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."
Take me to your leader
Parkes is the radio telescope that stared in the movie "The Dish" which describes when it was used to receive the transmissions of the first moon landing.
It seems like if we're looking for aliens, the last place we'd like to look is in the middle of a black hole.
...
Then again, there seems to be some incentive to move to another continent just to look back into space, so they must know something I don't
Would someone explain exactly what they mean by "shriveling black holes?" Do they mean ones that are giving off Hawking radiation (don't they all do that)? How else can they "shrivel?"
..attend to this, seti@home just looking for extra terrestial signs of life hasn't too much appealed to me(for various reasons, mainly because it's still looking for a needle from siberia, and wouldn't carry anything intresting even if some kind of sign was found, except create havoc by shaking people's minds..).
black hole's however seem like more possible and some extra info about them could help scientists tweak their theories.. wich could lead to something intresting, creative things.
of course, i am aware of folding@home, no need to reply pointing to it and that it has more use than some theories of space-time-continuum-and-all-things(tm), but there is also counter arguments why people don't want to fold@home(mainly on the who gets the monetary benefit which could end up being huge from the research&etc)..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hopefully the new software will be SMP ready like the distributed.net client was, a lot of people have access to multi-cpu systems but don't have the time or patience to set up the system to run multiple instances of the program to take advantage of all the CPUs.
The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico receives information from about one third of the sky, all in the northern celestial hemisphere. But what if ET is lurking in the southern skies? The Parkes telescope in Australia is the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and can observe all of the southern sky. Fortunately, SETI colleagues in Australia have agreed to colloborate with SETI@home and host a new data recorder at Parkes. Work on this new SETI@home data recorder is well under way. The new instrument will record data from 13 places on the sky simultaneously, observing 13 "beams" at a time compared to the 1 "beam" at Arecibo. We are trying to raise funds to conduct these southern hemisphere observations for SETI@home. Funding permitting, we expect the new data recorder to be installed and operational at Parkes in early 2003. For more information on the Southern Hemisphere SETI@home plans, see "SETI@home Gearing to Expand the Search" at the Planetary Society
They also name "AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes" and "To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)"
There is also the planned project time line until 2005.
and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.
For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.
This new project will run on a system called BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC and SETI@home websites.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
Parkes Observatory Homepage (does not mention SETI yet, at least not prominently)
Perfectly Normal Industries
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.
I'm pretty sure the Parkes dish was the one in the nice 2000 movie called The Dish.
If you haven't seen it I bet, as a Slashdotter, you'd like it.
At least seti@home seems to finally solved their bandwidth problem. I lack a heater in this particular part of the house so athlons must do, its nice that they will run toasty just in time for fall.
I'm running most of my clients under 2k and stopped for a time because of the problems they were having. (writing hundreds of entries to event logs [oh no! we can't connect] is a really, really annoying thing)
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
(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!
Everyone knows that the aliens have amazing scientific know-how, and are thus invisible to our primitive technology.
We don't have anything to worry about though; they'll just come to a planet that is two-thirds water (even though they have a severe allergy to it), and try and whup our butts in hand to hand inside of using their vaporizers.
Death by plant spray.
Least, that's what they said in Signs, anyway.
How about adding in multiple threads? (besides seperating out the graphics of the screensaver)
I have several dual-procs at my disposal that I like to run SETI@home on, but its an absolutely hideous chore to run and manage multiple instances of the client on the same machine.
Oh, and is SETI@home trademarked? Is the YourCableCompanyHere@Home a violation? (I'd love to see SETI get a huge widfall settlement at the "big boys'" expense.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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)
I'm still trying to find intelligent life on Earth...
Humor aside, I'm looking forward to this move. After 2618 hours spent plugging away at Arecibo's data, it'll be refreshing to get some new data to work with. I'm of the belief that the Universe is just too damned big for us to be that special in terms of intelligent life. With our galaxy as big as it is, not to mention other galaxies beyond it, it's hard to believe that we're all alone in the great void. Bring on the Aussie telescope's data!
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Absolutely: Australia, where according to the article there is an increased chance to find extraterrestrials. I don't see why they didn't search in Australia to begin with. On second thought, perhaps they first had to hone their detection technology so that they can distinguish native Australians from the aliens. Yeah, that must be it.
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.
The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment. This is the /. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically, if you know what someone means, it doesnt matter if they write like a Rhodes Scholar, or a layman. Lighten up a little, you will find yourself with lower blood pressure, and chicks will dig you.
