SETI@home Turns Five Today

mfh writes "Five years ago today, SETI@home launched a comprehensive program to search for Extra Terrestrial life in the universe, using millions of home computers to help compile useful data that could some day lead to the discovery of advanced extra terrestrial life. Since inception, SETI@home has found 2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet. SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."

Comments

obligatory space balls quote

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

"we ain't found shit!"

Let's get it out of the way

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new Gaussian overlords!

Five years, eh?

[bobhagopian]

Those bastards I'm competing against have accumulated thousands of years of credits.

Boring

[N3koFever]

I ran SETI@home for months but I got bored when I didn't find any aliens. What's the point of the game?

Re:Boring

[Anonymous Coward]

You should of been elsewhere...

In Soviet Russia the Aliens find YOU.

Signed.
A. Lien.

And - obligatory userfriendly

[spellraiser]

... here

and..

[MasTRE]

In related news, ET turns 22 today

Re:Defect

[dumeinst]

I bet the aliens have better computers. When we find them, they'll be able to simulate all that protein folding in SECONDS.

An still no sign of ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Intelligent life on Earth

Re:Defect

[gears5665]

uh huh...nice try but I aint gonna fall for it. You just want to get rid of some of your competitors!

A new project

[millahtime]

Maybe we need to redirect SETI. We should spend all computing cycles finding intelegent life in Washington.

Re:A new project

[gears5665]

As voters, we only have ourselves to blame.

Re:A new project

[Anonymous Coward]

first we should find "intelegent" life on slashdot.

Re:A new project

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Whichever turd won't ruin your country's reputation and allow evil to dictate policy. If it's the cat turd, vote there. If it's the dog turd, go canine. Woo. Problem solved. I'm awesome. That'll be $10, please.

Re:Defect

[znaps]

Yeah, like where the hell do my socks keep disappearing to?

Aah, the memories...

[Stack_13]

This reminds me of the time when I was *really* enthusiatic about Seti@home. Having a shell account on a university mainframe, I devised a clever script which launched setiathome client every night at 8 PM, and terminated them at 8 AM.

Problem was that something went slightly wrong with the Solaris server resulting in a crash of the server. This was probably unrelated to my setiathome processes (?), but one of the memory dump files had my user ID on them. Nearly lost my privileges - luckily the university IT folks were kind enough to let me off with just a warning.

Re:Aah, the memories...

[DaHat]

You are nicer than I ever was!

Back at my old U we had a pair of sun servers, on a 4 proc machine I'd throw 3-4 instances up and let em each have their own CPU for as long as they were running (no scripts to kill em involved).

Trying to be a lil more clever though (in a way), I changed the app names so they wouldn't appear as seti, and every now and then the admin would see what looked like run away procs and kill em... and a lil later I'd rerun em.

At a later date, a hardware memory error (ie one of the dimms started to break down) occurred and they tried to use my seti usage as an excuse for it... so they got me to stop.

Re:Defect

[Anonymous Coward]

20% to aliens, 80% to cancer research and 20% to medically related research

I've dedicated 103% of my CPU time to selecting three numbers that actually add up to 100%...

Re:Defect

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, there's a new version of SETI coming out where you can delegate percentage of the CPU to the various tasks. For example, 20% to aliens, 80% to cancer research and 20% to medically related researc.
Anybody have any more info on this project?

Hell yeah, I'd install that in a heartbeat. Any software capable of using 120% of my CPU should be respected.

Re:Defect

[Nordicfire]

I thought they were already probing us for our DNA.

What I don't get, though, is why the aliens seem to be so interested in the genetic material of hillbillies and crazy people...

Re:Top Secret

[mrzaph0d]

what's really weird, is when you decode what they're saying it works out to "i-d-10-t", which is the same as an error code i got from the tech support desk..

my best gag ever.

[joper90]

readining this reminds me of my best joke on a work mate ever.

He was always forever installing bloody seti on every machine server in the building..

So i played a joke, installed a app on his machine which at random points (i controlled) ping up and say it had found a singnal etc etc etc.. i used the seti gfx etc etc.

He got really excited, so of course we went one stage further.. The seti app told him that the signals were getting sent off for analysis, and someone would contact him shortly.

We then (other had now joined in) continued to make him jump out of his seat and explain "its happened again." while the rest of tried to stop laughing.

So an spoofed email address was setup and we emailed him from seti.. told him they were getting looked at etc..

Over the period of a couple of weeks we got the noise off the film contact, and mixed it with white noies.. luckly he had not seen contact. it started off really quite quiet in the background, and each email it got better and more and more clearer.

