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SETI@Home Faces Funding Problems
blamanj writes "The aussie version of ZDNET is reporting that money to continue the SETI@Home project is in jeopardy, and it may fall by the wayside unless further funding can be found."
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Or just start selling cute plush peng..er aliens.
What I don't understand is a government funding the SETI project and then denying the existance of extra-terrestreal life.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I've been crunching numbers for SETI for a while now. It's sad that they're running out of money, but it's a part of how their program works. All that bandwidth, and nobody paying for it. They don't get any ad money, and bandwidth is very hard to come by these days. Heck, every one person has to download a few hundred KiB of data every few hours.
That may not sound like much... but when you have 4,027,337 users, it's a lot. Even assuming that only 1/4 of those users actively contribute, you're still looking at a million people downloading > 2 megs a day. Also, some of those million people run whole server farms, and that can build the cost up to 100 megs a day.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. If they run out of funding, I'll be sad to see them go.
Actually I think that works about right. They are saying that ET hasn't visited us yet, but we're willing to look for him.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Worth it? Oh yes, most definitely.
I consider SETI@Home to be one of the most inspirational projects ever attempted by our generation. Really, it's my equivalent of the moon shot (which happened two years before I was born).
I don't get misty-eyed very easily, but when I think about the films of JFK's inspirational speech... well, I hope the Kleenex is handy.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.
God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.
...that all the CPU cycles I have donated over the years in processing over 1400 units have been...a waste of time?
No, even no-events are of some value. Now we know of a lot of frequencies that are not being used in a lot of start systems.
Tor
Perhaps they can set up a Donate icon on their application, perhaps through Paypal...
I'm sure there would be tons of people willing to donate.
I don't agree with this. Sure we may never come in contact with any alien life, but think about the side benefits. Without the great impact of seti@home, we probably would have never had companies like United Devices which have done research into ways of curing cancer using distributed computing. Seti@home has shown to the masses a new way of doing great things. If nothing else, the publicity that seti@home got has sparked a completely new area of computing that was only previously available to "techies".
Would it be possible for someone to come in and buy the name "Seti@home", along with the list of signed up computers, and then use that processing time for completely other purposes that might not be nearly as desireable as scanning for intelligent life?
I know that getting out of any such trojan use would be as simple as uninstalling/turning it off, but if there's a significant group of people who aren't smart enough to find out that the hands have changed and ditch it, what keeps the person who purchases SETI@home's assets from turning all those CPU cycles into something nefarious...like cracking the encryption on bank accounts or something (you're right, that was a lame idea, but I'm sure someone would come up with a better one).
And it would seem that given the universe of AOL/Windows users, there would be a significant number of folks who would fall into that category.
Or perhaps the End User Agreement or other documents prevent this? I've never run SETI@Home, so I've never seen their agreement.
In Short, just how exposed are people?
Do you also propose the cancellation of all astronomy research, and putting all the money into medicine?
It think the SETI project is great. If somebody donates their resources to science, don't complain about it, even if you happen to like other projects better. Go out and preach to somebody who has an idle computer instead.
Tor
All scientific endevours, especially the ones that go against conventional thought are considered to be a terrible waste of money and many people want them canceled. However, when these projects are sucessful, they rewrite conventional thought and their deiscoveries can change they way everyone lives their lives.
Columbus was considered insane to want to sail around the world to reach India. He was ridiculed and almost didn't find funding. His discovery completely changed the world. There was a time when the suggestion that the earth was round and not the center of the universe would get you killed. I'm not going to list any more examples of going against conventional thought but I'm sure all of you can think of plenty of them.
I'm sure that all of you reading this know, with out a doubt, that there is life on other planets. It is not hard to imagine that there is intelligent life out there too. While this project is trying to find a needle in a haystack, the cost of searching for it next to nothing vs the potential return, and actually finding it would be the greatest discovery ever made.
I believe there are many other projects that we should contribute to such as cancer or aids research, but do you honestly think that canceling SETI will make the vast majority of SETI users switch to another program?
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
what can I use my spare cycles for, besides SETI?
Distributed.net Break encryption and teach the government a lesson on the value of strong encryption at the same time.
That's where my spare cycles go...
*scoove*
Imagine how much power would be saved if everyone set their computers to go into hibernate mode during periods of inactivity. I never ran any of these distributed clients for the simple reason that I felt saving power was of more immediate benefit to my electric bill and to the enviorment.
