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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."
Cool stuff, until I found one of our managers had installed it on all of the computers in his department. The boss is still upset about that one, although he does do it on his home PC's.
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
I bet if they found anything it's Top Secret and we won't hear anything about it for a long time. Either that or we just can't figure out what the transmissions are saying.
Evolution or ID?
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?
My friend convinced me to start running SETI on any system I came in contact with to see how they benchmark against servers we buy. Right now I run four clients on my home systems and at least three clients at work. It's been fun watching the numbers crank away and comparing our newer systems to when we started some years ago.
wouldnt it be better to donate cycles to something like folding@home, parkinsons and alzheimers disease protein research?
i dont mean to belittle seti, i think its a wonderful project, and maybe this arguement falls deaf on geek ears (aliens vs disease- woh, war of the worlds:) but id like to see more terran problems solved, no?
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)
|plastic....or gasoline?|
When I saw this on slashdot, I thought that I had been doing SETI@Home for much longer than that, but apparently I registered May 16th, 1999, early in the UTC. Their news release puts the anniversay as May 17th.
Was that really their first day?
The signals we get from SETI, if we get any, will probably start out with dots and dashes, followed by audio and, about fifty years later, video of "Howdy Skwarklar" the puppet from Dontbotherus VII.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I have been a user since last year and collected 10000 work units, then i moved to both the folding@home and climatepredicton projects.
...
Why ? because i strongly suspect they'd waste CPU cycles on the same work units rather than say: hey, "5 MILLION user are enough" we have found this and that, and until new funding arrives you better move on to other projects.
The "current progress" page hasn't been updated in years, so the "future direction" page, look for yourself
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Likely what they're talking about is strong-ish, "looks like this might be something" signals that could not be re-established later on. As I understand it, the Holy Grail in this area is not so much a signal as it is a steady, repeatable signal (think Contact).
Does anyone know (can be bothered to work out) what else could have been done with all the CPU time they've been donated?
Don't get me wrong, I run SETI@home myself, I'm just wondering, say, how much of the 2048 bit keyspace needed for signing Xbox executables could have been searched? How far would the TivoCrack project have got if they'd had access to that amount of computing power? I'm just curious really.
Meep meep
I've been running SETI clients for a while now, and I suppose if someone asked my why I do it, I would say that I do it now just because I did it before.
I don't have any illusions about actually finding intelligent, extraterrestrial communications with SETI anymore. (And if anyone does, I'm not holding out hope that it's me.) In fact, I think that we should seriously question whether the entire premise of SETI@home--that other life forms would transmit data at the radio frequency of water--is still valid. Is it reasonable to assume that two completely different creatures would logically arrive at the same conclusion for how to communicate? Considering the amount of diversity on our planet alone, maybe not.
Could a blind man and a deaf man put together in a giant, dark auditorium find a way to communicate? That would be the easy problem; the hard one is finding a way to communicate with any intelligent life that's light years away out there.
Assuming it's out there in the first place...
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Just to mention that the number of users involved is 5 000 000.
Strange coincidence in the number five.
First I wanted to be a chef. Then I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow ever since.
Ahh, but if we actually knew *where* some interesting aliens *are* located, wouldn't that give us a good reason to figure out a way to communicate faster or go visit? I always joked that the best way to get a mars mission would be to send up a probe with a big inflatable "ship" (something that looked like it had big guns would be helpful) and make it look like it had crashed on mars. If we thought there was a crashed alien ship on mars, we would have people stepping on the planet in no time flat.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Okay, why the heck are we wasting so much processing power on something that will likely never yield anything useful for the human race. It's like a processing power lottery, where the probabilities of anything are so remote that the expected payoff is nil in the long run.
Now, there are distributed computing programs that have actually brought results and helped humanity. For example: http://folding.stanford.edu . IF these 5 million users all installed folding at home, could you imagine the advancements and help to medical science we'd see in the next 5 years. As opposed to absolutely nothing gained whatsoever by SETI@home? (Other than the fact that they were the first people to do distributed computing. afaik.)
And if folding doesn't work for you, there are dozens of other much more useful distributed computing projects which have given results and are more or less guaranteed to give more results than this complete and total waste of money, time and processing power.
Let's try to help the human race instead of wasting our time looking for someone else.
geez.
~ kjrose
I find Folding@Home to be a much more worthwhile use of my spare CPU cycles.
Um, never? Because it's not faith-based. They don't have faith that a signal will come. They just think that it might. Contrast this to a Christian who knows that Jesus will come again.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
"SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."
Frank Drake did receive a message during Project Ozma. One night, he started picking up, of all things, Morse code. When decoded, the message read "Message received. Send more Chuck Berry." Nobody ever owned up to the gag.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Interesting observation:
My last unit was processed in 1901 - How can we trust SETI to do anything right if they cannot even work out that we are in the naughts?
#snip from my 5 year email announcement
SETI@home turned five years old on May 17, 2004!
Thanks for participating in SETI@home.
According to our records, you have processed 24 work units, the most recent on December 13, 1901. Your contribution of computer time is greatly appreciated.
#end
"we ain't found shit!"
.sah data files and it has a cool auto Doppler drift algorithm, nice displays, ...
I like noise. In fact I am fascinated by it.
My viewpoint of the seti@home project is that they are a great source of high quality Radio Telescope signals. I let their program do it's science and I get to keep the work units. Seems like a fair trade. So far I have archived 5762 work_unit.sah files (~1.5 GB). Why?
Because I am an amateur SETI enthusiast and I wasn't satisfied with just watching the screensaver. Gaussians, spikes, triplets, phooey! I wanted to do more. So I collect every work unit and I analyze them myself with the baudline signal analyzer. It can read the
Despite the common mixing trough at 1.4200 GHz, and the stationary harmonic bleed-in interference, I have found a lot of interesting things in the data. Every now and then I run into a weak signal with a non-terrestrial Doppler drift rate. Sometimes they wiggle or pulse. Is it ET? Probably not, but it is exciting and fun. I should make a webpage of pictures.
[Disclaimer: Yes, I am an author of baudline and this is a blatant product plug.]
It's far more interesting to consider why a society would not transmit when they easily could. For instance, we don't - and we definitely could. IMHO, the two main reasons we don't are superstition and (possibly justifiable, but certainly debatable) cowardice.
As for civilizations "out there" being long shots, that is utter, patent nonsense. Out of all the stars out there, the odds that this is the only place where life arose and made it to radio technology level (and just look at the variety of life that crawls, waddles, swims and flaps about on this planet in so many different environments!) are just about zero.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
SETI is bunk. do something useful with your free CPU cycles instead.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through