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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."
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!
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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
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.
meh
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.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.