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

Defect

[phasm42]

All you SETI people out there... if you want your CPU cycles to actually produce something useful, how about running Folding@Home or United Devices or some other medical research program. Looking for scant signs of aliens just seems fruitless compared to the more immediate problems that you could direct your CPU cycles at.

Re:Defect

[DaHat]

True... and I could give my money to one charity vs another which you or others might think is a better cause... regardless of merit, I spend my dollars and CPU cycles where I choose.

Re:Defect

[phasm42]

If aliens are found, they'd be so distant contacting them would be useless. And by the time technology to communicate with them quickly was created, probably the technology to find them would also be significantly advanced. SETI just seems like a project that should be put off until another day when technology has improved significantly (this kinda reminds me of the Slashdot discussion on manned Mars missions and arguments as to why it'd be a waste of resources at the present time).

Re:Defect

[kindofblue]

I totally agree. I still believe that there is intelligent life out there, but we'll never find it. For a universe of 15 billions years in age, intelligent life on earth is a super tiny fraction of that. That's probably the same (order of magnitude) for other solar systems. Statistically speaking, we'll probably have better luck winning the Lotto while being simultaneously struck by lightning, than we will finding radio signals from life forms that overlap temporally with humanity's lifespan and are near enough to detect.

In the mean time, we could be folding proteins to help cure SARS, modelling global warming effects, run fusion simulations or other kinda more useful things.

Re:Defect

[LordPhantom]

or.... they're a cruel dictatorship-type society with a world-government that maintains absolute power by use of fear.

or... they're an alien species that has a hive-mind and no concept of inter-species warfare as we know it.

or... 100s of options that DON'T involve a concept of "aliens as humans".

or... 100s of options that don't assume that tech was driven by a "market".

Re:Defect

[Nordicfire]

Space exploration needs worldwide cooperation over a very long term.

If I remember correctly the history of human space exploration, competition and not cooperation has always been the driving force.

If they are a space-faring species, they would have to have been able to keep enough of their GDP available for space flight for hundreds of years.

I don't know about that. Why could not a fascist, hive-minded alien society achieve the same?

Second, space flight involves high technology. This means that they have to have high technology, and are more advanced.

This comment just made me shudder. You are associating advanced technology with advanced morality, which is an extremely dangerous idea to begin with. It is not corroborated by anything in the recorded human history either. On the contrary, technologically advanced societies have more than often brutally squashed the more primitive ones.

What do you think has led to the prevalence of the "western way of life" in the modern world? No, it was not science or enlightenment, although it helped a bit. What made all the empires possible was the application of violence in a controlled, highly intense and systematic way: modern warfare.

No luck so far but still searching

[drizst 'n drat]

This has been an interesting effort that I have supported since it first started. I have over 16780 units completed to date (35.011 years effort in processing time) and hope that it leads to something. Once you get started though its like a drug ... gotta finish more units!

Where are the results?

[maynard]

The status and update page sat nearly a year without any change until May 17th when they posted an update explaining why they haven't released any results from last year's Arecibo run. I realize it takes time to collate data. And given the very high and unpredictable latency of the their distributed processing system, I understand why it might take a long time to push data out and get results back. Still, since the project was originally slated to run two years, then extended to five, yet why have we (the public) seen so few results from this program? Even negative results would be of interest. Maybe I'm missing something here, since I don't pay very close attention to the project, but I sure would like to see more published details including core data and methodology instead of a pretty web site and irregular status updates. JMO. --M

Re:Where are the results?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the seti@home project is the major source of marketing for getting funding to buy Berkeley professors cool toys for their offices. They don't actually care about the results.

How many times will they send the same work units out? Until everyone wises up?

The Problem of SETI

[Himring]

Isn't there an inherent problem with SETI as it exists? Isn't it geared to search for life like us instead of life, period? Sure, a patch of moss won't put up a radio signal, but have equal efforts been made to discover planets which could house lower forms of life as has been put into, basically, finding "people" out in space (which is what we're really doing by looking for the evidence we're looking for in SETI)? Does anyone have any comparisons of resources spent? My point is, perhaps SETI should be refocused to consider such factors. "Contact," after all, was a movie....

Re:Just not on company PC's

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was anyone upset by this? The software client only uses spare CPU cycles and the bandwidth requirements are so low it's not even worth mentionning. Why the fuss?

