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SETI@Home to Crunch More Data
BigDave writes: "In this article on Wired, it describes how SETI is gradually running out of data, as the current data acquisition system cannot keep up with the rate of processing (since they now have 3 million users processing data). They have acquired a new high-speed digital data recorder which is Linux-powered, and was donated by Hewlett-Packard."
Maybe they could help out the STI Project
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances of life out there - what else is new?
Why not spending that processing time on some relevant projects where you can help make a differences? Like http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/. Or similar projects for scanning for asteroids or anything else that just has a plausible purpose.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
...reprocess the older data under different criteria? i would hate to think we missed something as importaint is stellar eavesdropping. but maybe not, what to i know?
Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the user is not directly observing SETI@Home software, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.
I've been thinking about the whole distributed computing issue recently. SETI@Home and Distributed.net have proven how effective large scale parallel processing is. OTOH, Nimda has proven how effective a very simple worm can be.
Joe Cracker just managed to get ahold of a password file from his favourite .mil site. But now he's stumped. He tried his regular password cracking programs, to no avail. He decides to code up a quick worm in Visual Basic, and in several hours he has thousands of computers working at his task.
http://www.distributed.net
The real unitron has Slashdot ID 5733, and needs to change his sig.
Why not do something similar trying to find a cure for cancer, or mapping genomes, or number crunching for physics simulations or something?
Dont get me wrong, i like SETI
but SETI@HOME is silly i think, when there are more important things to do. How about we apply some global computing power to getting INTO space, rather than wasting it listening to millions(?) of stars?
If there are not enough celestial data for the SETI@Home project, then let's turn some of that enormous Beowolfian processing power over to a categorically related AI@Home sub-project in the form of the First AI at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind -- whjere we are creating the artificial intelligence that we may need (or may encounter) in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Just as the otherwise idle computers crunch data in the search for ET intelligence, the AI@Home project may become a contest to see whose computer will have the longest-running, gradually most ancient AI running as an uninterrupted artificial life (alife) form since Star-Date 200X.
A few hard-core AI@Homers may provide the algorithmic advances while the masses of participating SETI+AI enthusiasts provide the PC's, workstations and supercomputers.
When the AI@Home technology is sufficiently mature, then we turn the AI entities loose on the quest for their starborne brethren and sistren.
Logic dictates: lim --> *** (The stars are the limit.)
We have made very little effort to send out signals of our own, other than disparate radio signals emitted from around the globe (local). If a civilization is to be found via SETI, shouldn't we organize a program that emits signals to targetted stars systems that have planets in a temperate climate that can harbor life?? so that in turn they can send data to us.
Does anyone know of technology that could do this?
I have heard of the possility of using lasers to refine the broadcast of messages to other solar systems. I would be very intrigued to see if a community of global researchers uniting to provide strong signals outbound. Seti users have already displayed the commitment to listening, i am sure i am not the only one out there who would actively participate in this endeavour.
Next stop radio shack!
Why not use your spare processing power for something that actually *matters* like cure for cancer? IMHO that's much more important than whether we are alone in the universe or not or if we can crack some encryption codes.
You can download the (Windows only, sigh) clients from http://members.ud.com/vypc/.
A lot of the early supporters of SETI@Home ( myself included ) joined it mostly as a political statement.
"You are going to cut our funds?? Big deal. We'll find another way.
Guess what? Now we have the biggest computer power in the world, all by volunteers!"
It was one of the first glimpses of the Internet as a tool for "light civil disobedience", followed (?) by PGP, MP3, etc...
I agree that SETI@home has a low cost/benefit ratio, that's why I'd rather crunch the data rather than have tax dollars pay some more for less. My 'puter has found lots of interesting signals, maybe one of them is a key to an important non-Seti phenomina.
The technology is pretty well proven wth SETIatHome so I'm sure that other more mundane uses for it will be instituted. And actualy my last up-grade was driven by the desire to crunch data a bit faster so it easy for me to see SETIatHome aiding the tech secter.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Maybe the Seti@Home project should consider re-crunching old data. Versions 3+ perform a LOT more calculations than 2.x or 1.x versions of Seti@home. How about adding a new 3.x version, that will only calculate the uncalculated portion of old data in the existing system.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
SETI@home collects its data from the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We've been recording data at the Arecibo telescope since December 1998, and analysing that data since May 1999.