I hate sigs.
There is no logical reason why one part of the sky will have more chance of detecting a signal than any other.
Yes there is. The Arecibo radio telescope is situated in the northern hemisphere, which can only view the outer arms of the Milky Way. Not only that, Aricebo can only sweep 30 degrees of the sky with 1 beam.
Parkers is in the southern hemisphere, which can view the central dense mass (laymans' term - lots of freaking stars in the middle) of the Milky Way, and sweep 70 degrees of the sky with 13 beams.
In other words, we went all over 30 degrees in the northern hemisphere, lets take a look at the highly populated (star-wise) section of the Milky Way in the unscanned southern hemisphere with a bigger and better telescope.
Common sense, really.
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.
Parkes telescope.
Bah, I cannot type at 5:30 in the morning.
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
Read a fairly accurate review of the movie.
/usr/bin/fortune favours the brave
But chicks apparently dig guys who try to define what the meaning of "is" is.
So do we find some sort of happy medium?
It is considered unlikely that theer could be much likelihood of life as we know it anywhere near the Galactic core. The place has a black hole in it and lots of resulting radiation.
If you really don't believe in that project, you can do something would have more direct implications.
:(
go to http://www.intel.com/cure and pick UD (United Devices,founded by seti@home project guy) Cancer project.
Phase 1 has ended, now they run Phase 2. Its running as IDLE process and no problems here. (runs non stop for 97 days here I read) Only for win32 though
I mean nothing is more stupid than an idle processor 24/7 while it can help something.
Oh btw, I am not against seti@home in anyway.
> yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License
Will the whole S@H part be also open source?
This far it has been rather questionable why S@H has been closed source. The explanations given by S@H staff hasn't hold water as there has been presented a way how many of the benefits of open source in a security sense can be accomplished without being truly open source:
http://www.geocities.com/usenet_j/vadcosl.html
VADCOSL - Volunteer Assisted Distributed Computing Open Source License
I remember lenghtly debate about the issue in USENET few months ago.
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
Whether or not it would be a better use of time, you can't use a general-purpose radio telescope for this sort of work. The best approach is a network of small optical telescopes like those run by Spacewatch. Since the data reduction process there is pretty straightforward, I doubt there'd be a need for an @home project.
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Why couldn't life exist in the radiation of the galactic core?
We live in the radiation from our own sun (UV etc..)
You often hear scientists finding life in weird and unusual places on our own planet. Places where conventional thinking would have no life existing at all.
Whenever someone asks about aliens i always say the following....
Life elsewhere in the universe ----- Definitely
Inteligent life elsewhere in the universe ----- Probably
Inteligent life coming to earth, sticking anal probes up the rears of country hicks in arkansas ---- Give me a break!
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.
Okay, picky picky this one, but I think you mean more sensitive. We're not blasting the aliens with Ricky Martin (maybe they didn't like that, hence the move), we're listening here.
Bigger dishes and arrays have the advantage of higher signal gain and different far field patterns (listening area shapes).
You gotta have more gain to overcome loss of signal due to air, noisy equipment, and the like. You don't get many choices on moving a dish the size of a small town really, so you gotta move.
Dan N7NMD/9W2DU
The Asteroids@Home bit was more of a quip at the end than a serious idea. I was talking more about the use of the telescope time, but as the poster above and yourself mentioned, a radio telescope isnt the right tool for the task, so its pretty much a moot point.
I just get pissed off at how issues as large as the failure to search for civilisation desroyers get forgotten as easy as they do. Oh well, its not like we'd leave anyone grieving the loss of humankind.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
"...in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials."
I haven't been following the UFO press lately. Has there been a spate of sightings in the Outback?
On a more serious note, are these characters saying that there are more advanced stellar civilizations in the southern sky than the northern sky? One shudders at the contorted logic and statistical analysis that could have led to such a conclusion.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Can you really say that a telescope stares? Perhaps because it typically is fixed, but it is a tool so it doesn't really look. It just allows us to look.
What is the point in SETI?
.....
/me removes tongue from cheek...
Certain parts of society are already liasing with aliens, and we have been for some time. Wake up and smell the coffee!
Yes and those documentaries, MIB and MIB2, were fascinating, weren't they?
We're decoding the message fron the aliens now sir. They say "Watch .. Out .. For .. That .. Asteroi--"...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Meant to write "starred" not "stared".
/me goes off to sit in the corner wearing the dunces cap.
The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment.
/. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically, ...
