Slashdot Mirror
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."
Please SETI@Home developers, if you chance my reading this please consider what I have to say.
Graphicless client. Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running and have STAY running for many people. I'd like a client I can load up as a service in WinNT or a deamon in Unix that will run without my futzing with it or having to do anything but have the damn thing load from init. I think there's a slew of other SETI@Home users who'd appriciate this as well.
Worker threads. Oh please oh please oh please in your next revision add worker threads. I really don't need the graphics run in one thread and work units processed in another. I've got a dual P3 system that is on 24/7. Half of its processing capacity is sitting idle since I don't run the S@H screen saver. The monitor is off whenever the system isn't in use so the screen saver isn't much use.
Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.
As an aside, does anyone know if any of the S@H work units are recycled and fed into other projects like studying pulsars or radio emitting variable stars? I'm not too up on the format of S@H work units but I thought it'd be cool if astronomers studying any sort of celestial phenomenae in radio bands could recycle WUs for their own purposes, even if they don't have a big distributed cluster working on them.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
(does not mention SETI yet, at least not prominently)
Perhaps not, but the link from that to the Long Baseline Array is quite interesting. There is a map of the array of telescopes - the spread is huge!
There are essentially no searches being carried out in the Southern hemisphere at the present after the Howard government in Australia chose to withdraw all funding back in 1996.
Maybe someone could look at an Asteroid@Home option as well?
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
While I understand the need to search for near-earth asternoids (the extinction of the human species doesn't appeal to me), there should be some resources reserved for projects like SETI. In retrospect, when we think of the greatest achivements of science, more often than not we think of the advances that changed, in a fundamental way, our understanding of the natural world. I don't see how knowing that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around made anyone's life better at the time, but the proof of this ranks as one of the greatest achievements in human history because it revolutionized the way we thought about God, ourselves, and the world we live in.
I think that the discovery of an extraterrestial civilization would be an achievement on par with the proof of heliocentrism. Knowing that there are civilizations on other planets would have no immediate practical consequences (we wouldn't be able to travel to their planet and meet them), but the knowledge that we aren't the only civilized species would radically alter the way that we think about the world, especially in terms of theology and metaphysics.
What I, in my ignorance, consider to be a waste of resources is the development of new elements. This is something that has no practical value and no effect on our worldview. Creating new elements in particle accelerators must be very, very expensive, and the finished product only lasts for a short period of time. Even if they found that, somewhere down the line, element 315 is stable, it wouldn't matter because they're making these things one atom at a time. If element 315 had an atomic mass of 700, they'd have to produce something like 8x10^20 atoms just to get a gram of it. I vote that we take their grant money and use it to search for near-earth asteroids.
Steve
I notice that they will make use of the multibeam receiver to get effectively a 13 times increase in stuff they can look at at one time.
.5 degrees across (quick back of the envelope calculation there, so to speak). What in the sky is within .5 degrees? Globular clusters and the centre of the milyway galaxy (or indeed, other galaxies). You won't find life in globular clusters, because there are simply far too many stars too close together, and life would be cooked. Same thing for the centre of our our galaxy. And since you can only see entire globular clusters or supernova in other galaxies, I refuse to believe any civilasation could produce more radiation than a supernova, so we won't be able to see anything that far out!
:)
I wouldn't think this would be terribly useful. When you go up into the focus cabin, and realise the 13 recievers are separated by not more than about 40cm (the dish is 64 metres across) - ie, you are looking at an area of the sky about
Not to mention I really hate seeing such a useful instrument such as the multibeam receiver wasted on such a useless task as SETI, but they are probably (hopefully) only piggy backing on the electrons going to other experiments.