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SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
The S in SETI stands for search, not for Speak.
The finding of a signal with non-natural origins, such as broadcasts would be on of the major scientific breakthroughs of the century. Communicating with any -if existant- "aliens" is an other story altogether.
Besides that - How many people play along in lotteries even their chances of winning are slim to none? People have a tendency to romatisize things, give 'em a break...
"The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space." I disagree. I think the whole promise behind SETI is that it MAY BE intelligent beings out there in the universe. How we can find then? SETI may not find then if they are, but I think that actively searching, even with very little chance of actually finding then, is a lot better than doing nothing at all to try to find the answer to that very important question: Are we alone? And at the moment SETI@HOME is the best way that I can use to give (yes, veeery smal) contribution to try to find the answer.
- no sig.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
Maybe the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God (wow, not only do you assume everyone has a god, but you mean THE god with a capital G) is just a nice bush to hide your head in instead of facing up to mortality and a universe without clear meaning.
Basically you are saying we should go to church and pray to some deathcult-deity instead of listening for radio waves from outer space. Somebody did a nice mind-job on you....
SETI ... Ug says SETI good ... Ug says Sun baaad
Sun
Oh no, Ug says make pain stop!
I know i am going to get modded flamebait here, but i dont care.
What a typical fundamentalist christian statement you have there. "The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God."
Translation: Dont be searching for ET you sinners, cause if you do find proof of intelligent life out there, it shoots giant fucking holes in our dogma. Thats why the catholic church, ever an institution thats quick to condemn anything that crosses their ideology, burnt
Giordano Bruno at the stake for even suggesting the possibility of intelligent life that was not on earth.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
How is this a troll? Unfortunately capitalism means people can spend money how they like, though. However, what ya also have to notice is that the money does not stop in the hands of SETI - it is used to purchase equipment, materials, bandwidth, etc, and stimulates the economy. Also, sun can use this as a massive tax write-off, since they can overvalue their own equipment to sale price :) Since I doubt starving children would have much use for things that Sun makes... (mmm... the tastiest bit is the lead solder...)
You, Sir, are ignorant and obviously haven't talked to many Christians. Most of us are as excited about the possibility of alien life as you are.
And I really like the idea of the Open-Source encyclopedia being broadcast for beginning or non-interstellar races (as posted below).
Needle Nardle Noo
Some people consider the search for extraterrestrial life to be an integral part of the search for meaning within one's self and with one's deity.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance
But space is big and time is, well, long. We have been pouring significant amounts of artificial EM into the universe for under a century. We have been actually listening in any sort of organized way for under half a century. The universe could be teeming with life - just not life that happens to be a) within 50 light-years of Earth b) in the EM-broadcasting phase of its development 50 years ago. If there was a culture at a Victorian-equivalent technological stage under a hundred light-years away, it would be completely invisible to us, and vice versa!
Remember that lots of our broadcasting was entirely accidental; a culture that is running short of bandwidth and concerned about energy consumption won't want to tie up huge chunks of it with powerful broadcasts, but will want to use it much more efficiently with short-range signals, line-of-sight, fixed lines, etc etc. It's safe to make that assumption because it's grounded in the laws of physics.
It's wise to keep an ear out, just in case.
Thankfully, we don't all think like you, and sometimes allow far-reaching ideas with no definite goal to lead us to scientific discovery. If nothing else, SETI has already undeniably advanced distributed computing.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Basically you are saying we should go to church and pray to some deathcult-deity instead of listening for radio waves from outer space. Somebody did a nice mind-job on you....
.sig I saw on one of /.'s articles a while back..
That's because they start them out when they are very young. Gives them plenty of time to screw them up so that we have to deal with them later in life.
This guy reminds me of a
"Religion is a crutch for the weak minded"
I knew, when I saw a thread about SETI, that it wouldn't take me long to see someone telling us how useless it is to search for the LGM's but that we should instead believe in whatever god they believe in.. Just amazing..
=]
bork bork bork!
I don't understand your post at all. There is no "whole premise" as you describe it. Science has found no reason why sentient life on Earth should be unique. Rare, maybe (maybe not), but not unique. So, the hugely interesting and important question arises of just how rare it is. SETI is one of the best sets of investigations we can undertake now to try to answer that question. Astrobiology is the other area where we hope to make progress, and which could help us constrain some of the terms in the Drake Equation.
Non-sequitur of the week, maybe month. communications != travel. Also, we've been using RF communications for about 100 years, so there's every reason to believe that only listeners in a small volume of space could know about us by those means. Also, if "they" were monitoring us from a safe distance, how would we know?
Helium balloons want to be free.
I think the word is still out on whether or not SETI will find anything interesting. What I think is fundamentally important about SETI is that is has become a proof in concept for the power of distributed computing.
.02
SETI, to my knowledge, was the first large scale, public domain, distributed computing effort to do something interesting in the name of science. The fact that it's looking for alien communications worked great with the "geek" community, a large number of which happen to like computers as well. It became the genesis for all distributed computing projects to follow.
Had the very first distributed computing project involve folding proteins, it would have never, ever attracted the same level of attention/effort that a search for alien communications did. However, because it has attracted this level of attention and effort, and because of its success as model for how distributed computing can work, we now see a whole slew of distributed computing projects coming up and companys developing distributed computing apps as a business model.
Generally speaking, I think only good things are going to come of these efforts, and at a much faster pace than they might otherwise have.
just my
jeff
Your attempt at persecution sympathy is noted, but ultimately fails. I occasionally browse at -1, and I've seen tons of anti-religious posts modded down, sometimes justly, sometimes not. The post you are replying to was no more full of hate than any other energetic critique of a dogma.
Hate: "All Christians should die."
Not: "Christians perform symbolic ritualistic cannibalism. That's freaking weird, man."
I know Christians in America love to tell each other that they are a persecuted minority, but it doesn't hold water under scurtiny.