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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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Maybe they could start selling some of the extra processing time to pay for the cost of the project? It would annoy me if they were making money off of it, but not if they were using it only to cover their costs.
If those spare cycles are on a Windows machine (maybe you're not using it anymore!) you could always try www.uniteddevices.com, at http://members.ud.com/projects/cancer/index.htm, and help find a cure for cancer.
Perhaps they could include banner ads to generate more revenue. It would kinda suck, especially considering that you're the one providing a service to them. But if it's what it takes to keep the project going I wouldn't mind...
- funding from big contributors (without commercial obligations), not likely to continue (forever)
- funding from users. If 500 000 paypalled $5, it could be enough. Would you?
- advertising, 4 million users. Could work, would you accept it.
- become a subproject of another (commercial project), search ETs only with certain percentage of available CPU power.
- be eaten by an OS vendor (at some stage, a distributed client will become a fixed part of many operating systems, I believe) this might provide a kickstart for doing it for some vendor.
- run it by volunteers, reduce staff costs.
Can you come up with something else?
This is another Entropia project, they test millions of candidate drug compounds against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses.
What fun is being "cool" if you can't wear a sombrero? (Hobbes of Calvin & Hobbes)
When has Seti@home actually provided any useful knowledge about interstellar ANYTHING? They just chew bandwidth and cycles for what purpose? Using FFT's to find seemingly coherant signals buried in electomagnetic background.
This project does seem quite interesting, in that it's trying to determine signals of life, but hasn't provided a thing (unless I'm wrong).
Why not let them die?
> Here at home it's taken about 4 Billion years for
> the technology to evolve allowing for an
> intelligent search for extraterrestrial life. If
> the Galaxy is 14 billion years old then older
> technologies should have at least sparsely spread
> over the Galaxy by now.
If that's the case, it may simply be that other civilizations in the galaxy/universe haven't been around long enough to be sending signals for us to recieve. Consider that about 10 billion years after the universe came into being, planets capable of supporting life began to appear, plus or minus one billion years.
If humans are average, and our solar system is average, and you consider how long earth has been a source of radio emissions (maybe a hundred years?), in the scheme of things we've barely been making noise for a fraction of a second.
Granted the distance between stars and the time it takes for radio waves to go between them, if all forms of life all across the galaxy started broadcasting radio emissions at the same time we did, radio signals may not even start to cross earth's path for another ten thousand years (the milky way is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter). If a civilization got a one billion year jump start on us, either they came and went while we were still evolving a vertebrae, or they never got past inventing fire, or we already missed their radio signals. Same story if they have a five hundred million year jump, or a 250 million years, or even 1 million years. If we were the first intelligent beings in the galaxy, it could be millions of years before anyone starts broadcasting anything.
Conclusion being, given how short a period we've been gathering data from space, to suggest there's nothing out there because we haven't found it is a logical fallacy. The galaxy just isn't old enough, and we don't have enough of a data set, to make any conclusions.
Too bad they wont promise that the cure will be in the public domain. I won't contribute to that if they are going to hold my friends and family hostage if they find something with my cycles...
Don't forget that when using Entropia, your computer's cycles are used for some commercial tasks to earn Entropia money. I have no idea what the ratios are for commercial vs non-commercial. They don't say, which makes me suspicious.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important.
Bull-puckey. SETI@Home is a quixotic endeavor at best. Results do matter---or at least, the reasonable belief that results are achievable. When JFK announced that we would be going to the moon, serious scientific minds believed it was possible in a reasonable time frame. There is no such reasonable belief with SETI@Home. We have no concrete evidence whatsoever that any intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, not to mention intelligent life that transmits radio signals in our general direction.
In the 1960s, we knew where the moon was, and we could determine reasonably accurately how much fuel and time it would require to get there once a vehicle was constructed. Who can tell us how much time and CPU horsepower it's going to take until we discover an alien radio talk show?
Yes there are always people who underestimate what is possible. But interestingly enough, we do all right anyway. We all get a laugh about Bill Gates' supposed quote that "640K should be enough"; and yet, somehow he still manages to make billions on products requiring many, many times that much memory...
However the issue is what is a good cause. Taking it to the extreme, I wouldn't like my spare cycles to be used by a password cracking system. The real problem is that computation can be easily "faked". I.e. multiplication of two large numbers can be done with FFT. So in order to be sure that nothing "funky" is happening, the system should be opensourced.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
Ok, you could eliminate polution by sending the same thing to multiple users, but that seems to kill the advantage of this kind of distributed computing (the overhead of distribution, comparison, etc, becomes comparable to the computation itself, so why not just do it locally ...)
The Raven
The Raven
At my school www.uncc.edu they run seti non stop on all the winXP boxes and slows the net work down. I don't know how much network activity seti uses, but I'm sure hundereds of boxes running it on a 10baseT network doesn't help the situation. We also run lots of dumb terminals, by which I mean computers just running X, so that needs a lot of bandwidth. Computers should be used for something more useful like folding.stanford.edu the distributed folding project.
MAKE YOUR TIME
RC5-72 is 256 times larger.
Assuming that RC5-64 could today be completed in two years if started over (not unreasonable), that's 512 years for RC5-72, assuming participation stays the same, and computing power does not increase. I don't feel like doing all the math to get exact numbers, but even if computing power doubles every 2 years for the next decade or two, you are still looking at around 15 years. And that is assuming participation stays the same, which probably isn't likely when the goal is half a millenium in the future right now.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.