I still wonder...

[bigattichouse]

Every experiment needs a control. As a control, they should send out a small probe and look backwards at earth on the same frequency(s) and see if the SETI clients consistently discover transmissions from earth... this would at least go a long way to prove if the tests are even valid. (or just point an antenna at chicago, or up in the mountains looking down on san francisco.

Re:Just not on company PC's

[TeknoHog]

Realistically, what's the problem with running s@h or a similar project on any available machine, as long as

• it's running at a low priority
• memory consumption isn't a problem (it takes about 16 MB)
• network isn't being ddos'd by a work unit of 300KB every few hours?

I hate to see CPU time being wasted. If you're worried about power consumption you might just as well turn the machine off entirely.

Where are the results? IN YOUR PANTS!

[Giant Panda]

I know the parent will be modded "troll" or something, but AC has a point, and it has been mentioned several times here today: The Seti web site sure is pretty, but where's the beef? As anyone who has been to grad school knows, science is nice, but the real focus is writing grants and getting funding for that new cluster or big flat-screens for displying (they say) pretty pictures (God knows you can't do that on a conventional 17 - 21 inch CRT...). Conceptually, Seti@Home has been good for science and advanced the idea of distributed computing. But maybe it's time to wrap it up and solve real-world issues with the same technology...

More Wasted CPU Cycles Than Solitaire

[LinuxBlah]

SETI has become a substitute religion. Athiests and secularists often claim they are so intellectually enlightened that they don't need religion. They laugh at and mock people of faith that go to church, mosque, or synagogue, but then expect to be taken seruiously and regard themselves as profound deep thinkers because they sit in front of their screensavers waiting for a blip from planet XYZ. How many years sitting in front of the screensavers will it take before athiests concede they their pursuit to find extra-terrestrial life is just as faith-based as conventional religion?

the real value of SETI

[Dan Crash]

SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."

These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.

Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)

"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.

If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.

The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.

So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.

So what's the estimated wasted power at this point

[Mustang Matt]

Have they ever predicted how much power has been used to search over the past 5 years?

Other @home projects

[Arcturax]

What I would like to see would be an @home project to process data taken on stars to search for wobble or to filter an image of a star from say Hubble over and over looking for telltale signs of less than jupiter sized planets.

Of course there is only currently a limited number of telescopes that can collect such data but that should increase in the next 20 years. I hope to see enough of such data to let us start looking for actual planets and enough of it that an @home is required for that too. That will help us zero in on possible inhabited worlds far more effeciently than searching for random gaussians will.

Re:Complete, Depressing waste of cycles

[ChuckleBug]

Why are you posting on slashdot rather than doing something to help humanity? Why play a video game when you can do something else that will actually help humanity? Why go to a movie when you can be doing something to help humanity? Why waste your time having fun, making love, playing games, exercising, writing poetry, painting, arguing - anything at all that's not helping the human race?

This isn't a zero-sum game. People get into seti@home because it's intriguing - there is zero chance that if you could wish seti@home into the cornfield, those 5 million people would sign up for folding@home.

Not only that, but I don't feel like there's an ethical lapse in donating spare cycles to a longshot like seti@home. I can do plenty of socially useful things while my work computer is churning away on seti data.

BTW, I tried to do folding@home (I have a biochem background and find that really intriguing), but have had nothing but problems with the Mac client. There's another folding project, whose name I can't remember, that was also impractical on my Mac. I'll keep going back. But my point is that nobody can make everything they do socially significant - so I have a problem with your implied (false) dichotomy of "Do something else/Completely wasting your time."

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell

Re:Just not on company PC's

[timeOday]

People freak out about seti@home, but not about cpu-hogging screensavers (GLPipes, anyone?) or bandwidth-hogging animated doubleclick.net ads. Just an observation.

Re:Just not on company PC's

[Anonymous Coward]

no, it was flamebait. It was written in haste, was not particularly informative (everyone already knows seti@ is not open source, and berkely is very forthcoming why its not, agree or not) and was simply a bash at seti designed to get others to flamebait.

That is EXACTLY the type of comment that should have been modded flamebait, and one of the few type I would not mark "unfair" in metamoderation.

Now, some kind moderator please ignore the parent, and mod the grandparent down some more, since the parent is obviously the same as the grandparent. You can mod this if you want to, what do i care ;)