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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network?
You mean share our music with the aliens?
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