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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.
is BOINC really the best acronym they could come up with?
I still can't see any information on their website as to when they will upgrade to BOINC.. Which is a shame.. I'm a top 5000 user and I want to switch ASAP :)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Expanding the scope of SETI@Home, eh? So like SETI@Work, SETI@Car, SETI@Vacation, SETI@LunchBreak and such? Sounds good!
..we're geeks, this is the only BOINC we're going to get.
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network? It should be technically feasable, and then the eff people could run an ad campain such as, "The RIAA is against Kazaa. Kazaa cures cancer. Therefore, RIAA is for cancer!" similar to the campain comercial in Head of State.
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Squirrel
Yes. Yes I agree. You for one should put some clock cycles towards fixing your goddamned grammar.
Hint #1: Don't spray apostrophes everywhere. Pretend there's a worldwide shortage and use them sparingly.
"Boinc".
(extremely obvious)
My father's cancer is gone thanks to a treatment that was just an EXPERIMENT several years ago.
People are only fooling themselves if they think that by running these that they'll see prompt effects.
Research needs experiments to validate/invalidate it. Successful research experiments can lead to experimental treatments, which can become standard treatments.
So coming from someone who has family members who were cured by things that were at one point just "an experiment", I say learn what you're talking about, and until then shut up.
Bill, shamelessly plugging.
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....
Java has one key advantage over assembler: it runs everywhere. Also, depending on the JVM in use, performance may not be bad at all... I'm sure that if optimizing assembler code was worth the effort to code it, the developers could write the Win32 flavor in assembler, and provide a Java version for those who run on other platforms.
Thing is SETI and other distributed computing projects have been doing just that already. For example, SETI has C/C++ clients for Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, you name it. Each has optimized assmebly cores.
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. 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.
Some remote civilization might be broadcasting a sort of Open Source encyclopedia which gives a leg up to emerging space civilizations. Very very far-fetched, but what does that God of yours say? Seek and ye shall find?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
In the past SETI@home had many network problems, with Berkeley throttling down the available bandwidth for SETI... Will BOINC adress this issue? There doesn't seem to be any information about this on the BOINC pages, and additional clients will probably increase the demand for bandwith further. I guess it's feasible to place the BOINC servers outside the Berkeley network infrastructure.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
or looked at JXTA recently,
it just got a *lot* better.
Check out the main website
and this review of JXTA 2 by DeveloperWorks
Cheers, Joel
As an aside:
"For its part, Sun is donating some of its midrange Solaris servers and some workstations. In addition, the SETI@home crew is dabbling with Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer protocols for future versions of BOINC."
Who ever said it was going to be in java should kick themselves in the ass. Not pointed at the OP of this thread, but at the OP of the article.
Old S@H protocol was full of security flaws. Due to lack of verification of returned data it was possible to modify the workunits. And people did it, just to make them compute fast. In the fisrt 100 places of current Top 1000 list there is at least 10 cheaters. I've heard some time ago that approx 30% of workunits results returned to Berkeley was fake.
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.
Java has one key advantage over assembler: it runs everywhere.
Should they open their client's specs, they'd get a lot of coders who'd port it to any platform.
Using Java because it's open is a bad idea, especially when there's no patent involved.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
SETI may be called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, but the data gained from it is used for various other scientific studies involving evaporating black holes and other radio wave emitting phenomena. Christian groups may call SETI useless, but then of course they are scared of its results and the effect it would have on their beliefs. And sure, the chance of finding any intelligent out there via SETI is incredibly slim. On the other hand, decoding a signal from outer space, even if we never translate it, will give us a very good idea of what direction to head when we do eventually get to exploring the universe (or more likely where our militaries decide to start pointing their guns, figuratively speaking).
East Coast Brewers
Am I the only one who read the title and thought that SETI was somehow using the Sun to pull in weaker transmissions, or maybe using it to threaten some rather anti-social aliens? :P
Considering that SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the context was rather amusing...
