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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.
- 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)
> 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...
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...