SETI@home is a very fortunate science program. It utilizes 70% of the Arecibo telescope time. The other 30% is time used for repair, maintenance, or radar observations (Arecibo's powerful radar transmitters create too much interference for SETI@home's sensitive receiver).
This is an extraordinary amount of telescope time! Most astronomers are lucky to get even a day a year on the telescope for their research. Since SETI@home doesn't need to point to any specific point in the sky, it just "goes along for the ride" while other astronomers use the giant antenna. If SETI@home could take data full time we would collect about 50 GB of data every day. It takes us about eight months to "cover" the Arecibo sky. This isn't 100% of the sky that is visible to the telescope since we don't control pointing, but it's close. SETi@Home's goal is to collect and analyze at least two years worth of data. This would allow us to cover the sky seen from Arecibo about three times.
Just think tho, if your computer is the one that finds the signal from ET, you not only get to be on every talk show (along with the SETI eggheads), but you will probably get your biography published, becoming an instant babe/stud magnet! Not to mention you will get an automatic entry to compete to see who gets to ride in the wormhole riding ball machine built from the plans that are undoubtedly being sent our way right now (not to mention patent rights to aforementioned machine). And all this for free FREE FREE (as long as you are running it on your office machine, since you don't pay for electricity there). And don't forget the screensaver (ohhhh, pretty blinking lights).
__
Don't sweat the petty stuff but do pet the sweaty stuff.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I've done the SETI thing and the Distributed.net thing and both, IMHO, were not very pragmatic. Other distributed projects exist, like Folding@Home and my favorite Genome@Home. They need more computing power, so please visit and try them. The even have Linux console versions for x86 machines.
There's even a $100,000 prize for the first 10,000,000 digit prime number. I encourage others to consider this project -- RC5 is close to pointless now (RC5/56 proved limited encryption is of no value), and SETI@Home already have more cycles than they can use.
I seriously question the science of SETI@home. I left them after one of the first debacles where they kept sending out the same packet of data to most everyone.
genome and folding@home just seems so much more likely to be useful.
If you're an atheist (or even if you aren't) you're welcome to join our genome@home team, Wicked Old Atheists. We're currently placed #24 in the world.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
For those who doesn't know it they (SETI@home) recently reached the Zettaflop (10e+21 floating-point operations) mark which is a world record. The last 24 hours "they" (read the users) performed 6.104916e+18 flops which is about 70.66 Teraflops/sec. This can be compared to the Terascale Computing System that theoretically could reach a maximum of 6 teraflops per second *laugh*. SETI's total cpu-time lies around 750 000 years, _pretty cool_ eh?
2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
And it many ways, at that.
Consider the fact that we've had radios for a hundred years now, and TVs for quite a while now. Add to that cell phones and satellite communications, and you've got a nice big EM bubble around Earth, of radius 100 light-years (since EM travels at light speed, and we've been sending them out for a century).
Granted, a hundred light-years isn't much, but if aliens within that distance are looking out for signals in the same way that we are, they've got quite a large source of incoming info.
But there's more! On March 15, 1999, a 400 000 bit-long transmission was sent out to four "local" star systems suspected of harbouring life. Take a look at the fascinating Encounter 2001 transmission. It's absolutely worth a look. Try to figure some of it out too, just for fun =) IMO, it's brilliant.
So we are, after all, broadcasting quite a lot, whether it be specific targetting or general.
Cheers.
BTW S@H have admited for a long time that they send out each unit 3 or 4 times, for double-checking, and because they aren't splitting/recieving the units from Arecibo fast enought. However they only use a small band of Arecibo's datastream, centered on the H-OH 'waterhole' (1420MHz +/- 1.25 MHz); this should improve the rang of frequencies covered.
There is talk of using southern SERENDIP as a second antenna to get better sky coverage. They have another problem; S@H accounts for about 30% of Berkeley Uni's total out going bandwith, outside the Space Science Lab, the net admins aren't that happy about this. Unless they can get other SpaceScience Universities to share the load, they can't increase their userbase much more.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
Hey! Thanks for that, it was pretty cool.
I definately see some recognizable stuff there. Hydrogen molecule, of course, coordinates in realation to the galaxy, etc. Pretty smart stuff.
How does that compare to what was sent out on the laserdisc on Voyager?
that we haven't made contact yet. If we ever did connect with an Interstellar /., sure as shooting, somebody would post a goatsx message. And then we'd find out that they mod down with an Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator!