There's nothing wrong with the sentence. The subject is you (understood), "people" is in the vocative case and is appositive to the subject, and the verb is "come on", which happens to be a
phrasal verb.
This is the
Having known a few Harvard Law students, I think it's funny that you use them as examples of grammar experts. Moreover, in this sentence you string together three independent clauses with commas, which is a no-no.
I was going to keep quiet (the internet being as you say a pretty casual environment), but I didn't like seeing the pot get modded up for calling the kettle black. I'll probably get modded down for doing the exact same thing.
Calling Parkes mroe 'powerful' than Arecibo is somewhat confusing. Arecibo actually has a much larger disk, so it can detect fainter sources (one definition of powerful). However, it gets this collecting area at the expense of being unable to steer, while Parkes can point all over the sky. The other issue is the multibeam receiver. Parkes with multibeam can observe 13 positions at once, while Arecibo is constrained to one. In this sense Parkes could be said to be 13 times as powerful as Arecibo.
It should be noted that there is also a multibeam receiver at Jodrell Bank near Manchester. I'm not sure if this has been involved with any SETI observations.
As to going to the south, an earlier SETI search by META found a few signals that might've been of artificial origin, but these did not repeat, so were not cast iron SETI candidates. Intrigingly, these sources clustered along the Galactic Plane. By moving the search to the south, SETI will be able to see far more galactic stars. The reference for this is: Horowitz and Sagan, 1993, Astrophysical Journal vol. 415 p.218.
How about a version of the OS X screen saver that doesn't crash the machine? My iBook reboots randomly while running it and a buddy of mine's dual CPU tower has random lockups with the client.
.technomancer
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.
Internet should have a capital 'I' not lowercase as in your post.
Not that I am being picky...
I presume they'll be looking for prison planets from now on?
oh c'mon, laugh.
I haven't read all the comments, so someone may have pointed this out, but SETI@Home hit 4 million users yesterday. Pretty impressive.
Bear in mind, as "loud" as our planet is, we've only been broadcasting signals into space (i.e. radio, tv, etc.) for less than 100 years. Considering that radio waves travel considerably slower than the speed of light, even our earliest signals are at most 100 light-years away. Most likely only a fraction of that. And there really aren't a whole lot of stars within that 100 light-years radius. Consider that the nearest is over 4 light-years distant. Even if there IS life in that star system (which is unlikely), the chances are, they might not have been "listening" for radio waves coming from our little planet. Remember, space is a pretty big place. Not only that, but a radio signal travelling across 4 light-years would be INCREDIBLY weak.
I'm not aware that any asteroids, earth-crossing or not, have radio signatures. Optical telescopes are needed for asteroid searches...
Dear Seti;
I hope you're reading this. I'd like a greater variety of clients, and preferably, more command line clients. I don't want to waste CPU cycles generating a pretty screensaver on my PC or Mac, I want to fly through work units.
Secondly, I believe that some time ago (around version 3) you DROPPED support for Sparc Linux, which cut the number of machines I can devote to SETI in half. I believe I have 1 Mac, 2 Windows machines and 1 Intel Linux machine still working on SETI (I have about 9500 work units done), but, if the Sparc Linux client returned, I could double the number of machines I have doing SETI.
Also, please make them stand-alone clients, and not dependent upon a library I may or may not have. Download time of the client isn't a factor, getting it to run, and run easily is the goal.
Thanks!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Don't worry about it.
AFTER the big rock falls out of the sky and kills almost everyone, Congress will propose a bill that will enact a subcommitte to discuss the solution.
Assuming bipartisan agreement, it should only take a few millenia after that to arrive at possible defense, which will be to bomb Iraq, or jail hackers, or something similar to the DCMA, but for asteroids....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Now they'll find even more nothing.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
From the article:
> BOINC, in essence, is "a new layer of software" that separates the different components of the SETI@home program. It will allow changes to be installed without interrupting the screensaver or asking the user to download upgrades.
Hopefully this will be an option, and not a requirement.
Vote for global prefs bug
Creating new elements in particle accelerators does alter the way we (well, physicists) think about the world. Creating trans-Uranic elements gives physicists insight into the atomic structure, how atoms are built, what keeps them together. Indeed, the creation (and destruction--how they fall apart is just as important as how they're built) of new elements provides data that are used to shape the most fundamental models of the universe; quantum theory and other such things are derived, in part, from such data.
Additionally, some of those elements do have a practical use; perhaps you've heard of a synthetic element called Plutonium?
