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.

Comments

Re:I doubt they'd find anything

[lennart78]

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...

Re:I doubt they'd find anything

[danidude]

"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.

Re:I doubt they'd find anything

[retards]

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....

ok time to spend some of that karma

[Indy1]

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.

Re:ok time to spend some of that karma

[liquidsin]

I hope you're joking. Your 'either-or' assertion is utter bullshit. Hell, there are earthlings interested in finding intelligent life, yet none of us has ever travelled beyond our own moon. What makes you so sure that there aren't millions of other life forms in the universe in the exact same predicament?

Re:I doubt they'd find anything

[sql*kitten]

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.

Re:I doubt they'd find anything

[fruey]

If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet

• Beings out there capable of interstellar travel may exist. Some of them may be too far from here to come and find this "noisy planet".
• Communication does not rely on travel. Being able to send messages via signalling on good frequencies provides near light-speed communications. This may have long delays, but be nothing like the time it would take to travel interstellar distances, save wormholes and other things which break current known physical laws. Your concept of impossible is too restricted. Indeed, how would messages from the travellers get back to the earth in reasonable time if communication is impossible over such distances?
• If other intelligent beings thought like you do, then they wouldn't have already found this planet in spite of the noise. Precisely for the reasons you think we shouldn't look.

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.