It was genuis.. we couldn't stop laughing.. he was telling his friend family etc etc etc that hed discovered possible alien life contact..

Of course.. we then relised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..

he was not a happy bunny..

Re:my best gag ever.

[ScottGant]

Reminds me of something similar I did to a co-worker.

I wrote and designed this application that perfectly simulated seti@home and it too popped up and informed him that he found a signal. Then I wrote a spoof email as if it was sent from seti@home telling him that they would be in contact with him.

I hired 5 actors and got Air Force uniforms for them to wear, making sure their hair cuts were just right, and then proceeded to go to his house and give him some garbage that I had written out as a script. They told him that the Aliens had requested that they contact him personally and that they would be there that Friday at noon.

I made up a mock up of the ship from Independance Day from syrafoam and paper mache, made it to scale also, which ment it was 1 mile across, and lifted it with several helium blimps inside the structure and then hauled it to his house. I contacted O'hare airport and had them re-direct traffic around the blimp/ship as it being 1 mile in diameter it could have caused problems.

Of course ILM wanted to get in on the gag too so I let them mock up some really nice Alien bodies and make-up effects...which really pissed off Stan Winston Studios...but that's a long story..

I got then-president Clinton to come in on the gag and the secret service also. It was pretty funny.

Of course.. we then realised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..

Friends in space...

[lildogie]

I've always marvelled at the concept of connecting our planetary network to a big open port aimed at space, hoping some packets of alien email might arrive.

Let's hope we get a chance to think before someone opens the attachment.

Re:No luck so far but still searching

[Spellbinder]

i ran SETI for about a month
then my overclocked p4 burned out so i stopped

Re:i hate to say it...

[gears5665]

ps i donate all my unused cycles to folding (over genome project, i personally feel that we're going to screw something up with the whole genetic genome geewiz junk)

And here class, we have the makings of a luddite. Notice how the fear of the unknown leads to rash illogical actions? This effect, is known as the evolution effect. It regresses an otherwise intelligent person into the superstitious fearmongering ancestor of 10,000 years ago. Now imagine if this person had acess to religion to spread his war against science. Ok, my time is up go write a paper on the implications of this.

Re:i hate to say it...

[Stevyn]

Um, the aliens have those cures. that's why we're looking for them

DUH!

Re:Top Secret

[Milo of Kroton]

I was tempted to reverse engineer the program and "report back" data of "All your base are belong to us." "You are on the way to destruction." "You have no chance to survive. Make your time." but I'm lazy.

Note, if anyone manages/bothers to do this, give me props.

SETI@Home sounds like SCO...

[PSaltyDS]

...refusing to produce their proof of extraterrestrial inteligence untill the universe allows them to examine every electromagnetic quanta. Microsoft is likely funding them (via a skunk-works shop in Area-51) to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about us being the center of the universe.

Regulation

[regjoe]

I bet we have found signals. The FCC is now fining them for broadcasting on a frequency already assigned to a different carrier...

Are they sure it's only 5 years old?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because yesterday, they just sent me an email that they hadn't received any data from me since, December 13, 1901.

That was back when we had to process this all by hand. You guys have it so easy now.

Re:Possible radio transmission?

[Mr. Bad Example]

> Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"?

All they got so far was this:

"Dear sentient:

Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Altair IV Chambers Of Commerce And Industry, I have the privilege to request for your assistance to transfer the sum of 47,500,000.00 (forty seven million, five hundred thousand Rigellian quatloos) into your accounts [...]"

Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey wait - I'm just hearing breaking news on the radio that an intelligible signal has finally been identified. Apparently the data has been passed on to the boffins at NASA, who have so far been able to translate the following fragment:

Dear Sir,

CONFIDENTIAL

Please, I am Zytrrx Qaluda, the only son of late Wxmzi Qaluda, emperor of the HD 70642 solar system.

My contacting you gave me the courage and confidence to rely on you. I am writing
you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance to transfer our cash of seventeen quintillion United States Dollars ($17,000,000,000,000,000,000.00) now in the custody of a BANK here in Zzprya-7 to your private account pending our arrival to your planet.

Re:i hate to say it...

[WinterSolstice]

Well personally, I don't want to waste my cycles searching for intelligent life in space.

I haven't entirely given up on finding it on Earth...

(rimshot)
-WS

Re:i hate to say it...

[ragnar]

Wow... someone who still uses OS/2. That is just about us rare as aliens.

(Just kidding... I used to be a rabid OS/2 user)