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Thats the theme of Clarke's "Rendevous with Rama" series, about to become a movie. 'Kill two birds with one stone' then :-)
SETI radio while NEC is visual. These would use different existing telescopes. They would compete for operational funding, though.
Aliens are trying to communicate with us via vibrations sent through element 315 via Quantum means?
Of course that is all just off the cuff nonsense science, but even so who's to say that other branches of science might not yield proof of extraterrestrial existance before radio telescopes?
As for hunting for NEO objects, I daringly propose that everyone on welfare be sent to orbiting satellites to man searching stations, and the whole welfare fund from every country used to build and maintain these stations. Then the people have some good marketable skills when they rotate off duty in a few years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
CNN is carrying a small article titled, "New telescope as big as Earth itself" about radio telecopes that cover 3 continents and work in unison to peer at the galaxy. If yer interested... read on.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Sadly, due to the constant eroding of such invaluable skills, like... say spelling for example, this one slipped by. What the original poster meant to say was that it starred in the movie (i.e. it played a role) as opposed to it staring in the movie. (i.e. looking at something with a fixed gaze.) Feel free to look them up in dictionary.com for better definitions, but you get the idea.
"it is possible to develop an internally consistent cosmology that does have the Earth at its center, with the Sun and the rest of the planets orbiting us. It is based on a model initially proposed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe."
They teach Tycho Brahe's system in school, but you have to take a college astronomy course to hear about it. Brahe had access to the best empirical data that could be gathered with the naked eye (he collected it himself). This was the data that Kepler used to formulate his view that planets orbit in elipses rather than circles. But since Brahe didn't have access to telescopes, his data still wasn't all that great.
The advent of telescopes made it possible to collect data that was even better than what Brahe had collected. Once you have telescopes, you have the ability to see the shadows that the sun casts on planets as they (or the sun, if that makes you happy) move around. I forget the exact situation, but someone was able to observe a shadow that, due to the angles involved, was impossible in a geocentric system, even in Brahe's.
Though Brahe's system failed, I heard from a retired math professor that you can construct a complete mathematical model of planetary movement by assuming that, instead of living on the surface of a sphere, we live on the inside of a sphere, with the sun at the center. I don't know anything about this, though, and can't explain how or if it works.
Steve
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?
Perhaps instead we should upgrade the aliens to make them easier to detect.
Table-ized A.I.
In my previous post, I admitted to being not very familiar with the creation or destruction of new elements, and now that you mention it, I see some value in the pursuit. But scientists (and all academics) have a tendency to research only the things that interest them and to publish the results only to their academic peers. The fruits of the research never leave the Ivory Tower.
This is fine if the scholars are going to pay for everything themselves, but if they use scarce public resources to conduct their research, they have a responsibility to give back to the public. It doesn't need to be a marketable or practical payback, but real people in the real world ought to wiser as a result of the work that scholars do.
Scientists are actually pretty good about giving back, but the current state of some disciplines is just disgraceful. Philosphers, for example, seem to have totally abandoned their responsibility to the public that funds their research.
Steve
I am worried that the seti@home project has lost its focus and gone astray. Seti@home was a romantic notion that captured the hearts and minds^h^h^h^h^h of many of it's users. Mindshare YES, brain power NO.
I think seti@home should transform itself from being a passive project to being an active project. Utilizing the spare CPU cycles of a million idle computers is great but utilizing the millions of idle minds that stare at the screen-saver is revolutionary. Imagine the computing potential. It's incredible.
I know the Seti League's project Argus is a volunteer effort, but unfortunately most of us don't have the space, money, skill, or time required to build a seti microwave station in our own backyard.
My idea is to collect high quality microwave data from antennas such as Arecibo and Parkes and distribute that to users over the internet. Instead of (or in parallel to) a seti@program client, the user would use a signal analysis tool such as baudline to search for drifting signals. Search strategies would need to be conceived and programmed. A collaborative component would need to be built to allow IM like communication, second opinions, and instant peer review. It would be true distributed science that anyone with a creative mind and a computer could participate in.
Since baudline can read and decode the seti@home work_unit.sah files you can perform your own secondary analysis of the seti@home data. Baudline is free but it only runs on x86 linux so give it a try if you can. Most WU data files appear to be pure noise and are boring to look at but occasionally you get an interesting one. Auto-drift rulez.
The ukentucky link below a similar concept that is rough and needs more polish. The potential is there but the implementation is flawed. It also needs more volunteers.