If the SETI project ends and you've still got that do-good feeling - enable your OS's power saving features. It's the OTHER good thing your computer can do when its processing power isn't needed.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I remember once hearing a statistic about how many tons of coal were burned a day to run SETI@Home. I'm sure there are lots of people who were in fact using "spare cycles" on a computer that would have been left on anyway and had no power management capabilities, but I would be that a high percentage of the computers running their program would either be turned off or be in a lower power mode if they weren't running it.
For a short period of time, I had SETI@Home running on 3 or 4 computers where I used to work (more to pump the company's stats than because I thought we'd find anything). All of those computers would have been turned off during the majority of the day when I was not at work if SETI@Home weren't running on them. So I don't buy the line that running it on another computer doesn't cost anything. Nor, frankly, do I think it's worth the extra cost that is incurred by running it.
Other distributed projects that have been mentioned in various messages here, on the other hand, I think are worthy causes. As long as the people (or companies) running their programs are willing to pay the cost of running the program, I think they're great things to be contributing to.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I hope you're trolling. Just because they won't sell the results to a for-profit corporation doesn't mean that the results aren't available. In fact, if you bothered to read the links the results are going to be made public. What they won't do is sell it to a company who will in turn require an exclusive right to the results.
So, for instance, Pfizer can use the results, but they won't get exclusive rights to the results. If Pfizer doesn't like these terms, and so won't make use of them, then Pfizer is in fact at fault.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I also run Folding at Home, and I find it disheartening that only a few thousand other people contribute. Protein Folding has far more potential to advance science and cure diseases than projects like the United Devices cancer program. Just yesterday I looked at the goal of the project to find that it's already been exceeded. Makes me wander what kind of progress would occur if Folding at Home had the kinds of numbers behind it other projects enjoy. For that matter, what kind of progress would all distributed computing projects make if sixty million people participated rather than the paltry several million we see today. Too bad most people are unaware of the untapped potential of their computers, too apathetic to use it, or both.
Basically, we're always in a funding crisis.
When a crisis lasts for more than a few months, it becomes a "state of emergency".
When a state of emergency lasts for more than a year, it becomes a "economic reality".
When an economic reality passes unnoticed by Slashdot for over six years, it becomes a "crisis".
One piece of advice to Seti@home: do not take Slashdot too seriously. We're just bored and enjoying the scenery.
Thanks for a great concept. Even if the actual chance of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is 0%.
I'm sorry, but what we call "intelligence" is simply our definition of humanity, and this is unlikely to be found anywhere in the universe except HERE.
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I lost my wife to cancer, but that's no excuse for this kind of idiocy.
a) Some cancer is avoidable (e.g. smoking) and some AIDS is not (transfusion, maternal transmission to infants).
b) Expecting people to avoid a disease by resisting the single most powerful biological instinct is stupid. It isn't going to happen. A medical treatment is the only hope.
c) HIV is a wake-up call. It is purely our good fortune that it is so hard to get that you have to have sex or a transfusion to get it, rather than being spread by mosquitoes like West Nile, or through the air like measles. The next virus to come down the pike may not be so well-behaved as HIV. Most of what we learn fighting HIV is likely to help us against the next one.
d) It's not a zero-sum game. Advances in biology are often portable. A cure for cancer could quite plausibly come out of AIDS research.
e) AIDS is increasing; most cancers are not. We don't have to worry about an epidemic of cancer among young people. Yet just such an AIDS epidemic is wiping out people wholesale in Africa. There is so much sickness that it is contributing to starvation, because people are too ill to raise food.
Instead of looking for what to do with spare CPU cycles just turn off the computer and save some of Earth's resources.
It's a totally trivial back-of-the-envelope calculation to deduce how many cycles it takes to find the key for an encrypted message by brute force (the way that distributed.net does it). Why do we need to corroborate that statistic via one very expensive sample?
The government does not need a lesson on the value of strong encryption: these figures are easy to work out, and in any case the NSA already has supercomputers that they use (presumably) to do the same thing. (Except, they likely have better technology than brute force for some ciphers...)
Distributed.net is not about "breaking" encryption. The ONLY thing we learn from it is the encryption key. The key was generated by the contest organizers, and if they wanted, they could have just saved it and we'd be one bajillion cycles richer.
I think it's much more interesting to put my cycles towards something where the answer isn't known! The various folding@home, aids@home, etc. efforts are tantalizing, though it's not clear that they will ever have actual results. Personally, I'm using GIMPS (primenet), which searches for very large prime numbers. (If you want to float your encryption boat, you could recall that asymmetric encryption often uses large prime numbers, though these primes would be totally useless for that.) This is the distributed computing program I know of that has had the most tangible results: three of the world's largest known primes were found by it. (It's also one of the oldest... I joined about 7 years ago.)
GIMPS is here: http://entropia.com/ips/