SETI to Upgrade Software, Telescope

Professor_Quail writes "Space.com reports that SETI@home is planning to transfer it's operations from Arecibo to another telescope in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials. The Australian telescope is more powerful, with a wider view of the sky; scientists are betting that this new telescope will also help find signs of 'shriveling' black holes."

Comments

Re:Is that such a good idea?

[WheelDweller]

[Long, probably accurate discertation skipped for brevity]

I'm told, admittedly by The Learning Channel, et al, that "each galaxy has a black hole in the center." That makes me wonder...it's probably there for a reason. Yeah, I know- great place to dump the trash....but maybe it's something more. I'd like to think that perhaps they might be connected....and if we could survive the massive gravity, that would be a way around the whole speed-of-light thing, or at least shorten it a lot.

I'll bet that won't make any sense at all in the morning. I'm turning in. Night all!

Re:So apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

if there are such things as "aliens", they must be tone deaf not to hear our extremely loud planet.

1. we have been here for 3 million years, which is a spec in time, just calculate the odds in finding a species evolving in that same time frame.
2. This planet will become un-inhabitable within 4billion years, if we dont find a way to colonize we will be extinct, (this rule more or less applies to any civilisation)
3. Humans are not a "nice species", why contact us, it would be the same as contracting a virus
4. if darwins evolutionairy principles apply to all life anywhere, then be affraid be very affraid: cuz evolutionairy we are seriously outclassed when someone knocks on our door at this point in time. To them we could be as dumb as cattle, and we all know what shoes are made of........

to be honest i think seti@home will never be used for anything more then crack codes and make calculations. (which is what it partly is being used for anyways)

The difference with SETI@home

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that makes me continue to run SETI@home instead of more "practical" applications like protein folding is the simple fact that SETI@home will not generate money for the originators of the project. The results of protein folding and AIDS research will ultimately result in some people getting filthy rich, and if they want that they can bloody well do the work themselves.

Re:So apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure, but I think it is Robert Heinlein who said "we humans use planets up. When we use earth up, we'll find another planet." I think all of the arrogance and hope of the human species is wrapped up in that one statement.

Optimizations

[Perdo]

Take a clue from KLAT2

"KLAT2's 80/64-bit double-precision performance is around 22.8 GFLOPS, a very respectable number. Then again, using 3DNow!, KLAT2's single-precision ScaLAPACK performance zips to over 64 GFLOPS"

Optimize clients for different architectures. MMX, 3Dnow!, SSE, SSE2, Altivec, Hyper threading, x86-64 etc.

Might be nice to jump from 50 Tflops/s to 150/s just by using processor specific instructions.

Since the client will be open source, users may try it anyway but perhaps SETI could offer some kind of contest to insure the code gets audited properly.

For programmers out there, imagine placing "Optimized code for the largest distributed computing project in the world, resulting in a threefold increase in performance" in your resume.

Being personally responsible for adding 100 Tflop/s to seti@home beats the hell out of running clients on a few idle machines.

While we search for aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

That may or may not exist, we have asteroids that DO exist that present a threat.....

I say all this scanning of the skies could be put to equal if not greater use by developing a distributed computing client that scans the skies for possible asteroids that may pose a threat.

BOINC's upgrades will download automatically

[Sigfried_Blip]

What are they thinking?

WARNING: Upgrades that download automatically without any user intervention? Have they gone "BOINCers?" This is a very bad idea that will create an enormous security hole. My prediction is that most businesses that currently allow seti@home will ban the new BOINC system.

Do we really need another generic distributed computing platform like the failed or failing Popular Power, Process Tree, Entropia, Parabon, and Distributed Science?

Statistics: The Second Great Evil

[perrin5]

Statistics?

When anyone starts talking statistics when referencing outer space, I just have to cringe. So, let me get this straight, just so I understand your argument.

1) aliens who use radio waves must be technologically advanced.
2) Technologically advanced aliens would expand to other planets (why? what if they cannot handle weightlessness, what if they don't WANT to?)
3) Said expansion would use relativistic speeds at all times to expand

ergo: We would not recieve signals much before we recieved aliens.

Now, let's look at a simple argument against your _Very_ loose logic.

1) Space is three dimensional. Even assuming your "expansion" theory is correct, you must assume either (a) the species multiplies as fast as they expand radially outward (so that the population density is large enough that they will run into us eventually, as their expansion reaches us.

or (b) they are targeting us as a direction to move towards. Personally, I don't find any plausibility to either of these arguments.

2) You assume that since it only took us several thousand years to get where we are, there would HAVE to be species that evolved before us. There is no proof, anecdotal or otherwise that we, as a species are either late or early comers to the scene. I am resonably sure that to be able to withstand the change needed to create technology, some form of advanced, multi-cellular organism would be required. This requires a long process of evolution, assuming you believe in such.

There are other problems, I won't go into them now....

Re:Statistics: The Second Great Evil

[Noren]

First, a brief comment on the OP: von Neumann machines need not be nanotech based nor spacecraft- the definition and primary characteristic is self-duplication. The other two would facilitate the tasks you have in mind, admittedly.

Perrin5, I think you're missing part of his point. He projects that a healthy spacefaring race would colonize the galaxy in a million years. This part is arguable, but if humans eventually do this that seems to me to be a reasonable estimate of the length of time required.

As to your specifics:

1a. I find completely plausable. Radial expansion at a constant rate is a much shallower growth curve than an exponential! Suppose that humans radically slow our population growth, so much so that the population requires 100 years to double itself. Multiplying our current population by 100 billion (very roughly the number of stars in the galaxy) would take less than 4000 years. I expect that humans (and Alien species X) would not have a problem of not enough population growth. This also could be the expected motive for Alien species X to expand.

2. You completely miss the point, he assumed no such thing. He merely pointed out that given a rough million year timeframe to encompass the galaxy, an unknown civilization would have to be very very recent by galactic time standards for them not to already be here. If you believe his expansion timescale, the first species to achieve spacefaring colonization would be overwhelmingly likely take over the whole galaxy; it would require a huge coincidence for two species to start expanding at times close enough to overlap, given how quickly the takeover is expected to take on a galactic timescale.