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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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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.
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.
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".
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*
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.
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/