After connecting to IntStelNet, please listen for a thousand years before posting...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How about taking some of this distributed computing power and use it to process the subtle signals given by women. Is she really interested, or is she just being nice? Now we geeks can find out!
All newer transmissions systems, from SSB to spread-spectrum to GPS to HDTV, don't use carriers. The FCC wouldn't license a transmission system today that used a carrier. In time, all radio will be carrierless, to save spectrum space. That date is probably about 20 years away, after the transition to HDTV and digital audio broadcasting. So for less than a century will our civilization have broadcast carriers. That's a narrow window to hit when looing for another civilization.
There's some redundancy in all carrierless systems, but it may be only a few percent, and it's hard to find if you don't know how to look for it. Typically, detecting a spread-spectrum signal involves trying to synchronize a psuedorandom number generator at the receiving end with the signal. This is hard when you have no idea what the psuedorandom number generator looks like. It's not impossible; it's a cryptographic problem. But it's hard to detect a signal so weak you can't read the bits.
You can look for the presence of a carrier so weak that you can't detect the modulation, by averaging over many cycles. That's what SETI@Home actually does. So if there are carriers out there, SETI@Home should find them. But unless someone is deliberately beaming carriers at us, there's nothing to find.
I've met some of the SETI@Home people, and they admit this problem. By now, if anybody in our stellar neighborhood was aiming high-power continuous carriers at us, we'd know it. But there could be signals encoded in more efficient ways and thus look like noise. SETI@Home will never find them.
I think that the SETI@Home effort should be devoting more resources to finding non-carrier signals. Maybe long-period autocorrelation, looking for repeats of bit patterns, would be more appropriate than the present carrier search. Something that sounds like stellar hiss might turn out to have data in it.
I prefer projects with a higher probability to make an actual differene to how people live, like the (already named) Folding@Home, Genome@Home, or FightAIDSatHome. The last one may not appeal to many here as Entropia, the distributed computing network behind it, apparantly insists in throwing in some commercial work packets to the clients. Finding a cure for AIDS sounds like a splendid idea, otoh.
My personal favorite is GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, discoverers of the four largest explicitly known prime numbers. I like them because you actually have a chance to understand what the program is doing (if number theory is for you, that is). IMHO better than looking at some blinking lights of a screen saver that looks for ET.
Alex
Heisenberg may have been here
By finding conclusive proof that We Are Not Alone (tm), it profoundly changes the philosophic base of society as a whole.
The specific scientific gains from any "information" received could be great, but more likely it will be meaningless or trivial.
We, as a society, will have to come to terms with the fact that Humankind is not the sole divine purpose for the universe to exist. Similar to Galileo's findings hundreds of years ago, once again we'll have proof that We Are Not The Center Of The Universe (tm).
For those of us that already believe that there is life elsewhere, this will be an amazing turning point. For those who are bound in religious beliefs that don't include any room for such possibilities, there will be great unrest and conflict. However, hopefully, as in the past, religion will slowly incorporate this new evidence into their rote, and move forward.
I, for one, hope that it would be the one single scientific fact that could help unite the world. We're not alone. It's now "humankind versus the Universe", not U.S. versus Afganistan. We've a lot more in common with each other than we do with "them", and it may make our petty differences seem insignificant.
Is that not a worthwhile goal?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
SETI is all about the screen saver. Most people who use SETI do it because of the cool blocks of FFT that get assembeled before their eyes, not because they are going to find ET. Anyone know of some cross platform (OpenGL??) screen savers one could use as the front end for a distributed computing project? SETI has proved that marketing is way more important to content for desktop supercomputing.
A cool screen saver and a spiffy website is all I need to get people to do my genetic programming runs for me. hehe...
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
It's time to write a distributed program that will grok all legalese in the world, and use massive seti@home-style processing to figure out every possible way to repeal the DMCA and other defective copyright laws. The distributed program would itself be protected by the DMCA, and any attempts by the MPAA/RIAA to stop the processing would be "circumvention."
I left them after one of the first debacles where they kept sending out the same packet of data to most everyone.
If you abandon every free-thinking project the first time a bug is exposed, well, you're probably a very frustrated guy. Especially in the Open Source, Free Software, or Linux camps! Have some patience. (News flash: They fixed that bug you think of as a "debacle".)