Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and it's still in beta, but progressing. I have it on one of my systems, but it's only working on one project right now. Aside from the occasional software update, I've not touched it in a month or two, so I'm not sure if they've implemented any more projects.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Uhh, SETI@Home turned five years old on May 17th, 2004. If you're going to announce an anniversary, you should at least get it right!
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
... and 0 aliens ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Not only has it turned five, but it also hit 5 million users sometime between yesterday and today. I was on yesterday afternoon, and noticed it was about 400 people away.
Number of users at the time of this writing: 5,000,769
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
moo
It's called Pioneer 10
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
I didn't find a real answer to this in a quick scan of the replies, so I figure I'll give it a shot...
I assume you know that SETI@home is parsing a vast collection of radio transmissions and hoping to find one from off-planet. When you download it and run it, you get a batch of transmissions and your computer will try to find a specific pattern in the mess. It is looking a single signal that initially has a steep decline in frequency. Then it levels out at one frequency. Then it goes into another steep decline. Why?
If a signal is broadcast from Earth, it stays at about the same frequency all the time. If it is brodcast from, say, Uranus, the spin of the Earth will cause a doppler effect. Start with your antenna being on the 'dark side' of the Earth. That is the side opposite the transmission. As it spins around and starts to pick up the transmission, it will be travelling very fast into the signal - causing the frequency to be increased. The relative speed going into the frequency will decrease as the Earth continues to spin. When you start heading back to the dark side, you will move away from the signal, causing the frequency to drop.
So, all SETI@home is really doing is looking for a doppler effect that matches the speed of the spin of the Earth. Such signals have been found. When they are found, the SETI people hunt down the source. Sometimes it is domestic (a weird situation where a signal bounces just right off a mountain or two). Sometimes it is one of our distant space explorers. Sometimes it is a star. So far, none have been from possible intelligent life - especially those domestic ones.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Try here Projects that do SETI, Folding, solve complex math problems, even help design new particle accelerators.
2048 bit space? Lets do some math, ok? Forget 2048 bit. Lets talk 512 bit for now.
9 08287585239790307310653902812811519987203052069789 048695605480701785914487078912
2^512 possibilities
Assuming every PC can do a billion operations per second (~2^30) and there are about 16 million users (2^24). Lets say there are 2^17 seconds in a day (its somewhere between 2^17 and 2^16) and 2^9 days in a year. Lets say the program was 8 years old instead (2^3)
That gives you 2^(30+24+17+9+3)=2^83 operations so far
You've completed 1 part in 1386334847060407429789207092071541851718218537687
While most /.'ers will probably run the FAH client, even Google supports Folding@home - read more at their Google Compute FAQ which allows you to run it as part of the Google Toolbar - heck, I even have my mother helping out this way since it is so super-easy to install.
And if you do decide to support Folding@home, consider joining a team - if you don't have one, you are welcome to sign up for my Google Compute team ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I'm in a similar camp, only my concerns are about power.
When SETI@Home came out, it was one of the only games in town, and computer power management was rare and didn't work well. The computer was going to use 100 watts whether you were using it or not, so it made more sense to put it to use.
Today, there's a very good chance that if you leave your computer idle, it'll eventually go into some sort of reduced-power mode. Given the complicated nature of the world energy situation (Californai blackouts, wars for oil, etc.), I'd rather not waste energy.
Still, these projects are cool, and I'll do what I can to help. My compromise approach has been to run Folding@Home on the machines at my disposal during the winter (when they're throwing off heat that we'd have to generate anyway) and to shut down all of the clients once it gets warmer.
--
sometimes it is hard to tell the serious inquiries / responses from the jokes, but here is my attempt at a serious response. You may also be thinking of the "Wow" signal that was detected at Ohio State in the 70's. It is one of the most interesting signals detected by a radio SETI search so far, but it was never confirmed even after intensive efforts.
A good summary by Seth Shostak (a SETI pioneer and really funny guy) is here.
Is there a simple script one could build on for analyzing .sah files?
Nope, no script for the analysis, what I do is completely manual, all visual. Open a file, tweak/fiddle with some controls, paste the data into the Average window which does the auto drift algorithm, then I stare it for a minute, make some measurements, and repeat. Baudline is just a visualization tool, my eyeballs and brain do all the analysis work. Here is the command line:
baudline -session seti@home work_unit.sah
The "seti@home" session just stores the option preferences and window layouts, nothing special about it.
By trough at 1.4 I assume you're talking about cellphones?
The 1.420000 GHz trough is an artifact of the seti@home collection (radio) and splitter equipment. They notch out a strong tone that is caused by their quadrature tuner so that the distributed client analysis software doesn't get upset. One in every 256 work units has this. It freaks some people out when they see it on the screensaver. It looks like a big dip.