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
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!
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. 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.
Communication does not have to be two way to get anything meaningful from it. Simply eavesdropping on the signals produced by an alien civilization could produce enormous benefits to mankind including but not limited to advances in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
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 and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
This is so flawed I don't even know where to start. First, interstellar travel is not a prerequisite for interstellar communication. All you need to communicate between stars is a sufficiently powerful EM wave, well within the capabilities of our current technology. Why would you have to be able to travel the stars to send an EM signal? "impossible" pfffffft whatever
Second, just because beings have mastered interstellar travel doesn't mean they have found us. I guess you think "building very fast spaceship" == "finding earth". I don't think this is the case.
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.
Seti is great testbed for distributed computing technology, worst case. Best case it is relatively low cost R&D that could pay massive technological dividends if anything is ever found. Leave god to the preachers, this is science.
That I've had with friends - why the hell are you using your computer to look for little green men (who, even if they contact us, are near enough to come to us, and do so, will probably make us into gourmet ready-meals for their home planet, or smething) when they could be running something like the UD Cancer Project
This gives SETI more legitimacy IMO... as a fun project attatched to one with real value. Of course, I suppose Sun probably couldn't stomach donating to a commercial venture like UD, so I won't criticize them for choosing SETI.
How about a "community" distributed computing project? A true P2P thing where anyone can upload a job and have it processed by folks, and in return provide computing power to others. No centralized server and formalized infrastructure, just a bunch of geeks crunching data for each other.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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
I'm hoping with the upgrades they will start looking for sexy green women.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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.
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware. Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2). Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.
Note that there are about 70 sextillion stars in the universe. That's a 7 with 22 zeroes. Even if only one in a billion stars has a planet orbiting it with intelligent life on it, that still means there are 70000000000000000 such planets in the universe.
Ofcourse, distances between galaxies are so large we can only reasonably search within our own galaxy, the milky way. The guesses here go from 3 billion stars to 100 billion stars. With the previously mentioned 1 intelligent species homeworld per billion stars this would result in 3 to 100 such homeworlds.
The odds ofcourse of intelligent life evolving are not known, because we don't understand yet how life evolved to the finest detail. So most guesses have to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the odds can be pretty slim and still result in intelligent life being pervasive in the galaxy.
Also, you have to take into account the age of civilizations. If an intelligent civilization developed 1 billion years ago around alpha centauri, it would be long gone by now, so we wouldn't be able to pick up their communications. Why wouldn't the civilization keep existing? Simple, the older a civilization get the likelier it becomes it destroys itself in one way or another. And if somehow a civilization doesn't destroy itself, it would either turn inwards (not communicate with the rest of the universe) or turn outwards (colonise the rest of the universe). Since we haven't seen any alien colonists schedule up an interplanetary zoning meeting with Bush, it seems unlikely there are any colonising civilizations out there. Although, I did like the idea from Star Trek where they only made young civilizations aware of the existance of the federation once the civilization developed intersolar travel.
Given the size of the universe, it's indeed pretty likely there is intelligent life out there. I fully expect we will find at least one intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform before our species disappears. What I'm curious about is how this is going to be retrofitted into religion, which very much assumes we are $DEITY's chosen ones.
SETI@Home is the most popular project, measured by number of participants, but it was actually the third large-scale, public domain, distributed computing project. A lot of its functionality and design is based on the second project, distributed.net, which in turn is based on some design ideas from the first project, GIMPS.
/. my site so I don't have to keep plugging it in these SETI@home discussions :-)
SETI@Home has definitely done a lot to popularize distributed computing, and has influenced many later projects, including protein folding projects like Distributed Folding and Folding@Home.
To see what other projects are out there, take a look at my site about distributed computing projects. And click on the links to past years (on my main index page) to see just how fast this field of science is growing.
Kirk
P.S. Somebody please