly easy. Physical travel across interstellar distances is ridiculously hard. The energy required to accelerate a 100-ton space ship to 10% of the speed of light would be about 10^20 joules, which is hundreds of times greater than the entire world's annual energy budget. Sending people to Mars isn't even likely to happen within the next 100 years.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
So what are the roaming charges for Saturn's moons?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
...there will be a SETI@Home story posted on /. and ET will finally make him/her-self known to the masses:
:)
ET (ET@QUADRA-5.EAM3002.GALAXY.NET)
FIRST POST!
Sorry. Humor for the evening
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I think the more interesting thing than the technology behind seti, is the sociology.
:)
Thousands of people are using it, religiously. I've been running it since it came out, i've overclocked my computer father, upgraded my processor, and even went so far as to install it quietly on the server farm at work
I'm not sure if people are in to it because they Dig feeling like part of the worlds largest computation (information age mob mentality?) or simply because we're incredibly lonely and, more often than not, thourougly dissapointed in the human race. The fact that you have seti at home clubs and organizations, people hold personal meetings to discuss how many work units they've burned in the last month (I guess thats the other factor... what better way to flex your hardcore box), Almost outweighs the fact that you can hear cell phones on saturn... besides, from what i hear, the long distance rates from there are deadly.
This article doesn't seem to go into any real new detail. The only interesting data is that they seem to be trying to expand their search by adding a new telescope. While this is a great idea, the SETI@home project can only do so much crunching.
The problem to date, to my mind has been that the processing is too front end intensive. This project should do rough curve fitting first (ie do quick calculations on client computers, to find a general idea of the curve) and then select areas of interest to farm out more signifigant data to client computers. But that's just my opinion.
who knows, with 10 gHz possibly on the way, this discussion may be a moot point as I send it.
hmmmm?
I know seti@home has been rather popular, but I see from some of the posts here, as well as many friends & co-workers, that people are growig bored with the client. there may have been 2.1M volunteers, but I'm sure a fair percentage, if not a majority, have dropped off the seti wagon in favor of other screensavers.
that's not to say SETI@home isn't doing great, I hear they've even been in the situation of not having enough work units to send out, but this whole project could be made into something much bigger, much grander.
I sure S@H could be looking at this data with more precision than they are currently, through numerous refinements to the search criteria and formulae. The limit is only in how many cpu cycles they can reliably expect. I believe the volunteer membership base could be doubled with one very minor refinement to the graphical client: by briefly blink-highlighting canditate signals in the 3axis bar graph gizmo. The article mentions that they've accumulated 1.1 billion candidate signals to date. You can be relatively certain that if you've completed even 1 data unit, you found one of these signals.
It seems to me that the eventual boredom with the SETI@home client is due to the almost complete dearth of feedback or accomplishment. the information displayed on the client is interesting, but it changes very slowly and in a completely predictable way. The simple psychological reward of blinking a triplet or a phased pulse when a canditate signal is hit would go a long way towards providing the rewarding sense of accomplishment people seems to be hoping for out of this project. This simple new feature would not interfere with the science and hardly slow down the typical cliet computer, so I say please!~ add this feature!
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Conversely, I realized that I could have been easily hoodwinked by a great sounding operation that I understood (basically) only on faith! I guess the lesson here is caveat downloader!
This article is a very nice description about what seti@home does, but the question is: Does it even have a chance of working? The assumption is that ETI would use radio because the laws of physics prohibit anything faster, but if that's true, why would they even bother? Most likely they would be too far away to really talk with wouldn't they?
So, I wonder, are WE transmitting a repeating signal at 1450 Mhz or near it? If WE are not transmitting a distinguishable repeating signal near 1450 Mhz, why would we expect anyone else to?