If advanced alien civilizations existed in numbers significant enough for us to hear their radio transmissions, the probability is overwhelming that at least one in a nearby galaxy would have embarked on a program of colonization. Evolution favors organisms which have a drive to expand (otherwise they would have been out-competed). Technological civilizations inherit their evolutionary drives and will share this expansionist tendency.
Expansion can be performed at a significant fraction of the speed of light. von Neumann machines - self-replicating, nanotech-based robotic spacecraft - can fly to a new system, make copies for exploration and colonization, and more copies which get sent off to other stars, all using local system resources. An entire galaxy or even group of galaxies can be explored and colonized at perhaps a tenth the speed of light. A million years will be enough to cover all the stars in a galaxy; a few times that will cover the local group of galaxies.
Once a solar system is inhabited by a technological civilization, its most important goal will be to manage the primary resource, the energy production of the central star. Stars in unmodified systems radiate 99+% of their energy wastefully into empty space. A civilization will want to capture that energy and put it to work, by building a Dyson sphere or some similar structures to collect the wasted light and heat from the star. Star systems inhabited by advanced civilizations will look very different from the ones we see in our galaxy.
The galaxy is ten billion years old. Our technological culture is no more than a few thousand years old. If other technological species have arisen, chances are statistically overwhelming that they are at least tens or hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. This means that they will have had ample time to fully explore, colonize and even modify the entire galaxy.
The only plausible way this can't happen is if there are no other technological civilizations out there. And in that case, SETI won't work, we won't find any signals. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the fact that we live in a galaxy unmodified by technology.
If the galaxy were so full of advanced life that SETI would work, they'd be here, and everywhere else in the galaxy, by now. Therefore SETI can't work.
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....
hmmmm?
About time, recently restarted seti@home after a lengthy absence and the work units were dated 1999. While the project is interesting, who wants to re-analyze 3 year old data for the 1000th time.
Perhaps some completely different form of life could evolve there with much better repair mechanisms (RAID-5 Genomes anybody).
Dude, let us just not get nitpicky, we don't need thread nazis on the /. message boards
I hate sigs.
Fair enough. Despite my crabbiness (not enough coffee, I guess) and apparent hypocrisy, I did agree with the spirit of your comment.
to echo one of my friends sentiments, there needs to be a new /. moderation, "tru dat", its ok, i get like that if i dont have enough code red
I hate sigs.
to paraphrase Dr. Frink:
"which is obvious to even the most dimwitted individual that holds a phd in adavanced astronomy."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
haha that was funny, especially considering "The Matrix" was the real documentary. ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
25 * * * *
_____________
runs the start-seti program hourly (start-seti checks for duplicates before going further)
start-seti:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~samuel/seti
if ! ps auxw | grep setiathome | grep --quiet -v grep
then
./setiathome -graphics -email -nice 20 >> seti.log
fi_____________________
Note that standard error is not redirected. If something goes wrong, stderr output gets mailed to me by cron.
If seti@home starts with BOINC auto-loading programs, I'd be inclined to run this under a sandbox account (if I run it at all).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Have you ever heard of P2P? Its my only answer to it... 24/7 connection?
And no, I am not an American.
oh I forgot something too... You don't get a heck about what IDLE processing time I speak about.
E.g. IBM Grid computing... Big blue spends billions to that research.
While I reply needlessly to your comment, UD Ligandfit tries to find a cure to cancer at background, without effecting anything. It runs while my system is ON. I don'T turn ON my system for it. Big difference.
You can run it as a screensaver only too... Instead of seeing stupid Direct3d or photo etc tricks, you can see ACTUAL stuff (latest displays OpenGL model of the molecule being processed) and do REAL help to Oxford university trying to find a cure to cancer via distrubuted computing.
You sure about 100W? - a P-IV 2GHz consumes 75W by itself - a single HD consumes 12W when idle see Tom's hardware for reference. The motherboard is not innocuous and neither are the RAM or the video card. You don't have to run 3D for the GPU to run hot. Then there's all these fans. My guess it that the computer probably consumes at least 150W when running 100% CPU without disk access with recent CPUs from either Intel or AMD. Now I need to read out on switching PSU like you say. What is their efficiency? They seem to require cooling as well (fans) so it can't be 100%. To me 200-250W seems very reasonable as a consumption starting point when running S@H. Certainly recent PCs are quite good at heating a living room. And even if you are right (100W) that's still over $100/y, not an altogether negligible sum. Maybe you can laugh about it but I don't.
slashdot, home of the thread nazis
I hate sigs.